[This post is the fifth 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.]

The excerpt published in The Wire of Meera Nanda’s “Decolonising Ourselves into a Hindu Rashtra” argues that postcolonial and decolonial theorists bear the blame, at least in part, for the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. In eschewing “Enlightenment Secular Humanism”, Nanda argues, these theorists have opened epistemic space for right wing ideologues to justify reactionary politics. Furthermore, she argues that the ideas of postcolonial theory have their roots in the “neo-Hindu revivalist strains of anti-colonial nationalism.”, who she identifies with “Gandhi, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, and even Tagore”. These thinkers were apparently seeking an escape from the idea of modernity present in the “legacy of the British Raj”. This, apparently against the “enlightenment thinkers” of India in which she presents a bizarre counter grouping of “Ambedkar, Periyar, Nehru, M.N. Roy, and Narendra Dabholkar”. This opposition that Nanda sets up is so ludicrous to someone who has even spent a minimal amount of time studying our freedom struggle or any of these thinkers that it requires little comment.

But of course Nanda is not really interested in any of these thinkers. As she admits, she is “an old-fashioned Enlightenment secular humanist”, where by “Enlightenment” she means the European enlightenment. And presumably the British Raj, whose legacy she compares with the French Revolution (!), would have brought about this radical transformation but was unfortunately stopped by our “conservative” nationalist leaders.

The irrelevance of this argument to the lives of Indian people is evident and should be passed by without comment. The quality of the excerpt dissuaded us from buying the book and we do not engage with Nanda per se. Nevertheless, the publicity provided by The Wire reflects certain ideological tendencies in our time which do require engagement.

There are two ideological positions that hold considerable sway in our time. The first sees European modernity, as shaped by the European enlightenment, as the end of history. This was famously argued by Fukuyama and it continues to exercise considerable political influence. The second questions the project of European modernity and identifies all modern nation states and national movements as inextricably bound up with this project. This is identified with postmodernism and postcolonialism, schools of thought which primarily gained prominence through American Universities and whose ideas have now spread beyond academia. Both of these positions are united in their opposition to the rise of “authoritarianism” which includes states like China, Russia and Iran as well as right-wing movements and leaders within so-called democracies. The first argues that we must fight authoritarianism and the rise of the “global right” by returning to liberal enlightenment values while the second argues that we must center the marginalized for a new decentralized grassroots resistance against the global right.

We argue that both positions get our moment wrong and do not have a vision for the future. Neither the European Enlightenment nor postmodern deconstruction can be the basis for a new world order. Indeed, both philosophical viewpoints draw their legitimacy from the dying Western world order. We argue that this is a moment of crisis in the West, which has opened up the space for new democratic horizons. This demands the struggle for a coloured modernity (singular). The vision for this was incipient in the ideas of the anti-colonial struggle and coloured modernity requires the completion of that struggle. Our framing of this moment as coloured modernity emerges from our discussions in The Saturday Free School of Philosophy of Black Liberation based in Philadelphia.

We argue that the theorist for our times is W.E.B. Du Bois. The central problem of the 20th century, argued Du Bois, is the problem of the color line. Its resolution could only come through the unity of Pan Africa and Pan Asia. In other words, Du Bois diagnosed the roots of the crisis of Western modernity in racism, colonialism and imperialism and envisioned a new world order based on the universal and united strivings of darker humanity. He saw within each darker civilization the striving for new universal human values. Du Bois predicted that it might be through the ideas of Tagore and Gandhi that a new world order might emerge.

The theoretical work of W.E.B. Du Bois leads us to conclude that this moment requires a revisiting of the Indian Freedom Struggle and its leadership, which both the Eurocentric and the Postcolonial Left attacks. However, in our moment of the crisis of the West and the rise of colored modernity, it is to this leadership and this history that we must return. To understand this, it is important to first correctly characterize our current moment.

Our Current Moment

We believe that the two processes that characterize our historical moment are the crisis in the West and the rise of Asia. The sense of crisis has become omnipresent in Western societies and in its intellectual discourse, dating back to the financial crisis of 2008. Because of the primacy of the West in our international order, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implications of the domestic crisis in the West, and particularly in the United States, is felt around the world. The crisis in the U.S. is much more important than in Europe, which plays a much less significant role in the world at this time.

The most important aspect of this domestic crisis in the U.S. is that it is a crisis of legitimacy. The American public no longer believes in American institutions. Multiple polls report that every major institution in the U.S. from the government, to the courts, the media and the universities are facing historically low levels of confidence. This further implies that the people no longer share the world view of the elite, no longer believe elite discourse and understand the same events very differently. We are therefore witnessing an unprecedented internal battle in the U.S. for control over the institutions of the state and a desperate attempt to re-establish legitimacy in conditions that are nearing the possibility of a civil war.

