[This post by Nivedita Menon is the fourth essay of the series in Kafila titled Decolonial Imaginations. Links to the previous essays are given at the end.

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.]

Introduction

As Hindutva ideologues and the rightwing globally, appropriate the idea of “decolonising”, it seems to many opposed to these trends, that scholarship around decoloniality is itself the problem. Such arguments tie in with earlier ongoing attacks on postcolonial scholarship since the 1990s that virtually accuse it of directly contributing to the rise of the right. Decolonial scholarship is relatively a new arrival in the Anglophone world (since the 2000s), and ever since the rightwing started using that language, the same charges are laid at its door as well. Indeed, the implication (and sometimes outright allegation) is that decolonial/postcolonial scholars were secretly rightwing all along.

This charge I will address in a somewhat different way in the first section, by way of analogies with other bodies of knowledge.

The second section will address another related critique of decolonial thought, that it is “merely epistemic” and does not consider the materiality of structures of power

Finally we will ask the question – when Hindutva claims to be “decolonising”, what is it doing exactly?

But let me first address the issue of collapsing together postcolonial and decolonial frameworks. There are three significant differences between the two. First, postcolonial thought emerged from the British/Anglophone colonies while decolonial thought emerged from the Spanish colonies. This means that the community with which each communicates is different; the histories of colonialism are different (for decolonial thinking, colonialism begins with 1492 and Christopher Columbus); the precolonial worlds are different; and the bodies of scholarship within which there are ongoing conversations are different.

Second, postcolonial thinking claims European modernity for itself, while being critical of it. A famous instance is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation that European thought is both inadequate and indispensable. This body of scholarship is concerned then, with correcting the distortions of European thinking, and producing a modernity that aligns better with the realities of the global South. For postcolonial thinking, secularism (in the sense of keeping the religious and the spiritual in the non-political domain) is a given. Decolonial thought on the other hand, rejects the constellation of features termed modernity altogether, as it is only the “lighter side” of colonialism, the only side we are allowed to see. Decolonial thought is therefore more about recovering heterogeneity and this includes reinstating indigenous spiritualities from modern organized religion.

A third difference is that while postcolonial studies emerge from and are located in the academic field of the  secular humanities, decolonial thinking has not been an academic discipline alone: it has included community activists, artists, and scholars critical of modern Western secularism who have drawn from and contributed to religious studies as well.

Both postcolonial and decolonial in Walter Mignolo’s terms, are “options”, and neither needs to be seen as inherently superior. They address different issues, imagine different futures. But for the record, I locate myself in the field of decolonial thought. Located in an Anglophone academic universe, I find decolonial thought productively destabilizing.

I

Is any knowledge safe from being appropriated to opposite ends?

What is the idea of “knowledge” underlying critiques that see decolonial thought as complicit with rightwing appropriations of it? That true and good knowledge (let us call this K1) is unamenable to being appropriated by the enemy. If the enemy – that is, those whom K1 casts as the enemy – legitimates itself using any elements of another body of knowledge (K2), that knowledge itself is tainted, complicit and must be rejected. Moreover, the critiques of other knowledges (such as K1) that underlie K2, also therefore are proved to be wrong, And of course, K1 itself is immune from appropriation or misunderstanding, and if it ends up serving the interests of power, that is accidental or an aberration, and no reflection on K1 itself.

In the context of the attack on decolonial thinking, K1 is the assumed universalism and telos of the European Enlightenment, and the particular constellation of features that emerges in Europe over the 18^th century that gets canonized as “modernity.” Since decolonial thinking (K2) casts colonialism not as not an aberration but as the flip side of this modernity and the European Enlightenment, all politics and thinking that rejects (or claims to reject) “the West”, including ethnonationalisms of the right, are assumed to be necessarily produced by K2.

If we were to apply this spurious logic to other appropriations, what else would we have to reject as rightwing? Let us consider a few instances. Israel uses queer politics to justify itself as the only democracy in West Asia as it gives equal rights to (Jewish) homosexuals. We do not in response reject queer politics as a whole, as complicit with and enabling Zionism and genocide in Palestine. Instead we call this out as “pinkwashing”, and present a queer politics that is instead, anti-imperialist, democratic, and anti-capitalist.

