[This post is the seventh 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.]

It is impossible to think of modernity and colonialism, without thinking of their third sibling – science. They are not just siblings, in fact, but a set of triplets which took birth within the same western context and period – and hence, the adjectives ‘modern’ and ‘western’ are used to qualify science, often by the colonizers themselves. Just as the notion of ‘savage native’ was a part of colonial construction, so was the idea of ‘modern science’. Not only did the colonial powers conquer people and knowledge systems across the world, but they also established hegemony within their own societies, colonizing them from within. This was done using complex mechanisms of power, control and appropriation.

The Case of Smallpox

Let me illustrate this by dwelling upon a case from the history of science: the prevention of smallpox.  Smallpox vaccine is seen as having helped eradicate the disease singularly almost as though there was no other discourse around it. However, as many know, before the discovery of the cow-pox vaccine by Edward Jenner in 1896, variolation i.e. the inoculation with the pox from an infected person was, for centuries, a widespread approach in preventing and controlling the spread of the disease in many parts of Asia and Africa. It was first introduced in England in the early 1720s by Lady Montagu, an English aristocrat, who had learnt of this technique in Constantinople. In India, variolation was practiced widely in Bengal and Orissa and in parts of north India but there was no prevalent practice in south India [1]. Variolation was introduced by the East India Company in Trichinopoly at the very end of the 18^th century but presented as a medical practice that had been improved and perfected by Europeans. Jenner’s discovery of the vaccine happened just around this time in England[1] and, hence, within a few years of introducing variolation as a practice in south India, the Company decided to replace it with Jenner’s vaccination. The Company’s earlier advocacy and support of variolation turned to a disavowal and repudiation which then became increasingly hostile to variolation, and, a few decades later, variolation was completely debunked and talked of as a ‘murderous trade’ [1].

The local population in and around Trichinopoly responded very similarly to both variolation and vaccination —  since there was no traditional practice of variolation in that region, it was received with the same suspicion and fear as the vaccination was. The suspicious attitude stemmed largely from the fact that it was the colonizer who was advocating these interventions. But the way the colonial authorities reacted to the resistance that the Indians were demonstrating was different in the two cases: in spite of all their attempts, they could not claim the practice of variolation to be their own and, hence, their response to the reactions of the Indians to variolations was somewhat circumspect. The vaccination, however, was an European contribution and the resistance to it by the native population was met with  much more strongly. The European authorities had already encountered public resistance to the vaccine even in Europe and they set up the rhetoric of benevolent medicine pitted against popular belief/superstition. But, in India, it acquired a different dimension – it allowed for the ‘othering’ of the colonized, the difference was constructed along the lines of the benevolent European medicine and the inherently superstitious and ignorant natives. Even as they were doing that, the colonizers were constructing the subsequently enduring binary of the enlightened European and the savage native; as Gyan Prakash says, ‘the concept of “savage natives” helped the European elite discipline their own working classes and peasants into modern subjects’ [3].

The trajectory that the case of smallpox prevention in South India took reveals several interesting features. One, variolation was unknown in Europe till the early 18^th century while it was common in other parts of the world but when it was used in Europe and then introduced in South India, it was advertised as having been improved and perfected by Europeans. The Asian roots of variolation were suppressed[2].

Two, vaccination was also a result of bringing together the technique of variolation, from Constantinople, and knowledge about cow pox commonly known to farmworkers in rural England but, as a finished product, claimed to be a European scientific invention and simultaneously ‘modern’. The suspicions and fears of the local population in India was used to construct the notion of the ignorant, superstitious native ‘other’. It is here that the constitutive role of science for colonialism is revealed in the sense that science was not used to merely implement but rather to conceptualise the project of colonialism itself[3].

Extending the ‘post-colonial’

While the example of smallpox is illustrative of many aspects of the colonial encounter but as instances of traditional knowledge systems in the Indian sub-continent go, it is relatively small. There are other areas of traditional sciences and their philosophies that post-colonial research has helped to bring to light. I will list a small number of them here just to lay emphasis on the range and diversity of this scholarship: i) traditions of materialism in India like the Carvakas which has been discussed in the older book by D.P. Chattopadhyay [4] but discussed thoroughly in the recent remarkable work of Pradeep Gokhale [5]; ii) ancient atomism in India [6]  in the 6^th century BCE which paralleled what was being pursued in Greece by Leucippus and Democritus. As I have argued in [6], when Dalton and other eighteenth century scientists revived the idea of the atom in modern scientific contexts, it was to the Greek conception of the atom that they sought to establish a link to, ignoring the atomic philosophies of India, for example; iii) the body of scholarship that has uncovered the early roots of calculus in Kerala. The contributions of the Kerala school is an important case as the research into this has demonstrated not just the contributions of the school but also how context-specific and limited it was (see, for example, [7]).

There are many more important examples, but the point I want to make is: traditions of science, mathematics and the associated philosophy were present in India over a span of two and a half millenia. Much of this history was lost and more intentionally suppressed, internally and externally. Post-colonial scholarship has helped unearth this history. In fact, I would like to state that while some of these accounts of traditional knowledge systems in India might not fit into the current badge of post-colonial scholarship, I think it is important to bring this wide range of scholars of pre-modern science in India under the heading “post-colonial”. These seek to, even if it is only implicit, resist the colonial whitewashing of traditional knowledge systems. Much of this scholarship in the history of science may or may not stand on the political spectrum of left or right of today but they have contributed immensely to the history of ideas in the world. There may be western scholars who have studied the history without much understanding of the post-colonial project, but my contention is that they are all intrinsically aligned by the academic impulse to ‘set the record straight’ and the term post-colonial must be therefore extended to include these.

