[This post by Aditya Nigam is the second essay of the series in Kafila, titled Decolonial Imaginations. The first essay can be read here.

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.]

The question of decolonization/ decoloniality keeps surfacing periodically in ill-informed writings and tracts. The target may be postcolonial studies or more recently, decolonial theory, but the attack is always launched in the name of “the Enlightenment” (notice the definite article). The idea behind making what was the European Enlightenment into “the Enlightenment” for the whole world is to claim – as has been done for a couple of centuries since – that the world was lying in “darkness” and “superstition” before the dazzling light of the Enlightenment rescued the inhabitants of the different continents. What were Latin Christendom’s (Europe) “dark middle ages” became the convenient and imagined dark ages of all societies in the world.

Thankfully, over the last many decades, this faith in “the Enlightenment” has been seriously shaken. Arguably, the first big crisis of that legacy emerged first in the Romantic revolt in 19^th century Germany and reached its apogee in the rise of fascism/ Nazism about a hundred years ago. Though that crisis can be read in many ways, there was one particular article of Enlightenment faith that was rudely shaken with the rise of fascism/ Nazism: Its belief, expectation and investment in the ideal of the “autonomous, self-willing subject” as the crux. This was thoroughly shattered. Immanuel Kant had defined Enlightenment as “man’s (sic) emergence from self-incurred immaturity”. This ideal of freedom and autonomy, of an individual capable of taking independent rational decisions was something all of us as Marxists too believed. What the world saw in horror was the rise, across Europe, of the person who does not desire to be free; who is indeed afraid of freedom and panics at its very possibility and is consequently prepared to arrogate his/her agential authority to a father-figure under whose shadow and shade s/he feels comfortable and safe.

This is a big conundrum to which the best minds in Europe have applied themselves and very sophisticated analyses of the phenomenon exist and some important Marxist thinkers too addressed the question, drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis as well. Psychoanalysis became crucial because it seemingly provided a key to the “unconscious” and a way of understanding the play of irrational forces within the emerging individuated man or woman. Despite serious problems with Freudian psychoanalysis and its understanding of the unconscious, this line of inquiry was quite productive. In fact, as late as in the early 1970s, when Deleuze and Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus and completely redefined the Freudian unconscious away from the family (“daddy, mommy and me”, as they put it), they still identified this as the key question of contemporary political philosophy. It remains, even today an important question for both philosophical reflection and research into the mass psychology of fascism and Nazism.

No one, however, had the pat answers to the rise of fascism/Nazism that Meera Nanda has now produced – not just about the Hindu Right in India but also about the rise of Nazism in Germany as well. Indeed, we are served much more of cherrypicked German intellectual history in her recent book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason, than we have of Indian history – intellectual or otherwise. Expectedly, it is a tract that has not the foggiest idea of what the crisis of the Enlightenment ideals was/is all about and she simply parrots some of the crudest work that interested readers may want to check out for themselves. Most serious scholars of fascism will however, shudder to draw the kind of “conclusions” that she does – “conclusions” that only seek scapegoats to blame rather than look at why the intellectual milieu in 19^th century Germany changed so drastically and rapidly against the Enlightenment and modernity, seen primarily in the rise of Romanticism. Indeed, the scholars Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre (Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 2001), whom she cites copiously, present a far more complex account of Romanticism and its assault on modernity than her frankly superficial portrayal of it does.

So much for the crisis of modernity in Europe, for the moment. My concern here is with the world outside Europe – the global South – and the problem of decolonization of knowledge. In this essay, I want to propose seven theses on decolonization/ decoloniality in order to underline what the project largely means.

I should state at the outset that this essay, though occasioned by Meera Nanda’s book, is not a response to her. How, after all, does one respond to or argue with invective, name-calling, misrepresentation and fulminations? What is worse, Nanda is stuck in the acrimonious debates of the 1990s, whereas real life has moved on, as has the debate. Readers who are interested in the debates of that time will not find anything worth their while in this essay.

Rather, the theses on decolonization that follow are primarily meant for the reader who is interested going beyond rhetoric and posturing to see things for herself. At different points, however, I will need to refer to aspects of Nanda’s “argument” simply in order to point to the blatant dishonesty of the way she constructs a straw man to knock it down.

