The Fraught Terrain of Decolonization/Decoloniality in India

Abstract

The project of decolonization/ decoloniality in the Indian context is particularly fraught because the ruling proto-fascist party and its parent and kindred organizations routinely indulge in decolonization-talk, positing a simple West versus Indian binary, where ‘Indian’ is defined in elitist Brahmanical and homogenous terms. On the other hand, intellectuals and leaders of the historically most oppressed section of Hindu society – the untouchables –have from the late 19th century onwards, found British colonial presence and the modern discourse of equality and rights liberating. This division has become more exacerbated in recent years since the Hindu Right came to power in 2014. The crucial point that is missed is that the Hindu Right is, in fact, constituted by colonial knowledge in at least two ways. (i) The ‘Hinduism’ that they espouse is a 19th century invention (through the mediation of Orientalist scholarship and colonial institutions of historical and archaeological research) and formalized as a category by British censuses. (ii) Its entire political imaginary is predicated upon the European ideas of nation, nationalism and nation-statism. Indeed, its entire imagination of the Indian past is based on mimicking the European and the irrepressible desire (common among nationalists of other hues as well) to prove that everything that India too had, in the remote past, what defines Europe in modern times. Its decolonization is therefore about proving India’s past greatness in European terms, completely obliterating in the process the counter-traditions that were rapidly marginalized through the collusion and colonialism and nationalism.