[This post is the eighth 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 has been 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 that mark some spurious claims to ‘correctness’.]

When I first encountered postcolonial theory as a young scholar, it felt like an opening into a new way of understanding the world. Much of my introduction came through Indian thinkers, some of whom were not located in India, yet their work spoke powerfully to questions of colonial legacies, subjectivity, and the politics of knowledge. These early engagements helped me grasp the goals of postcolonial scholarship: to make visible the structures of power that colonialism left behind and to explore the ways in which it continues to shape our systems of knowledge and self-representation. Over time, however, I noticed a subtle shift; the language of postcolonial studies seems to have receded somewhat, while the term decolonial has gained prominence as a way to address questions of knowledge and authority in the present moment. Other contributors to this blog series have traced the rise and relative decline of postcolonial thinking in South Asia. I still resonate with postcolonial analysis, and have used it within my own work, but for the purposes of reflecting on the current politics of knowledge in Indian universities, I am choosing to engage now with the decolonial project.

Over the last decade, the call to “decolonise education” has entered the mainstream of public and institutional discourse globally (Gopal, 2021) and in India. Yet what begins as a radical demand to redress epistemic injustice, to question how colonial hierarchies of knowledge persist in our knowledge systems, has been steadily co-opted by conservative imaginaries of belonging. To be fair, even the conservative articulation of the urgent need to decolonise arises from a recognition that colonialism was not merely a political domination but a psychological one; it was the imposition of certain ways of knowing, classifying, and governing human life. In this sense, the demand to “decolonise education” in India is a call to redress the epistemic violence that accompanied empire: the erasure of indigenous knowledge systems, the valorisation of Western science, and the marginalisation of vernacular intellectual traditions.

Colonial education did more than impose what counted as knowledge; it reshaped the very idea of what it meant to know. Built into this model of pedagogy was the figure of mastery, embodied by the colonial elite, and sustained through the hierarchies of the classroom through the dull bureaucratisation of learning. This is explored in Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place (1999) in which he evocatively remembered his early years of schooling as both formative and alienating. The colonial classroom had prized mastery, memorisation, and hierarchy. Its logic was that of a top-down transmission of ideas: the teacher as authority, the student as recipient, and knowledge as an object to be absorbed and reproduced. Its afterlife remains visible in the exam-centred and lecture-dominated systems that still govern higher education in India. Even contemporary reforms, framed in the language of skills, employability, and innovation, continue to prize mastery, over texts, over others, and over oneself. Yet mastery is just as likely to be invoked to defend national pride as to challenge violent oppression.

This drift should not surprise us. The language of decolonisation lends itself to nativist appropriation, because it can invoke the powerful imagery of return: return to authenticity, to our roots, to lost time, and the fantastic riches of yore. But this nostalgia for a pure resplendent past is precisely what undermines the ethical intent of this type of decolonial thinking. Decolonisation is not about recovering origins; it is about dismantling structures of domination that shape how we come to know and to be known. When decolonisation becomes synonymous with defending cultural authenticity or national identity, it ceases to be a politics of liberation and begins to mirror the very closures it once sought to undo.

This is the problem of methodological nationalism: the tendency to take the nation, or the local culture, as the natural and self-evident frame of knowledge. The term was first offered by Herminio Martin in 1974 but elaborated by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller wherein, “methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the nation-state by the social sciences. Scholars who share this intellectual orientation assume that countries are the natural units for comparative studies, equate society with the nation-state, and conflate national interests with the purposes of social science” (2003). It replaces the imperial universal with the national one, leaving intact the idea that knowledge must speak from a single, coherent centre. In education, this manifests in the urge to provincialise without pluralising. It would be methodological nationalism to solely replace Western canons with Indian equivalents rather than to question the very logic of canon formation itself. The result is not decolonisation but re-colonisation, this time in the name of the self.