Feminism is appropriated by militaristic nation-states, as the USA did during the bombing of Iraq, counter-posing its (modern, liberated) women soldiers to the (Muslim patriarchy-oppressed) veiled Iraqi women. More recently the Indian government presented women soldiers as the face of the operation against Pakistan, producing itself as feminist and secular vis-à-vis supposedly backward and regressive Pakistan. This has been celebrated not only by the complicit media but by some who claim to be feminists. But other feminist voices have been almost entirely critical, pointing out the hypocrisy and contradictions underlying this strategy.

A kind of liberal feminism is sometimes claimed by the Hindu Right in India that has mobilized women in their violent and Islamophobic politics, as Tanika Sarkar and other scholars have shown.  Is feminism to be rejected as having enabled miilitaristic and religious identity based, exclusionary nationalism?

Feminism as well as queer politics are also appropriated by neoliberalism and capitalism. International Women’s Day and Queer Pride become just another marketing opportunity, evacuating these of their radical content. In a move similar to the attacks on postcolonial and decolonial thought, Nancy Fraser in 2013 wrote an essay accusing feminism (a certain kind of feminism – liberal-individualistic, meritocratic, oriented towards success in the market) of becoming the handmaiden of neoliberalism. Not only was this feminism compatible with neoliberalism, said Fraser, it had actually contributed to neoliberalism’s arsenal by its critique of the family wage (thus enabling the legitimation of flexible capitalism which relied on the cheap labour of women); by its critique of exclusive focus on class exploitation and drawing attention to domestic violence, sexual assault and reproductive oppression; and third, by its criticism of welfare state paternalism, leading to the dismantling of social security. This critique is entirely unsustainable – attributing to feminism the power to produce neoliberalism is surely overestimating it considerably! And just as surely the social welfare state was hardly dismantled on the grounds that feminism was critical of it. As for liberal individualistic feminism which supposedly had helped to build the neoliberal order, it was never interested in talking about sexual and domestic violence.  However, even after making these strong assertions, Fraser does not reject feminism but concludes by presenting an alternative vision of a feminism oriented towards social solidarity and an equitable society.

Globally, the phenomenon has been noted across the USA, Europe and Latin America, that “anti-feminist, anti-democratic leaders are using the language of anti-feminism, illiberalism and authoritarianism to advance their ideas, but in the same breath” they use  “the language or tropes of democracy and equality – including the language of women’s rights, and a commitment to the appointment of women as high-level executive officials and judges”, as part of “a project of superficial or selective implementation or rights, or else, the co-optation of female leaders into the anti-feminist, anti-democratic project.” This phenomenon has been termed “abusive feminism” by Rosalind Dixon. She, unlike Fraser, does not accuse feminism of having mothered authoritarian dictatorships, but examines the processes by which feminism is selectively appropriated in these contexts.

Marxism too has been claimed by authoritarian, anti-democratic and violent regimes from Stalin to Pol Pot. Ecologically unsustainable capitalist interventions are justified by regimes following a certain kind of Marxist understanding of capitalism being the necessary prelude to socialism or communism. Some critical interlocutors do exit the field of Marxism altogether, but the more nuanced and responsible response has been to produce a debate within the broad field of Marxism itself, through ideas of ecosocialism and degrowth.

And the final example in this section is the appropriation of B R Ambedkar’s thought by the Hindu right, widely written about, but Gopal Guru was among the earliest to point this out, in 1991 (“Appropriating Ambedkar” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 26, Issue No. 27-28, 06 July). This appropriation has created a sharp and intellectually oriented debate within the field of Ambedkar scholarship – nobody would dream of rejecting Ambedkarite thought as a response or accuse it of having enabled the rise of Hindutva.

