[This post is the ninth – and penultimate – 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’.]

Much has already been said in this set of essays on the difference between two kinds of Indian responses to colonial western modernity. These responses can be classified as the left leaning post(de)-colonial theories and the right-wing responses that may also be classified, by some, as post(de)-colonial theory. This set of essays are in conversations around the allegation that the former feeds into the latter. It is evident to many of us doing post(de)-colonial theory on the left that the difference between the two is unmistakable. Yet, this is missed by many on the left, leading to much misrepresentation; and by many on the right, leading to much appropriation. We also know that the responses to modernity from post(de)-colonial theories on the left are fractured on multiple axes, religion and faith being a major one. Due to the common worlds we inhabit, it is indeed possible for much confusion to occur. I think the act of demarcating the players, the fields, and the actions of the oeuvres, the right and the left is important, especially for a pedagogic purpose.  Each generation seeks clarification in the classroom on several of these confusions and debates. While demarcating the difference regularly and rigorously is an important intellectual exercise for everyone in the discourse, doing this is also an ethical responsibility, particularly for those who do not wish to be either misrepresented or appropriated, which is basically those who are not bedfellows with the orthodox left and definitely not with the orthodox right. The demarcation is required to be done in multiple domains of theory as well as practice. This set of essays seeks to precisely do that.

Demarcating

The challenges and difficulties of demarcating the two oeuvres, in the face of appropriation of the left by the right on the one hand and misrepresentation of the left, by the left, on the other, produce political and philosophical anxiety in many of us. This anxiety is an integral part of our own journeys, our own questions and our own self-reflections. They do not really require outside mirrors. Though anxiety as a form of intellectual life and a state of mind is emotionally exhausting, it also pushes us to churn out ideas that are introspective and instructive, almost on a daily basis. As someone who has been working for a long time in the field of critical post(de)-colonial science studies in India, the anxiety has been defining, compelling and propelling. My three marginal locations — as a sociologist in the positivist hierarchy of academic disciplines, as a woman in the patriarchal organization of ideas and as a post-colonial subject grappling with questions of a modern identity — have made the task of developing science criticism in the academia very hard. It has been especially hard to do so as a feminist researcher. It has been arduous.

In an environment of continued hostility and the polemics surrounding the field, sadly cast in the language of ‘wars’[1], I find myself paralyzed at times and animated at others. Paralyzed or animated, I find myself demarcating, all the time, between the right and the left but also between the left and the left, seeking a third or even a fourth path. A path that is like a maze, that will confound one about the destination but will always make the travel more exciting. Feminist discourses have given me these paths.

RPDC(L) and RPDC(R)

In the exercise to demarcate the fields of a left radical post(de)-colonial – RPDC(L) from henceforth – critique of modernity, from the fields of doing a right radical post(de)-colonial – RPDC(R) from henceforth – critique of modernity; let me submit what I think are some of the things that need to be done.

First, the move must be to identify the subjects who are doing these critiques. The exercise to identify which subject is doing what would translate into asking: who are the people doing these critiques, and for what purpose; are they different from each other or are they the same? The two sets are different. I would say that it is important to distinguish the people and identify them – as theorists and as citizens. It is my observation and contention that the RPDC(L) theories are undertaken by scholars speaking for and from marginal social locations leading to a multi-layered critique of nation(s) and culture(s), and the RPDC(R) theorists  speak from  vantage positions  of power and dominance while reinforcing essentialist notions of culture(s), specifically Indian culture, leading to a cultural nationalism.