The post-colonial critique of science/modernity is a critique that is grounded in a profound theoretical engagement with colonialism and its manifestations. It has now become a valuable philosophical tool for understanding the once-colonised cultures. These scholars, who hardly need to be named on a platform such as this one, may be left-leaning but the rigour of their critical lens did not exempt even the Eurocentricity of left-politics from scrutiny. In this sense, there are many post-colonial scholarships. Once again, it is vacuous to bring them under one umbrella.

Where is the horseshoe?

However there are responses, especially from outside the academia but some from within, which either combine ‘no research’ or’ fake research’ with political stances to produce meaningless rhetoric about puskhpak vimans or plastic surgeries. Equally disconcerting is the prevalence, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, of what Sandra Harding refers to as exceptionalism – ‘the belief that Western sciences alone among all human knowledge systems are capable of grasping reality in its own terms – “cutting nature at its joints” as philosophers of science typically enjoy referring to the matter’[8]. The exceptionalists sadly accept the colonial construction of science as truth with no attempt to understand the large corpus of research work that points to the contrary. It is amusing, then, that an exceptionalist, like Meera Nanda opines that post-colonial critiques of European modernity have fuelled right-wing cries for decolonisation [9].

Nanda’s conclusion is precisely what one would arrive at when no attention is paid to the nuanced arguments that post-colonial theories advance in reclaiming traditional knowledge and in positioning themselves vis-à-vis European modernity and Enlightenment. Dipesh Chakrabarty articulates the post-colonial position eloquently: ‘The point is not that enlightenment rationalism is always unreasonable in itself but rather a matter of documenting how – through what historical process – its “reason” which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look obvious far beyond the ground where it originated’ [10]. The horseshoe with the right-wing and the post-colonial theorist located on the two poles is a superficial conception: these do not exist on the same epistemic plane, leave alone the political axis.

Another common feature of the attacks on post-colonialist theories of science has been that they espouse a cultural relativism but, again, these are naïve arguments that totally miss the point. Alan Sokal, a physicist who became famous for a hoax paper he wrote and not for any of his physics papers and also a collaborator of Meera Nanda, once challenged relativists by asking them to jump off his window [11]. Gravity, he said, would act on them in exactly the same way independent of their gender, race, class or any other social location. I mention this because this is precisely the kind of argument that has often been used to obfuscate and silence serious discussion. Gravity is not science: it is the phenomenon. Science is the theoretical understanding, the experimental apprehension and the technological manipulation of the phenomenon and these are susceptible to culture specificities.

But neither is the conception of cultural relativism absolute. In fact, as Sandra Harding points out that post-colonial theories, like feminist theories, ‘clearly recognizes that, on the one hand, one cannot simply abandon modern Western sciences and their philosophies. On the other hand, these can be radically transformed through integration with regional legacies so as to enable the flourishing of a multiplicity of knowledge traditions and the societies that. depend upon them’ [8]. The hope is that the promise of the unitary modernity we have should be resurrected in multiple modernities that post-colonial and feminist philosophies have been envisioning [12].

K. Sridhar is a theoretical physicist and a writer of fiction.

References:

1. Brimnes, N. Medical History 48, 199-228 (2004).
2. Kochhar, R. Biosc. 36 (5), 761-768 (2011).
3. Prakash, G. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1999), p. 13.
4. Chattopadhyay, D.P. Lokayata: A Study of Ancient Indian Materialism, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House (1959).
5. Gokhale, P.P. Lokayata/Carvaka: A Philosophical Inquiry, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India (2015).
6. Riepe, D. The Naturalistic Tradition in Indian Thought, Seattle: University of Washington Press (1961);

Sridhar, K. Ancient Indian Atomism in the History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: Vol. XII. Part IV: Modern Atomism (D.P. Chattopadhyaya and J. Pasupathy, Eds.), Centre for Studies in Civilizations, New Delhi (2017).

7. Roy, R. Mathematics Magazine(Mathematical Association of America) 63 (5), 291–306 (1990);

Katz, V. J.  Mathematics Magazine, 68 (3), 163–174 (1995);

Pingree, D. Isis, 83 (4), 554–563 (1992).

8. Harding, S. Sciences from Below: Feminism, Postcolonialities, and Modernities, Duke University Press, Durham (2008), p. 3.
9. Nanda, M. Post-Colonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason, Routledge, Oxon (2025).
10. Chakrabarty, D. Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton (2000).
11. Sokol, A. Lingua Franca, May/June 62-64 (1996).
12. Seth, S. Postcolonial Studies, 12 (4), 373-388 (2009).

[1] It has been argued that Jenner, in modifying variolation to develop his vaccine, benefitted from local knowledge in rural England about the immunity to smallpox derived from cow pox [2].

[2] Incidentally, the European method completely removed the religious rituals that always accompanied the practice of variolation in India.

[3] One important point that needs to be borne in mind is that this was not the story of smallpox all over India – the resistance to vaccination in areas where traditional variolation was practiced had a very different texture and played out very differently. I would like to add parenthetically that post-colonial scholarship pays attention to such heterogeneities in attempting to deepen its understanding of colonialist encounters. Anything purporting to be a critique of post-colonial scholarship needs to be at least as nuanced and focused on details: a simple repudiation of all forms of it by bringing it under an umbrella term is simply vacuous.

———-

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

The Struggle for a ‘Coloured Modernity’: Meghna Chandra and Archishman Raju

Decolonizing the ‘Colonial-Brahmanical’ – Thinking Outside Modernity: Sunandan KN