In short, there is no pure knowledge that cannot be appropriated to ends opposite to its claims. This includes thought based on the assumed universal truths of the European Enlightenment, some of the principles of which (equality, democracy) postcolonial thought definitely espouses. Decolonial thought valorizes these principles too, but while rejecting the claim that these values were introduced by the European Enlightenment for the first time in the history of the world. Decolonial theorists argue that in the pluriverses that existed before the Columbian era (long before the European enlightenment), ideas of freedom and equality were debated both with reference to the imperialists as well as internally. Walter Mignolo in this article refers to the “epistemic disobedience” of Ottobah Cuguano of modern day Ghana who wrote in the late 18^th century and Waman Puma, Quechua intellectual of the late 16^th-early 17^th C. (There is of course an entire body of scholarship even in English by many decolonial scholars on these questions, I refer to just a short piece here)

One can also see this kind of argument (that the values attributed to the European enlightenment have much older non-European histories) in scholars such as David Graeber and David Wengrow. Though they do not explicitly use a decolonial framework, their argument is relevant here, that the idea of the desirability of equality was brought to Europe through the encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of North America in the 17^th century (I discuss this aspect at length in the Introduction to my book Secularism as Misdirection. Critical Thought from the Global South, Permanent Black 2023).

And perhaps one should add here, given the degree of confusion peddled by many, that decolonisation (as opposed to decolonial thought) refers to the phenomenon of the formal exit of colonial powers, and is therefore a much narrower term. It may be argued that decolonisation is not complete until a just and equal society is established after colonial rule ends, and decolonial thinking is compatible with this understanding.

II

Only epistemic, not materialist?

The charge that decolonial thought is merely “epistemic” as opposed to “materiality”. I believe this distinction to be unsustainable from a materialist standpoint informed by Marx. The capitalist transformation of the material structures of society is enabled not merely by force, violence and coercion but by the transformation of common sense alongside. The idea that matter comes first and is independent of thought is precisely what Marx devastatingly critiques in Theses on Feuerbach. “Sensuous objects” and “thought objects” are not separate, as Feuerbach’s “contemplative” materialism holds, rather, sensuousness involves thought. Epistemic transformation may in fact precede material transformation as in the colonies, where the elites of the colonies were brought into agreement with the colonial masters regarding their own backwardness and the ground map needed to build new “modern” futures. Futures in which for example, indigenous peoples, forest peoples and such others were seen as remnants of an earlier era which was to be transcended.

The decolonial agenda of epistemic disobedience therefore, in my understanding, is materialist, in the sense in which Marx understands materialism. As he put it in Capital I (Chapter 7 Section 1), referring to labour as “conscious life activity” – “At the end of the labour process we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.” What one conceives of as possible, legitimate, appropriate, or comprehensible in “the real world”, is intimately tied to epistemic frameworks located in materiality.

III

Decolonising or recolonising?

When Hindutva claims to be decolonising what is going on, exactly? My own understanding is that any project of decolonisation has to embrace heterogeneity and undecidability, in the Derridean sense of refusing meaning through established, fixed codes. Coloniality is precisely the forging and enforcing of legibility to the state, of homogenizing all history and the entirety of the present. And this aspect of coloniality is very much the ambition of modernity as well, hence the dyad of coloniality/modernity in decolonial thought. James Scott (not ever listed among postcolonial or decolonial scholars) in Seeing Like a State demonstrates that the modern state, whether colonial or independent, functions by making populations legible to itself through a series of homogenizing measures – such as imposition of uniform languages, units of measurement, “surnames” in cultures across the South where this naming practice did not exist, land tenure systems that set up individuals as owners from whom tax could be collected, and so on. This facilitates state control and capitalist advancement (or Stalinist state socialism).

An aside here – while decolonial scholarship as exemplified by Walter Mignolo asserts heterogeneity as a value, one of Mignolo’s weaknesses is that he sees some nation states of the global South (India, China, for example), as resisting coloniality but seems to assume them to be internally homogeneous. This perspective is what led to his initial endorsement of J Sai Deepak’s book which is a manifesto for Hindu Rashtra, an endorsement he withdrew after intervention by South Asian scholars. A book from the global South invoking indigeneity and decoloniality, it must have seemed to tick the right boxes, but as Kira Huju points out, “in this emerging tradition of thought, the indigene of Bharat is not just any Indian (or, as one might have expected, India’s indigenous Adivasi communities) but the Hindu”. As I will go on to show, this Hindu is still in the process of being desperately constructed, and it is precisely the non-homogeneity of India that foils that project over and over.

