In recent years—since 2014, to be more specific—terms like ‘civilisational state’ or ‘civilisation-state’ have gradually become part of public discourse across large sections of the Indian mainstream and social media. In July 2014, renowned Indologist Dr Koenraad Elst used the term ‘civilisation-state’ in a blog post titled India as a civilization-state, arguing for the need to rethink the identity of the Indian Republic as a ‘civilisation-state’. In 2021, advocate and author J. Sai Deepak explored the concept of Indian civilisation and the ‘civilisational state’ at length in his book India That Is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Last week, while answering a question on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described India as a millennia-old civilisation. This statement sparked an animated discussion on social media, where some people, including journalists, went on to assert that the prime minister had characterised India as a ‘civilisational state’. But did he really do so?

To many of us, the term civilisational state/civilisation-state represents a rather vague concept. Often, we tend to apply the term quite loosely in writing or in speech – sometimes merely to sound ‘cool’ before an audience. Many Indians end up confounding it with the Sanskrit term ‘rashtra’, and sometimes with the European term ‘nation’, clearly oblivious of either term’s conceptual frameworks and historical underpinnings. Sometimes we are just unable to define the idea behind these technical terms in clear, coherent words – largely because our woolly thinking hasn’t been refined through appropriate training in navigating, interpreting, or carrying out critical historico-philosophical ways of thinking.

In this brief reflection, I shall explore the ideas embodied in terms like civilisational state/civilisation-state and civilisational nation. Hopefully, this will help shed some of the baggage of confusion and conceptual problems that these terms have put on, due to their uncritical circulation in the popular discourses of our country for over a decade now.

A nation is a people united by shared cultural practices and political aspirations—though not necessarily bound to a fixed geographical area at all times. For instance, monotheistic faith-based nations may have clearly defined objectives of political expansion or the reclamation of long-lost political power and sovereignty.

Over time, it is natural for such a people to develop traditions and establish institutions—whether religious or theological, social and moral, political and administrative, legal-juridical, economic-industrial, educational, or artistic-aesthetic. At a fundamental level, all these institutions embody the peculiar cultural practices and the specific socio-political aspirations of that nation and enforce them whenever these practices and aspirations are at risk of being violated by elements internal or external.

When these institutions—collectively embodying and enforcing the shared cultural practices and political aspirations of the nation—ripen through an unbroken, continuous existence in time, and grow a kind of resilience through varied temporal and worldly experiences, they give........

© News18