I want to start telling the story from the other end: from the end of those destroyed by colonialism – and indeed the European Enlightenment. For it is from there that the claims for epistemic reconstitution of knowledge and indeed, epistemic justice are being articulated. Nanda is horrified that there are people in this world who want to think for themselves and can even talk of something like “swaraj in Ideas” – and this horror is evident on every second page of her book. For anyone who has read KC Bhattacharya’s essay of the same name, it should be clear that his was not a rejection of western philosophy (indeed, Bhattacharya also wrote a whole book on the significance of Kant’s philosophy) – but he appears as a caricature in Nanda’s account. In this particular essay, Bhattacharya’s point was that instead of uncritically accepting the hegemony of Western philosophy we should be able to critically engage with it. Bhattacharya wanted Indians to engage with Western philosophy on the basis of something he called “Indian” philosophy – and I have presented my own criticisms/ amendments to his position in my book Decolonizing Theory. My point in bringing up this reference to Bhattacharya is to show that Nanda objects even to any suggestion of “swaraj in ideas”, however limited – and in the process simply caricatures Bhattacharya.

I begin with the philosophical discourse of modernity, with special reference to three specific issues that are critical from the vantage point of the global South.

a) Imagine this: There was a time when there were hundreds and thousands of communities and societies with ancient civilizational histories that existed contemporaneously – in the same time. Till one fine day, the Enlightenment warriors descended on their shores and told them that they belonged to the past, that their time was over and therefore they deserved to perish. Their present/s were deemed illegitimate and became the Past of ‘World-History’. Three hundred years of genocide in the Americas and Africa followed. That story is well-known and I will not dwell on it here. Unbeknownst to these inhabitants of these continents, some philosophers had placed all these hundreds of discrete societies on a linear scale of “past” and “present” and “backward” and “forward”. This wasn’t just a playing out of some economic “logic of capitalism”, for its prior philosophical justification had been prepared with the rise of the modern European episteme via the Enlightenment. Nanda’s much beloved discourse of Reason and Progress was the basis of this new conception of Time.

b) The discourse of “the Enlightenment” erased almost a thousand years of history of science, mathematics and philosophy in the Arab and Islamicate world, where the treasures of the world of knowledge from all over the world (ranging from mathematics, science and technology from what are now India and China) were preserved and developed. There is a burgeoning body of research that has brought all this suppressed history to the fore again. This work has only scraped the tip of the iceberg and it still continues. The important point is that this erasure wasn’t just an accident. How else could you show that the world before “the Enlightenment” was a world of darkness and superstition? Interested readers can do a simple internet search and find out the massive amounts of work that has come up over the past couple of decades. (I have also referred to some of them in my book, Decolonizing Theory).

No less important is the fact that the seeds of rationalism in Renaissance Europe first sprouted through the works of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, in particular: Latin Averroists (followers of Ibn Rushd) were in the forefront in this regard, introducing these ideas into university curricula from the 13^th century on. These expunged parts of the history of philosophy are now the subject of intense research and as philosophers begin to write the “history of philosophy without gaps”.

c) Finally, the “disenchantment” and “secularization” that Nanda makes so much of [she considers it “the core of modernity” (43)] was the prerequisite of capitalism’s ravaging of the earth, capture of land, forests, rivers and indeed of colonization. The philosophical background for this was prepared by what has been called the “great divide” between “Man” and “Nature” or the “Human” and the “non-human” and the institution of “Man” (read Western, Rational Man) as the new sovereign. And the fate of the earth was linked closely to the fate of those now declared backward and “savages”. They were both to be mined, taken over/enslaved used for labour, destroyed when required. Extermination and genocide were fine as far as these parts of humanity were concerned – that was collateral damage for (Western) Man’s Progres. These colonized people were in any case, the past that was destined to perish.

Once colonized, entire societies were put in the kindergarten and taught “abc”. Not only were the new intelligentsia forced to learn a new language, through it they were to forget all that they had had, by way of signposts to recognize their world. On learning the colonizer’s language, they had to then learn the history of Europe, its narrative of world conquest and its philosophy. This intelligentsia was therefore destined to always see itself as subordinate to the intellectual prowess of Europe, so starkly reflected in Nanda’s oblivion of Indian history and locating, digit by digit, India’s current trajectory in the history of Germany.

This linguistic division has created a permanent faultline in societies like ours where English is the language of power, sophistication and secularism, while the vernaculars remain the domain of the crude, god-believing, backward subaltern. The world of the vernacular easily becomes a world of resentment. And there are always the reactionary vernacular elites present in the field to cash in on these resentments which acquire a potent form when articulated via political mobilization. These reactionary vernacular elites are always perceived as culturally closer – as “our own” – by the subaltern masses too, who also feel excluded and marginalized. The progressive vernacular intelligentsia faces an uphill task in engaging in this daily struggle against the Hindu Right and its machinations and is always at a disadvantage because it too is seen as defending forces of modernity that “threaten our traditional way of life”. This is, of course, a very complex issue and I am obviously compressing too many things here but the point is that the struggle for democratic transformation of power relations has to be fought, not in the largely English speaking “civil society” but rather its underground, or what I call the “paramodern”. Given this, it is simply off the mark to blame anti-secularists and post/decolonials for the rise of the Hindu Right. It can be argued, on the contrary, that by choosing to remain safely ensconced in their comfort zones and handing over everything from the vernacular domain to all that is part of the lived world of ordinary people to the Hindu Right, it is the secular-moderns who leave the field open and uncontested.