What Hindutva and other right wing projects claiming decoloniality espouse in their supposed rejection of Western colonial modes of thought, is a recolonisation by dominant frameworks of the contemporary elite, of the rich heterogeneity suppressed by coloniality. In India that framework is Brahminical and capitalist. For example, the replacement of the Indian Penal Code by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita has been touted as a decolonising move by the current regime in India. What we have been gifted with is instead, a thoroughly colonial set of codes giving unprecedented power to the state to suppress dissent in glorious colonial style, and a new name for these laws in Sanskritized Hindi, a language not accessible to most Indians.

The invocation of Indian Knowledge Systems (and its forcible induction to all syllabi of sciences, humanities, commerce and social sciences) is almost exclusively Sanskritik, refers to an “India” assumed to have as eternally existed over millennia, and ignores the multiplicity of practices and knowledges that the different communities of this subcontinent have evolved over time. For instance a sample course “Philosophical Foundations of Ethics” on the UGC site for an undergraduate course in Commerce, states it is based on “Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Puranas, Ramayana, Mahabharata and other ancient literature”. Clearly, these refer to only one tradition (the Brahminical tradition) that is sought to be imposed as “Indian”, despite claims to “multiplicity of practices and knowledges”.

When it comes to science and technology, the Director of IIT Mandi said about IKS in the IIT curriculum: “Rooted in millennia of indigenous ecological wisdom, IKS emphasises harmony between human activity and nature, offering frameworks like panchabhuta (five-element theory), vastu, and kri-parara (traditional agricultural treatises) that promote regenerative and low-impact practices”.

[UPDATE. I realised later that kri parara is a typo or some other kind of mistake. The reference is to Krishi Parashara, claimed to be an early Sanskrit text on agriculture.]

These Sanskrit terms are not what hundreds of communities on this landmass would use to describe their ancient ecologically sustainable practices that have been almost entirely wiped out since Independence, a process highly accelerated since 2014. Moreover, while pontificating on ancient harmony with nature, this particular regime tried to force through a series of laws to bring about capitalist transformations in agriculture that would enrich a few corporations while impoverishing millions, and which pay no heed to the crisis of Indian agriculture brought about by climate change. These laws were withdrawn only on sustained, militant protests by farmers who marched to the borders of Delhi and camped there for a year.

Forests have been shrinking alarmingly since 2014, as environmental controls are loosened for private capital; and the proposed Great Nicobar Island Project in one of the world’s most biodiverse areas is an environmental disaster in the making. Additionally it involves the displacement of the 300 member Shompen tribe, classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. Their knowledges and lives are not “Indian” enough to be celebrated. A capitalist Hindu Rashtra colonising an indigenous people and their resources – that is what we see here.

We come now to the ongoing counterrevolution on the question of women, trying to recolonise the spaces liberated by Indian feminist movements since the 19^th century onwards. Access to legal abortion, limited as that right is in Indian law, seems to be under threat with several references to the “falling birth rate” by RSS and BJP leaders, and the recent statement by Mohan Bhagwat that Indian families should have three children each, “to keep the population sufficient and under control”. Along with the phrase “demographic imbalance” (a dog whistle signaling growth in Muslim population due to conversions and “love jihad”) the implication is clear. Women (especially “Hindu” women) are expected to produce more sons for Bharat Mata. Second, the freedom to choose one’s sexual/romantic/marriage partner has been under threat with the “love jihad” campaign that propagates the widespread rumour that there exists a systematic campaign involving Muslim men seducing Hindu women to convert them to Islam. This accusation is palatable for all families of course, because no family wants an inter caste or interreligious marriage. What protected adult choices were the Constitution and the law. This last has become increasingly unreliable. Indeed even legally the status of women as citizens is becoming tenuous with the passing of legislation such as the Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code (2025) which covers all Uttarakhandis wherever in India they live. The most revealing provision of this law is the surveillance over and state control of “live-in” relationships, requiring self-declaration to a registrar who will grant or not grant permission after a thorough enquiry. Failure to register such relationships is a criminal offence. Several court judgements on various matters over the last ten years have stressed the “sanctity of marriage”, and the reinsertion of women into the patriarchal family is becoming more visible in many spheres. Colonel Qureshi, one of the three women armed forces officers who were the face of the Indian government during the military operation against Pakistan, was referred to (approvingly) by a BJP leader as “the sister of terrorists” who sent her brothers a strong message. At another event, Anant Vijay, senior journalist asked – “Is Simone’s feminism better or Savitri’s feminism, who brings her dead husband back to life?” He went on to say how positive Manusmriti is from a women’s perspective because it is written in it that  “no decision can be made without her permission after she enters her in-laws’ household.”