Speaking of a fixation on the self, psychology offers a telling example of how the call to decolonise knowledge can sometimes slip into nativist arguments. The discipline’s engagement with culture, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, was meant to challenge the universalist assumptions of Euro-American psychology. Yet, even as researchers sought to account for cultural variation in human thought and behaviour, the field split along methodological lines. Cross-cultural psychologists pursued comparative studies using standardised instruments across many societies, while cultural psychologists turned to ethnographic and interpretive methods to understand meaning within a few (Triandis, 2007). Despite these differences, both strands remained tethered to frameworks that privileged the Global North as the locus of theory and the Global South as the site of data collection (Macleod & Bhatia, 2008). In India, thinkers such as Durganand Sinha argued for the indigenisation of psychology (1997). This was a vital and necessary critique of intellectual dependence. Yet, as critical psychologists like Erica Burman (2007) have warned, cross-cultural psychology also risks falling into methodological nationalism. In foregrounding the “indigenous,” one may inadvertently defend cultural authenticity without asking whether everything cultural should indeed be preserved. The danger here is that such decolonial efforts can begin to mirror the exclusions of the very colonial hierarchies they resist, reasserting dominant social orders within the local context.

So how, then, do we actually go about decolonising? Universities tend to begin with method, with designing frameworks, revising curricula, or drafting policy documents. The strategy is to create a structure first, to draft frameworks, revise curricula, or produce a new set of guiding principles. Theory before praxis, curriculum before change. But this sequence can be deceptive. When we start by focusing on method, we risk becoming trapped within our own process: endlessly refining how we might act, instead of acting at all. The work of the political, in this sense, becomes bureaucratised, it turns into a technical problem to be solved through policy change. I have seen this happen more than once in university spaces, where even well-intentioned reform begins to circle around itself, producing a kind of methodological paralysis.

I encountered this dilemma more concretely in 2019, when I took on a small project at the Manchester Institute of Education, of analysing the curriculum of a professional doctoral programme (the DCounsPsych). The project was supported by the Social Responsibility Fund of the MIE, SEED, University of Manchester, and part of that report is now archived on the Race, Roots & Resistance collective’s blog. What began as a fairly straightforward curricular review soon became a deeper inquiry into what decolonising education might actually look like in practice. I spoke with students, supervisors, and faculty, and what emerged from those conversations was an important realisation: perhaps the starting point was wrong. Rather than deciding in advance that the curriculum itself must be “decolonised”, a goal that often feels like a mirage, enticing but always beyond reach, what matters most is who occupies the classroom, and how knowledge is being encountered, contested, and lived within it. Very simply, it is about the bums on chairs.

The question, therefore, is not whether education in India should be decolonised, but how it might be done without reproducing existing hierarchies of caste, class, and gender in post-independence India. To decolonise education in India today requires us to hold two commitments at once: to resist the imperialistic hierarchies that shape our intellectual work, and to refuse the political masquerade of emancipation in methodological nationalism. If the university cannot be decolonised by decree, thus it must be inhabited. The classroom must become a space where knowledge is not simply delivered but negotiated, where teachers acknowledge the partiality of their own frames, and where students are invited to think historically and critically about the epistemic conditions of their learning. A politics of decolonisation begins with the refusal of closure, with resisting both the universal and the local substitute that claims to replace it, and by opening its doors to not only plural ideas, but people of plural backgrounds. The route to decolonising the university necessitates the expanding of access to education, by inviting more people to participate in their multiplicities, and in doing so, paving the way for more ways of thinking, speaking, and knowing.

Sabah Siddiqui teaches history and philosophy of psychology, clinical psychology, and critical disability studies.

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 References

Burman, E. (2007). Between orientalism and normalization: Cross-cultural lessons from Japan for a critical history of psychology. History of Psychology, 10(2), 179–198.

Gopal, P. (2021). On Decolonisation and the University. Textual Practice, 35(6), 873–899.

Macleod, C., & Bhatia, S. (2008). Postcolonialism and psychology. In C. Willig & W. Stainton-Rogers (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research in psychology (pp. 576–589). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.

Martins, H. (1974). Time and theory in sociology. In J. Rex (Ed.), Approaches to sociology (pp. 246–294). London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Said, E. W. (1999). Out of place: A memoir. Knopf.

Siddiqui, S. (2019). Decolonising mental health training in the university: Curricular analysis of a professional doctoral programme in MIE, SEED. Race, Roots & Resistance Collective. https://www.racerootsresist.com/anti-racist-classroom

Sinha, D. (1997). Indigenizing psychology. In J. W. Berry, Y. H. Poortinga, & J. Pandey (Eds.), Handbook of cross-cultural psychology: Theory and method (pp. 129–169). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Triandis, H. C. (2007). Culture and psychology: A history of the study of their relationship. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 59–76). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Wimmer, A., & Schiller, N. G. (2003). Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology. The International Migration Review, 37(3), 576–610.

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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

Colonialism, Modernity and Science: K. Sridhar