Guest post by SHAMAYITA SEN

[This post is the first of a series in Kafila, titled Decolonial Imaginations.

The terms ‘decolonization’ or ‘decolonial’ have become quite critical now, given that the impulse of justice lies at the core of these concepts. Neither postcolonial nor decolonial perspectives are compatible with right-wing ideologies but the fact that Hindutva ideologues in India and the rightwing globally are now trying to appropriate that language makes it seem to some that the very idea of the postcolonial or decolonial is suspect. We believe that this demonizing of decolonial theory from a position defensive of the European Enlightenment needs to be unpacked in the interests of a mutually productive debate. Kafila will be publishing a series of interventions on what the idea of the decolonial imagination involves, locating decolonial theory as speaking from the margins, drawing attention to identities which the orthodox Left subsumed under ‘class’ and which the rightwing in India seeks to assimilate into Brahminism. Additionally the orthodox left’s rejection of spiritual beliefs and inability to engage with them is also a factor that may have produced the space for right wing appropriations of a field marked “religion”. 

We hope that these interventions will clear the ground for productive conversations on the left rather than polarised and accusatory claims.]

This article comes as a response born from a deep sense of intellectual anguish and frustration. It is a rebuttal to a YouTube video titled The Left’s Accidental Gift to Hindu Nationalism posted by one of India’s leading independent news portals, The Wire on 14^th August 2025. The video attempts to summarize Meera Nanda’s critique of Postcolonial Left as elaborated in her latest treatise, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason (2025). While I have read the newly published work, including the excerpt published in The Wire which have been shared widely in popular social media platforms, this piece restricts itself to the Video which comprehensively outlines Nanda’s arguments. An extensive engagement with the critique that Nanda mounts is reserved for some other time.

While summarizing Nanda’s line of thought, the Video offers a series of oversimplifications that amount to little more than a layman’s caricature. There are fundamental flaws in the explanations presented in the synopsized Video. Not only is its premise problematic, its claims (along with that of Nanda’s) of the Hindu Right and Postcolonial Left as ‘strange bedfellows’ also systematically misreads the subject matter at hand. Such (mis)representation and (mis)interpretations run the risk of inverting nuanced critiques into endorsements of the very hegemonies they have spent decades dismantling.

The following sections, before moving into a conclusion would dissect all five claims of the Video one by one. Structurally, it will attempt to make sense of each claim and follow that with a riposte. Let us begin:

1. On Turning Criticism into Treason:

This line of ‘reason’ing claims that postcolonial intellectuals like Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee have interpreted western ideas, like, science, rationality, secularism, and rule of law as tools of ‘mental slavery’. This stance, the Video posits, deeply resonates with (and also morally legitimizes) Hindu Right’s claim of Indians being longstanding ‘victims’ of foreign ideas.

             This charge blaming postcolonial scholars of turning reason into treason is fallacious and reductive. Their works are a direct intellectual inheritance from forerunning postcolonial theorists like Edward Said (Nanda engages with Said cursorily) and Frantz Fanon. These scholars have trenchantly argued that the most insidious form of colonization is not of territory, but of mind. It is this colonization of consciousness (most pervasively dealt with in the works of Ranajit Guha, the pioneer of Subaltern Studies canon), which naturalizes Western modernity as the universal benchmark for progress and rationality. Chatterjee and Guha have attempted to deconstruct and expose the elite lineages of such colonial consciousness. They have rightly debated the universalist claims of Western Enlightenment but their project was never to abandon rationality. Instead, both have provided seasoned critique of a monolithic, all-encompassing Western rationality.

In influential works like Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), Chatterjee unpacks the concept of nationalism as a ‘derivative discourse’. He reveals the myriad ways in which anti-colonial nationalism in India was forced to appropriate the modular idioms of Western modernity. The political predicament of anti-colonial nationalism, Chatterjee argues, was not encouraging because while it aspired to be sovereign, it got perpetually enmeshed within the very colonial logic that it sought to dissipate. Nandy pursues a very different logic. In texts like The Intimate Enemy (1983), he focuses on the psychological and cultural damages of colonialism and the ‘loss of self’ under its rule. These scholars, pursuing distinct lines of thought, however come together in arguing, explicitly or implicitly, for modernities, in the plural, rooted in different and unexplored cultural and historical experiences. To leap from this nuanced critique of ‘epistemic violence’ to the claim that they paved the way for the likes of J. Sai Deepak is more than just polemical overstretching. It can also be read as a rather mischievous distortion. These intellectuals did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. They urged us to not mistake that particular bathwater as the only ocean.