Two points are notable from the perspective of my recolonisation argument. First, the re-insertion of women firmly back into the patriarchal family, sometimes the natal family (as sister of men) but more often the husband’s family (as wife and daughter-in-law). Even “feminism” is indicated by protecting your husband’s life.

Second, more significantly, “Simone” as Western feminist is counterposed, not to actual feminist inspirations from this subcontinent – Savitribai Phule, Fatima Sheikh or Pandita Ramabai to name just three individuals. There are of course, the women of the Tebhaga movement, the Chipko movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan and any number of brave dissenting women in post-independence India. But no, while “decolonising” by dismissing Simone, the counter icon offered is the very essence of a recolonising Brahminising and patriarchal ethos.

It is clear therefore that whatever the Hindutva project calls decolonising is in fact a recolonisation project – some degree of superficial de-Westernization (replacing of English with Hindi and Sanskrit) masking a project of Brahminical supremacy and devastating capitalist transformations for the private profit of mega corporations.

Starting from roughly the Puranas (composed circa fourth to eleventh centuries) and continuing into twentieth-century ideologues of Hindutva such as V.D. Savarkar, and further into the Hindutva of the twenty-first century, the rich heterogeneity of beliefs and practices of non-Aryan, Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi communities across the subcontinent (those which cannot be classified as Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or Parsi) have been sought to be assimilated into Brahminism, or marginalised, or wiped out. This diversity of practices gets labelled as Hindu only because the legal definition of Hindus is one that gathers up all those who are not Muslim, Christian, Parsi, or Jewish into its fold. Thus, what is often celebrated as the diversity, inclusivity, and tolerance of Hinduism is merely the massive and age-old assimilationist project of Brahminism which has still not succeeded in making “Hindus”.

The growing and insistent conflation of Sanatana Dharma with Hinduism, such that any critique of Sanatana Dharma is claimed to be anti-Hindu, when it is only anti-Brahminism, is another indication of the attempt at recolonisation. The term “Sanatan Dharma” has emerged from Brahminical texts such as the Manusmriti and the Bhagavata Purana to refer to supposedly eternal and universal values such as honesty, mercy, and so on. But it has been invoked in different contexts to mean quite different things. The meaning that emerged the nineteenth century, as traditional Hinduism faced a challenge from reformist movements like the Arya Samaj, is in fact what sanatani means – that is, anti-reformist. Sanatani Hindu was the self-definition among those opposed to the Arya Samaj and reform, and who celebrated the orthodoxy/orthopraxy of caste. In this intra-Hindu debate the Sanatani Hindus presented themselves as the majority.

I argue in Secularism as Misdirection that it is a millennia-old project to present Brahminism as the majority religion (called Hinduism from the nineteenth century) – a project ongoing in different forms from the Puranas to the twenty-first century. The failure of this project is evident from the increasing violence required to establish it as the only acceptable form of religious practice. Widespread physical attacks against Muslims and Dalits, as well as against nonconforming “Hindus”, is carried out by independent actors even while state institutions – the government, many court judgments and the police – act in concert both to repress dissent and to produce the new normal of India as Hindu Rashtra.

There is too, the ongoing double process since the 1990s but accelerated since 2014, of assimilation of local pujas and pilgrimages (chhat puja, Ganapati puja, kanwar yatra) into Ram bhakti, and their weaponization against Muslims by massive takeover of public space and aggressive processions in Muslim neighbourhoods. That is, what we are seeing is the recolonisation of local practices into Brahminism, and the recolonisation of India as Brahminical Hindu Rashtra.

It should be recognized that India is a country of multiple minorities. There is no one majority religious community in India. Hindutva is the latest stage in the millenia-old attempt to produce one, and the claim to decolonisation is a cover for a recolonising project.

Links to previous posts in this series

Sleeping with the enemy? Postcolonialism, misread and misjudged: Shamayita Sen

Beyond philosophical gaslighting – seven theses on decolonization/ decoloniality: Aditya Nigam

Anti-colonial thought and the global right – an untenable alliance: Ishan Fouzdar