In passing, I also need to present one instance (of the many) of Meera Nanda’s style of misrepresentation and falsehood that is concerned directly with what I have written. Launching a diatribe against my use of the terms “paramodern” and the “Puranic” she says:

“Nigam never pauses to ask if the paramodern world of Puranas is the subalterns’ own creation, or if it serves their aspirations for a better life. The Puranas that he is so enamored of have a history and a purpose, namely, ‘the purpose of serving as instruments of dissemination of mainstream religious ideology (of Brahmanism) amongst pre-literate and tribal groups’ over centuries going back to the beginning of the Common Era (Nath 2001, 19). The Puranic paramodern is no emancipatory discourse of the oppressed but is the ideology of the dominant castes. To invoke it against the modern world might help Nigam’s decolonization agenda, but it only pushes the subaltern further into darkness.” (99)

I would like to draw the readers’ attention to the two parts I have underlined. Anyone reading this, who hasn’t read my book would of course think I am “enamored of the Puranas” and that I consider “the Puranic paramodern” to be “an emancipatory discourse of the oppressed.” The unsuspecting reader would also think that I have no clue that the Puranas were/are the “instrument of dissemination of mainstream religious ideology (of Brahmanism”. So here is exactly what I say:

“…my interest here is not so much in the ‘texts’ called the Puranas but in the particular modes of being that these texts were trying to domesticate by drawing them into the Brahmanical fold.” (Decolonzing Theory: 178)

Nanda is therefore simply deliberately misleading the trusting reader who is made to believe that she has shown up my ignorance that “the Puranic paramodern is no emancipatory discourse.” In fact, one can see that I use a far stronger word here than what Vijay Nath does in the quote marshalled by Nanda: Where Nath talks of the Puranas as mere “instruments of dissemination” of Brahmanical ideology, I make the considerably stronger claim that they were instruments of domesticating modes of being that lay outside the Brahmanical fold.

Apropos Nanda’s attempt to enlighten me about the fact that the “Puranic paramodern is no emancipatory discourse”, let me state right away that I do not see it as “discourse” but rather as a space of encounter between the Brahmanical and the communities that lie outside its fold. It was therefore a space of contestation in the time when these texts were produced. In our own times, I speak of a Puranic mode of being, which far from being emancipatory, I describe thus:

“It may not be out of place to…underline…that in this world of the Puranic, malign and dangerous powers are usually not directly confronted but propitiated and ‘controlled’ through yajnas – a stance in direct contrast to the modern idea of the political that is predicated on notions of rights and autonomy.

A recognition of the space of the paramodern calls then, not so much for the abandonment of the modern project of transformation as its radical reformulation.” (DT: 205)

A word is also necessary here about why I refer to the way the Puranic mode deals with the malign and dangerous forces – not by mobilizing and confronting authority – but by trying to please or control them by means of certain rituals. The point is that those of us who believe in some kind of radical politics of transformation, need to confront this aspect underlying the behavioral structure of largely politically passive Indian masses. It may help us to understand why the history of India was not a history of class struggles, as Marxist historians had discovered to their dismay. For at least two millennia, the high points of “dissent” and “revolt” in India were bhakti or devotion. In other words, unlike the dishonest spin that Nanda tries to give to my reference to the Puranic and the paramodern, my whole point is that without understanding this no change in Indian society in a democratic direction is possible. Not certainly by the diktat of increasingly marginalized and irrelevant gung-ho Enlighteners.

In a breathtaking passage that reveals Nanda’s utter lack of connect with anything of everyday life in contemporary India, she says:

“…we would still need to know the role the popular belief in Puranic gods play in how the subaltern navigate their lives in the earthly realm. Do they trust modern medicine, for example, which does not depend upon supernatural/spiritual causation? Do they consult the gods when they decide when to sow and when to reap their crops? What role do the gods play in their understanding of the natural world? How does belief shape their political choices? Merely insisting that the subaltern live in a paramodern world does not qualify for an alternative social theory. Nigam offers nothing more than a lament that the moderns have denigrated the world of gods and ghouls.” (99)

Presumably Nanda expects the replies to all the questions she asks would be a resounding “no” – thus reducing me to speechlessness! I will leave this passage for more culturally literate readers to figure out the answers to her questions and move on now to the theses.