2. On Making Science into “Ethnoscience”:

The second criticism suggests that scholars like Vandana Shiva, by relativizing Western science’s claim to objectivity, have created an intellectual vacuum, which, in turn, has enabled state-sponsored ‘pseudo-science’ (like astrology or ritual healing) to survive under the banner of decolonization.

A cursory reading of Shiva’s works reveals that her critique of modern science, like the one teased out in Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (1988) is not a rejection but a finessing of the scientific temper. They attack the epistemological hierarchy rooted in Western science’s claim to fame. Shiva, an eco-feminist, seeks to pull apart the patriarchal and reductionist edifice of West-led science. Her argument resonates with the decolonial project and points to methods through which knowledge systems existing outside the Western canon have been systematically delegitimized and branded as ‘unscientific’. She calls for these ‘Ethnosciences’ or traditional, indigenous, and women’s knowledge to be treated with equal respect and subjected to equal criticality. Her goal is to dismantle the hierarchy perpetrated by ‘patriarchal capitalism’. Her arguments do not call for an uncritical embrace of every claim from every system. To suggest that a call for epistemic justice is an endorsement of blasphemous pseudoscience is to remain oblivious of the argument’s nuances. This critique once again mistakes a call for embracing intellectual diversity as a license for inviting irrationality.

3. On Secularism as a “Foreign Disease”:

This point claims that some postcolonial thinkers like TN Madan and Ashis Nandy have dismissed secularism as a European project, thereby, involuntarily, aiding the Hindu Right. Further, it contends that their romanticization of India’s civilizational ‘tolerance’ rooted in the idioms of Hindu religion and tradition ignores the oppressive realities of caste and gender inequality. It recommends that a secular state, however flawed, protects right-bearing individuals against communal majoritarianism.  

            This is another gross oversimplification. Madan and Nandy’s interventions were to point out a sociological fact. Both started by exposing the dubious claims of Western model of secularism, predicated on a strict separation of Church and State. They argued that Secularism is ill-suited to the Indian context where religion and public life are deeply intertwined. While Nandy’s work can be interpreted as one that rejects secularism, the more syncretic and tolerant practices that he highlights invariably rally against false homogenization of diverse religious practices. It is here that the Hindu Right’s path diverges from that of Nandy. Madan, on his part, never rejected secularism. In the oft-cited essay Secularism in Its Place (1987), for instance, Madan called for the category’s contextual adaptation. By pursuing this line of thinking, scholars like Rajeev Bhargava have adapted secularism to Indian realities. Bhargava, for instance, posits that the Indian model of secularism is one of ‘principled distance’, not equidistance or strict separation. The Indian State does not ignore religion but actively intervenes to reform its iniquitous aspects. For example, by legally prohibiting caste discrimination and untouchability, practices sanctioned by certain interpretations of Hindu scripture the State has sought to constitutionally address the perils of the silenced majority. This is the very opposite of the Hindu Right’s project, which seeks to dissolve any distance between the State and a monolithic, casteist, patriarchal, majoritarian Hindutva. To interpret a call for a context-sensitive secularism as playing into the hands of communal majoritarianism can be read as a failure of comprehension.

4. On Romanticizing the “God-Loving Common Man”:

The fourth charge is that the Subaltern Studies collective has romanticized the rural Hindu majority by idealizing their faith as ‘authentic’ and ‘pure’. By posing religiosity as weapon against the machinations of modern State, these scholars, the Video claims have inadvertently fueled majoritarian politics (from Ayodhya to Kashi; wonder why it ‘left’ Mathura out!). The dark sides of authenticity, like superstitions and caste oppression, it argues have been systematically overlooked by likes of Dipesh Chakrabarty who falsely, in their attempt to ‘provincialize’ Europe, polarize the debate as one between faith and elitism.