A second simultaneous process of great significance that characterizes our historical time is the rise of Asia, led predominantly by the rise of China. Despite the extreme pessimism in sections of the intelligentsia, Asian societies as a whole, including India, have no sense of crisis. To the contrary, ordinary people generally have high confidence levels in a better future, in their institutions and their leadership. The scale of the transformation in China cannot be overemphasized. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the past four decades. The top leading research institutions in the world are now almost all Chinese. China has rapidly industrialized and urbanized in the past several decades. It has most of the world’s biggest cities. China is an ancient civilization that has modernized a huge population. Further it has done so without colonialism, slavery and genocide which characterized the modernization of Europe.

The implications of this simultaneous crisis of the West and the rise of Asia force us to reconsider the question of modernity both from a theoretical and practical point of view. Theory based on the experience of 18th and 19th century Europe and postmodern nihilism is simply insufficient to explain the processes that we are witnessing. This is not the industrialization of 19th century Britain, this is not the “Weimar moment”, this is not the end of the British Empire or any other such easy historical reference. We are living in a fundamentally new moment that requires new thinking. We are witnessing historical processes that have not been seen before and force us to re-examine the basis of our social theorizing. This social theorizing must not only help us understand these historical processes but also suggest a course of action for the future.

W.E.B. Du Bois and D.D. Kosambi as Theorists of the Future

The key to the future of humanity is not in the bourgeois revolution in Europe, but in the anti-colonial struggles of Asia and Africa, which remain incomplete. In many ways W.E.B Du Bois can be considered as a foundational thinker of these struggles.

The legacy of Du Bois is unfortunately little known partly because of the attacks and suppression of his ideas in the American academy, which has recently attempted to appropriate him. He was not only foundational to the creation of the modern science of sociology, but a participant in the black struggle in America and a supporter and friend of the anti-colonial struggles around the world. At one point, he was very well known around the world, particularly among the colonized.

Du Bois argued that “Nothing which has happened to man in modern times has been more significant than the buying and selling of human beings out of Africa into America from 1441 to 1870.”. In other words, he emphasized the centrality of the trans-atlantic slave trade and the creation of whiteness to understanding modern Europe. In his study of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois argued that it could not simply be understood in class terms and discovered the category of the “black worker”, who played the defining role in determining the outcome of the war. Thus Du Bois argued that the “backward” black worker pushed democracy forward more than the “forward” white worker, who was compromised by whiteness.

However, Du Bois did not simply see race to be in a dialectical relationship with class but saw it as a civilizational category. The logic of whiteness predicated on the supremacy of western civilization determined social relationships in the world. The black worker was a category that could be expanded to include darker workers around the world. As he wrote in Black Reconstruction in America,

“That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry—shares a common destiny; it is despised and rejected by race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven, beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but name…

Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black”.  

An epistemology that centred the experience of the black worker was crucial to understand the history of modern Europe and the future of humanity writ large.

Therefore, in his novel Dark Princess, Du Bois argued allegorically that the path forward would be the unity of Pan-Africa with Pan-Asia. In other words, he theorized the possibility not of alternative modernities but of a coloured modernity based in the intercivilizational relationships between Asian and African civilizations that had been suppressed by Europe. Du Bois very clearly saw that this modernity would look different from Europe. It would draw on the experience of the Russian Revolution as well as on the civilizational foundations of Asian and African societies, including their religions. He understood civilization not as the culture of the elite, but as having a broad base among the people. However, this left open the question of how to understand the history of large and complex civilizations.

In a country like India, what sense does it make to speak of a civilization given the vast cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity that exists? It is here that we believe D. D. Kosambi’s methodology is essential. Though Kosambi primarily studied ancient history, his creative exploration of Indian society furnished a science of social complexity.

Kosambi suggested that a study of Indian society requires combined methods. Kosambi argued that India was a country of “long survivals”. The bewildering variety of cultural diversity in the country nevertheless had a “double unity” and hence culture and civilization as the ways of life “of the whole people” could nevertheless be scientifically studied. Indian history could not be studied with economic determinism as “social manifestations of the class-struggle in India” had found “religio-philosophical channels of expression”. The centrality of religion to historical evolution, in Kosambi’s opinion, “minimized the need for internal violence”.  Ultimately, it allowed the existence of a living history in the Indian people where practices often dated back to pre-historic times and had been preserved through a process of “reciprocal acculturation”. Thus, Kosambi argued that Indian society could be scientifically understood despite its complexity.  His analysis suggests that the historical evolution of Indian society would benefit from comparison with Africa and China rather than with Europe, though such comparative studies have hardly begun. In our view, it also suggests that the transformation of Indian society into modernity would look very different from Europe.

In his unpublished manuscript Russia and America, which was censored under Cold War pressure, Du Bois argued that it may be through the philosophy of Gandhi and Tagore that this new colored modernity, which he characterized as an Asiatic communism, may be created. He was of the view that the freedom of India would surpass even the Russian revolution in importance.