A further question to ask would be, as citizens, for whom do they vote? Are they distinguished by this choice or not? This would be a good basis to ascertain which one of these is leading to ‘the rise of the right’? Do for instance the RPDC(L) theorists vote for the right-wing parties? My suspicion is: no, they do not. Many RPDC( L) theorists either a) vote for left parties because they still believe that the left parties can deliver a better world, or b)  bet on a newer reimagination of centrist parties (based on the ‘idea of love’ and constitutional morality) to be their electoral option, or c) choose non-right wing alliances of regional parties with the hope for  federal structures of political organization as eventual electoral outcomes. The RPDC(R), on the other hand, are not likely to do any of this, they are most definitely voting for right-wing parties. Also, the RPDC(L) and the RPDC(R) theorists both present critiques of the organized political parties of the orthodox pure left in India, which leads to some obvious confusion. Yet, there is a difference in the heartbeats of the two. The disdain of the RPDC(L) for the organized orthodox political left does not stem from a leaning towards right-wing political ideologies but stems from a deep experiential disenchantment and disillusionment with left ideologies. The organized left parties, and their ideologues need to see this fact more squarely and honestly. My sense is that the parties do not do so because of their own vested interests to stay politically relevant, a task becoming highly impossible given what they do at the ground level. The ideologues of the orthodox organized left need to recognize that their parties need to do a whole lot of self-reflection on, for instance, what they did in Nandigram but also on what they think of caste, patriarchy, sexuality and of course religion. Every time, either the parties or their intellectuals,  are asked to examine the limitations of their orthodoxy, they reassure themselves – and others – of their ‘internal critique’, reinforcing to my mind the idea of a ‘pure red left’ that confers and congregates behind closed epistemic gates where you cannot say caste or patriarchy are as relevant as class, where you cannot say that gender and sexuality do have a materiality but are also beyond it, where you cannot say that religion and art have liberatory potential and may be deployed outside of a propogandist matrix, where you cannot dare say that ‘laws’ of social change are driven by subjectivities and ideas and where you cannot say that science may be a product of social construction.  Most significantly, behind these gates you cannot challenge ‘big brother’ on the left, the mirror of the authoritarian ‘big brother’ on the right.

This horseshoe effect[2] weakens the options of aligning with the organized orthodox left. The party-intellectual nexus, I would say, functions more like a ‘lobby’ and less like a community, and even less like a collective. Just as many essays in this series that have preceded mine, I too submit that the demarcation exercise – between the right and the left but also between the left and the left – must be necessarily done on the axes of content, intent and allyship: axes that those on the side of the organized orthodox left need to understand once and for all. Let me reiterate that at the heart of the response to the recurrent misrepresentations that are generated by this lobby is a simple appeal: demarcate between the right and the left and address the differences between the left and the left. At the heart of this appeal is the conviction that this demarcation will help us in navigating messy intellectual and political terrains, leading to solidarities between ‘kinds of left.’ It will help us to avoid dangerous opposition between the ‘kinds of left.’ This aspiration is worth upholding despite the fractures in this circuitry. This demarcation attempt is not ‘rocket science,’[3] and I hope to demonstrate this in the following sections. These acts of demarcation are unexceptional routine and ordinary. As the wise ones say, if there is will, there is way. And often the way is simpler than we think.

Further, most essays in the series have necessarily distinguished and established the inevitable connections between the prefix of ‘post’ and ‘de,’ submitting that post-colonial and decolonial critiques of modernity are distinct but linked historically and through language. As most discursive ideas are. A prefix like ‘post’ also goes, as we know with other suffixes like structuralism and modernism – and colonialism – creating multiple academic genealogies, discourses and meanings over geographies and cultures. Much work has been and continues to be done in this domain across the world. It suffices to say here that the affinities – and allyship – between the ‘post’ of structuralism, modernism and colonialism, both conceptual and ideological, are not easy, often strategic, and highly contested. These must be highlighted and strengthened, at a global level. The problem faced by the RPDC(L ) theorists located in universities of the west is often more acute.

Finally, the essays in this set necessarily take varied positions, as they must. They do not build a false consciousness of consensus among the responses. Each essay is a particular response to tough questions of knowledge production, national identity, and power structures in and of modernity. Depending on disciplinary locations and intellectual commitments, each essay responds differently to the challenges of what to do with the our subjecthood, of our lived experiences of a hybrid ‘Indianness’, of the received wisdom from (and of) national and civilizational traditions, of what to do with the spectrum of indigeneity within our political geographies, and what to do with marginal identities and epistemes of class, caste, and gender, to name three. The standpoints are similar, yet the substantive theories upheld may be divergent. Each essay is also, on the spectrum, aligned to the left with different emotional and intellectual agency and intensity. This heterodoxy in the responses is a distinguishing feature that should help us in the exercise of demarcation between the RPDC(L) and the RPDC(R). The imaginations are distinct. The latter thrives on orthodoxy and homogeneity; the former is the exact opposite.