This is perhaps the most egregious misrepresentation. The entire project of Subaltern Studies was to excavate the histories and consciousness of those—the peasants, the marginalized, the subaltern—who were ignored by both colonial and elite-nationalist historiographies. In works like Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), Chakrabarty does not create a false binary. Instead, he reveals an existing one. He astutely observes that for vast sections of the oppressed, religion and faith are not simply opiates but are constitutive of their worldview. Critically building on Guha’s analysis in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgencies in Colonial India (1983), which delved deep into the role of religion in shaping the consciousness of the rebel-subaltern, Chakrabarty demonstrated how religion served as a resource of resistance against a coercive state.

This is a world away from the Hindu Right’s project. The ideological dispensation in power at the Centre seeks to orchestrate a State-perpetrated religion. It seeks to assert a top-down imposition of faith for political consolidation. Subaltern Studies, in contrast, documents the tactical use of faith by the people as a mode of expression and resistance against power. To equate the two is to deliberately ignore the vector of power. To deny the role of religion in subaltern consciousness is to commit the very elitist blunder that the Left (especially political Left) has been accused of for decades. It is tantamount to a failure to understand the very idioms of imagination of the people the political Left claims to represent (or patronize).

5. The Weimar Analogy:

Finally, the Video concludes with a Weimar analogy. The current intellectual climate in India, it cautions following Nanda’s position, mirrors Weimer Germany, where anti-Enlightenment thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt created fertile grounds for fascism. Although it graciously admits that these thinkers were not fascist themselves (some benevolence there), it warns that they paved the way for totalitarian thinking by undermining reason and liberal-individual democratic ethos. Postcolonial Left is not portrayed as fascists per se. The claim is that their anti-rational theoretical edifice is enabling the rise of a dangerous Far-Right ideology in India.  As an antidote, the commentator urges us to return to the ‘rational arguments’ of Buddha, Ambedkar, and Periyar. It desires a reclamation of critical thought, secularism and reason, now more than ever.

To begin with, drawing an analogy between ‘conservative revolutionaries’ like Schmitt and Heidegger and scholars who have been the staunchest and most consistent critics of rising fascism in India is perverse. Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and their intellectual peers have never abandoned rationality. Rather, their scholarship remains an exercise in a deeper, more critical reason. In this age of unreason, their works interrogate the power, history, and politics embedded within dominant paradigms of ‘rationality’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘modernity’.

Far from being apologists for illiberal politics, they have consistently warned against the rise of majoritarianism and populism. Partha Chatterjee’s most recent publication, For a Just Republic (2025) stands as yet another testament to this commitment. Interestingly, in this volume, Chatterjee substantially engages with the writings of Ambedkar and feminist theorists to build up a nuanced account of minority, caste, and gender politics: one that is more bottom-up than to-down in orientation.

To conclude, criticism of postcolonial and subaltern scholarship is not only welcome but necessary. However, it must be founded on an honest engagement with the core arguments, not on flimsy caricatures. A recurrent but oft-repeated theme in public discourse is that the Postcolonial Left has ‘inadvertently’ enabled the rise of the Hindu Right. The Video’s synopsis too indirectly hints at the perceived distance that looms between the dense theoretical vocabulary of the Left academics and the lived realities of those they wish to theorize. It tacitly claims that as ordinary citizens find the works of these theorists inaccessible, the intellectual vacuum is filled by the simplifications of the populist Right. In this reading, while these intellectuals remain ensconced in their proverbial ivory tower, the Hindu Right chips away its foundations.

Even if accessibility remains a problem, the solution is not to abandon Postcolonial Left. It is to democratize its dissemination. Postcolonial critique is not problematic in itself. The problem lies in the exclusion of critical social science education from the reach of the broader public. The State’s intentional failure in investing in accessible pedagogical exercises has sustained this divide. Therefore, rather than dismissing Postcolonial Left scholarship as elitist, biased, and anti-modern, and an enabler of Hindu Right, the more important task in hand is to build mechanisms for its meaningful translations in languages best understood by the people. It is through the democratization of education and not through the erasure of critical postcolonial traditions that the ideological juggernaut of the Hindu Right can be effectively countered.

Shamayita Sen is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of Indigenous studies, Postcolonial Theory, and South Asian studies.