As three centuries of gaslighting and the philosophical con game now come to an end and the world awakens to the grave planetary crisis that the modern European episteme has brought us to, the decolonization agenda takes on urgent and unprecedented dimensions. Increasingly, the forced one-way conversation of the past three centuries is now being abandoned. The global South is in revolt and the signs are visible everywhere. This is the context of the seven theses I propose below.

1. Colonialism must be assessed as a global phenomenon. Genocide of native populations, trans-Atlantic slave trade, establishing the rule of private property and capital, have been central to it. That the structures of power put in place by colonialism continue to determine relations between the postcolonial societies and the “metropolitan” centers, is equally the outcome of the hegemony of the modern European episteme.

2. Since colonialism was a global phenomenon, decolonizing knowledge cannot but be a global project as well. This means first of all, that the decolonizing/decolonial agenda has to confront the philosophical discourse of modernity and interrogate its fundamental assumptions. Indeed, this is already happening in different ways in different parts of the world to an extent but it needs to be emphasized that the challenge has to be met at different levels of knowledge production.

3. Central to the decolonizing/ decolonial project is the question of epistemic justice.

This is absolutely critical to the project of decoloniality. No project that uses the language of decolonization to oppress/exclude and dispossess other modes of knowing and being can claim to be a decolonial project. This point follows logically from the idea of epistemic justice and its meaning should be clear for us in the Indian context also: attempts at deploying the language of decolonization/ decoloniality to re-establish hegemony of the precolonial or Brahmanical patriarchal elites cannot be considered “decolonizing” in our sense. This also means, emphatically, that the struggle for epistemic justice must stand for epistemic plurality.

4. Decolonizing is a postnational project.

This means fundamentally two things. (a) It questions the “naturalness” that nations and politics have acquired in the modern world. This also means a rejection of the masculinist business of war and territoriality. (b) It means it thereby also refuses to anachronistically read earlier histories of open cultural, intellectual and other interactions through the lens of contemporary nation-states. Nationalism imposes a long amnesia over the centuries-long histories of fluid and unbounded knowledge flows between different societies, which needs to be dismantled.

5. Decolonization is a postsecular project.

Contentious though this may seem, the fact remans that this is closely tied to the existence and modes of being of indigenous communities that are in the forefront today in the struggle against global capital and the forces of modernity/coloniality. This is also related to the recognition that coloniality is intrinsic to the modern project that is not just manifested in external affairs of nation-states but in continuing internal colonialism and dispossession of indigenous and peasant communities inside nation-states. Their relationship with the world and “nature” is not external; they do not partake of the “disenchanted” view of the world. That is why the Pachamama – the Incan Earth goddess, Mother Earth herself – had to be enshrined in the Ecuadorean and Bolivian Constitutions.

6. Decolonization is fundamentally a project about reconstituting the human and social sciences, not about “national pride” or “national glory”.

Ideas of “national glory” or “national pride” are already terms constituted by the modern notion of nations, invented in Europe.

Further, if the human and social sciences are to be concerned with investigation into the human condition, they cannot be confined to the narrow world of the secular-modern – treating everything else as lying outside their domain. The assumption that the “human” is the sovereign subject of what we call the “human sciences” has to be interrogated in the context of the new philosophical revolution that seeks to remove “man’ from the centre of its epistemic universe.

7. Following from thesis 6, decolonization is about broadening the experiential and intellectual base of social sciences and the humanities, not about substituting one parochialism (European) for another (Indian or any other). As of now all our knowledge and theorizations of modernity, capitalism, secularism, democracy and such other categories are predicated exclusively upon the European experience of modernity as though the experience of the rest of the were irrelevant to an understanding of the contemporary world.

Although the right to property of the bourgeois (as opposed to say the indigenous or nonmodern forms of ownership) is central to the discourse of rights and autonomy, in a country like India, it did open up an emancipatory space for the liberation of those most oppressed by the caste system – even while it continued to relentlessly dispossess and destroy Adivasi/ indigenous populations. This happened throughout the colonial era leading, as we know, to major uprisings. The point therefore, is that while the struggle for Dalit emancipation was enabled by it, an overall understanding of colonialism in decolonial thinking cannot but give due weight to the fact that in most of the world its history has been one of genocides, extermination, trans-Atlantic slave trade and the forcible implantation of capitalism and the rule of private property.

Finally, then, the point is simply this: the storm of intellectual decolonization is raging across the world, in the three continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America. All kinds of right-wing forces might like to appropriate and hijack it for their purposes – like they do with everything else. Intellectuals in India have to decide whether they want to intervene, contest and shape the agenda or sit back carping and fretting, while the right-wing forces hijack it. Frankly, I see no third option.