Lastly, all the essays make a fair and clear submission on the perennial dilemma that is more a problem of logic and ethics than of politics. So, if X appropriates Y, must Y be cancelled to cancel X, must Y be misrepresented by Z, especially by Z, a shade of Y.   Instead, what we need to do is to rigorously develop the distinction between X and Y and to say: hey, hold on X, Y does not mean what you mean, or Y means this, and this and this but not that.  In fact, I would say that it is the moral responsibility of Y and Z to a) come together and call out X and b) sharpen the strategic alliances between Y and Z rather than cancelling each other all the time. And that is what I see this set of essays as doing. The constraint on doing this comes from the fact that the public sphere and civic society are controlled by X, killing dialogue, debate, and reason. The discursive field we all know is shrinking. Hence, it is hard to build a counter to X saying that Y is not X, that we are not you, and please do not do what you do, and do not do it in in our name. But as though that is not bad enough, the public sphere and the discursive field are shrinking even further because of Y and Z going hammer and tongs at each other! This set of essays from Y must be seen as more of a response to Z. In the messy chess board of critiquing modernity, we need normative rules for Y and Z to check mate X, for both to self-reflect on how they might have failed the visions for an egalitarian and rich world true to multiple imaginations of plural universes. Though this, even to my own ears, sounds like the rhetoric of unattainable utopias, it is the only pinnacle of argument I can reach.

Within this scenario, I share a few notes from my personal journey in the exercise of demarcating the RPDC(L) from the RPDC(R).

Ordinary Autoethnographic Notes from a Personal Praxis

I remember the decades of the 1980s and 90s as I grappled with finding my way into academic worlds of thinking, being and doing, over activist worlds. This dichotomy defined my choices as I went along, only for me to gradually realize that the two are – and must be – deeply linked in a praxis. Thought versus action, mind over body, reason over emotion, individual over collective, science over religion were other existential questions and dualisms that I grappled with. At the time, I did not recognize these as Cartesian dualisms but saw them as textbook givens, as universals. Somewhere in the 1990s, I decided that a deeper pursuit of academics would be suited for me as it would allow me to explore questions about truth, identity, and politics. Trying to make sense of the 1980s, and then the 90s, was also about making sense of the political complexity and instability that was changing the Indian nation, both as idea and practice. As I stepped into adulting and into a ‘life of the mind’, untrained as I was, I carried a received disenchantment with liberal and centrist politics. Due to my own encounters with left wing student politics, I also carried my doubts about the left at multiple levels. My personal legacy of being the child of two partition driven people, one a leftist trade unionist and the other a somewhat right-leaning schoolteacher, must have been splitting me into multiple possibilities in ways of being. Not surprisingly, I was caste blind, casteless. Also, I had begun the journey of finding feminism, albeit the classical type that fought for individual rights collectively, that stabilized the category of ‘woman’, that uncovered structures of patriarchy without intersectionality. My tryst with Gandhi, with Ramana Maharshi, with forms of prayer were inviting me to explore interstices between the left and the center, the right was never on my mind, never an option either. As all of us do, I found myself gravitating towards a synthesis of sorts, more like a mixed-breed hybrid, less like a pure-bred whole, open, un-positioned, much like the world around me. When I started my doctoral work in the late 1990s, the BJP had already formed a government and become a threat to the idea of Nehruvian India, the humanist temper versus scientific temper Delhi gang wars[4] had already happened in the academia, our number one political enemy, the Congress, was hit by the hiccup, the economy was already being ‘opened’, privatization of health and education had dealt a blow to a socialist imagination of the nation, signaling the failure of the welfare state. As it went, in the next decade Nandigram happened, signaling where and how the left parties were headed. Also, we were living in a post-Mandal world.