The Indian Freedom Struggle at the Vanguard of Coloured Modernity

The Indian Freedom Struggle, as part of the world anti-colonial struggle, led the way towards a new colored modernity. It inspired nearly every major anti-colonial struggle in the world. Properly making sense of its history is crucial to understanding the momentous changes occurring in the world today. Both the leadership of the Indian Freedom Struggle and the postcolonial Indian State have been attacked by both the Eurocentric left which saw it as nothing but a “bourgeois movement” and the subaltern theorists who similarly saw it as a movement of national elites imposing European modernity on the subaltern. Ranajit Guha, for example, declared in 1982 that the Indian state has “failed to come into its own”, and Spivak said that the aspiration to be a leader is undemocratic and itself a source of problems in postcolonial societies.

As much as we take it for granted today, the question of how a civilization which had been colonized and brutalized by British imperialism could be taken forward in a revolutionary manner presented no easy answers in the early 20th century. However, the leadership of our freedom struggle understood that the struggle for liberation would find religious channels of expression. Therefore, they sought to re-interpret Hinduism and Islam in ways that would allow them to become religions of freedom and anti-colonialism.

A large number of people understood that Gandhiji was a revolutionary though sections of the Indian left could not understand him partly because they had an inadequate theoretical basis to do so. Among the Indian communists, it was S. A. Dange who fought for this position within the communist movement. Nevertheless, there were many participants of the freedom struggle who saw no basic contradiction with their socialistic ideas and association with Gandhiji including Jawaharlal Nehru but also lesser studied figures like Aruna Asaf Ali, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya etc.

In fact Nehru, who is often misunderstood as a liberal or social democrat, was greatly concerned with understanding the Indian revolution and how it could be continued after obtaining state power. In an interview with Russi Karanjia taken towards the end of his life, Nehru clarified that he did not see any break in his thinking from Gandhiji’s time. He saw that the Gandhian method of revolution was distinct and rooted in the Indian tradition. Most importantly, it was based not on a vanguard that was ahead of the people, but in the whole of the people.

This striving of Nehru towards coloured modernity which had a civilizational basis bore fruit in such initiatives as the Nonaligned Movement, the Panchscheel declaration, and support and solidarity for anti-colonial revolutions all over the world. The struggle for colored modernity expressed itself in the struggle for a New International Economic Order. The anti-colonial state, the product of the anti-colonial struggle, expressed, in potentiality, the universal strivings of the people for peace and development.

Nehru knew that religion played a central role in politics for both Gandhi and Tagore. Nehru was therefore interested, particularly at the end of his life, in a “scientific-spiritual approach” deriving from both Gandhi and Tagore. Interestingly, when Tagore visited China in 1924, some Chinese radicals from the May 4th movement attacked his “spiritual” approach arguing instead that what Chinese society needed was modern science and democracy. In reply, Tagore argued that “The revelation of spirit in man is truly modern: I am on its side, for I am modern.”. In other words, Tagore warned against associating modernity with Western technological advancement and instead argued for the democratic emancipation and spiritual development of humanity which could be forged through closer civilizational relationships between Asian societies, as he strove to do in Visva-bharati. 

Conclusion

The role of the intelligentsia is to assess the world and provide a vision for the future. For an intelligentsia to be relevant, it must answer the challenges of its times. As James Baldwin wrote, “An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn.”

Just a few years after independence, Aruna Asaf Ali argued “the Indian intelligentsia was getting confused about the great objectives for which the people had struggled”. Today, there is active hostility to these objectives. However, one thing is for certain. The leadership of the freedom struggle would not have lost faith in the Indian people and characterized them as backward. Nor would it have seen them as divided, fragmented and incapable of unity. In many ways, their times were more difficult than ours.

What then is the role of Indian intellectuals in this time? By intellectuals, we don’t mean academics, but all those who seek to contribute to the ideological contestations of our time. They must separate themselves from the fashions of a dying West and instead “return to the source”, by seeing the potentialities of our own people. For, as our leadership understood, it is not intellectuals but the people who make history. The struggle for ideas, which can become a material force in the hands of the people, will be paramount. We must struggle for the completion of our freedom struggle in the construction of a state of the whole people. This requires defining a revolutionary struggle for democracy from within the Indian tradition to which Gandhi and Tagore are central. This struggle for democracy is not defined by constitutionalism but by working out the possibilities for the democratic transformation of Indian society into a modern civilization.

The age of Europe is over, the age of humanity is beginning. We must look forward, not backward.

Meghna Chandra is a researcher with a healthcare worker’s union in Chicago, Illinois and a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation.

Archishman Raju is a scientist based in Bangalore associated with the Intercivilizational Dialogue 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

The Hopeless Quest for a Pure Incorruptible Knowledge – Decoloniality and its Discontents: Nivedita Menon