Research

As I reflect, I realize that my path towards post-structuralism was natural, I needed to find adequate theoretical languages for the ‘particular, the subjective’ over the ‘universal, the objective.’ My questions were also informed by three other needs: to find critical languages for the experiences of patriarchy, to look empathetically into the ‘Indianness’ of my own identity, and my need to explore the liberatory possibilities of faith and religion in holding the tragedies of a contemporary world. Given that I was interested in the question of ‘truth’ and knowledge production, I chose to do my doctoral work on the question of science, an old romance. I attempted to look at intuition as a feminised epistemic category in the production of scientific knowledge, with a particular focus on the Indian scientific intellectual, Srinivasa Ramanujan, a figure who embodied all my questions. Deeply intuitive, deeply Indian, deeply religious, Ramanujan signified much of what I wanted to be engaged with. As I read in these directions, I encountered Science Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem to Modernity[5], the classic text in the field of what we later call Critical Science and Technology Studies. The edited volume, which contained two masterpiece essays by Shiv Vishvanathan, one brilliant analysis by Veena Das, a highly polemical piece by Claude Alavres, was an outcome of the Scientific Temper debate that I referred to earlier as the Delhi Gang Wars. JPS Uberoi’s Science and Culture and later his European Modernity[6] were texts that informed the field in more complex and nuanced ways. On the feminist front, Vandana Shiva, the essentialist ecofeminist was the sole voice, other than the voices from the reproductive health movement in Mumbai. Ashish Nandy’s biographies of Ramanujan and Bose were also out as Alternative Sciences[7]. This was the landscape that I entered. Of course, there were more historical works by Deepak Kumar[8] and Zaheer Babar[9], to name a few. While these works provided the most incisive and sharp critiques not just of science but also of science and colonialism, I think in retrospect that they failed to produce plural ‘alternatives’ or counter narratives to modern western science. In their attempts to find the ‘elsewhere’ in India, they stopped at Gandhi, at Vedic Hinduism. As I did. I now understand that this was not only a function of their/my own social locations, but it was also their/my alienation from the orthodox left. On the other hand, Marxists like D. D. Kosambi, D. P Chattopadhyaya that I read did not challenge science per se, but were looking critically at traditions of knowledge production in and of India from the standpoint of people’s materialist traditions. Their sharp understanding of feudalism, and knowledge systems within, were brilliantly articulated, yet reductive. The silence or subsuming of religion, caste, gender was short sighted and deliberately so. In fact, there was almost no engagement with liberation theology as a possibility. I was also noticing then that many in the women’s movements, probably the first ones to do so, began articulating the political breaks with the left

When in the second decade of the millennium, some of us from the autonomous feminist spaces began collecting ourselves to look critically at science, we naturally critiqued western modern sciences as situated in a gendered historical context. Most organically, because of the maturation of contemporary feminist theory and the women’s movement in India by then, we began taking an intersectional perspective to both: things modern and things traditional. Looking at knowledge traditions, scientific and indigenous, we asked questions of caste inequalities more squarely along with questions of gender, it also became important for many of us, also from upper caste and middle-class locations to look at our own privileges and locations more reflexively, to question privilege. An illustration of this is the works done on midwifery practices, soil management, forest and livestock management that we highlighted in the volumes Feminists and Science in India[10]. I would argue that this is and was the turning point that helps us significantly demarcate RPDC(L) from the RPDC(R) within feminism. My simple submission is: if we continue to center caste, along with gender and other axes of marginality, including tribe, sexuality, and disability, we cannot go wrong and cannot ‘play into the hands of the right.’ As I said, the anxiety of being appropriated by the right is something we live with daily, it pushes us to self- correctives, much more than what our critics know and would like to be attentive to. And frankly, we need to address them like this, publicly, only out of a pedagogic need and purpose.

Classroom

The everyday world of the classroom is a theatre where some of these anxieties and dilemmas get played out, leading to sharper skills of demarcation. In the pedagogic process of course design, in curriculum making and most importantly in the classroom practice, questions paralyze and animate. Let me start by sharing experiences from sites of pedagogy, of teaching question one, around scientific knowledge science and two, around sexuality.

In my experience of teaching science studies, from a RPDC(L) perspective has meant setting up and positioning the debate on some central themes around scientific knowledge. First on the question of relativism in science. Is scientific knowledge absolute and universal? If we say it is not, do we immediately slip into becoming anti-science, is the body and nature not real, is it all a language game, is it all cultural construction? The anxiety is palpable. At this point, I find it useful to help them pause, look attentively, and distinguish the ‘thing’ from the apparatus of knowledge construction around the thing. I find it useful to park the debate between absolute scientism and absolute relativism at a feminist station where we have found it strategically useful to opt for an ontological realism ground in materiality and corporeality. This, while suggesting that epistemologies are culturally conditioned and thereby situated within cultures. Then, is the question of knowledge traditions in India and how do we look at them, as scientific or superstitious or as something third, or even fourth? This question itself must be first freed from the east-west identity politics that is set up by the RPDC (R). Then, it is important to develop the double vision to see it not from the point of a singular grand narrative around these ways but to see it from the standpoint of the people holding these ways.  For instance, ideas like ‘we had it all, that we were superior, and that we have been plundered and marginalized’ are typical of the RPDC(R). We differentiate this position from the RPDC(L) which points out the hegemony of the west without setting up pure singular identity-based politics. I find myself succeeding simply by pointing out a) how India’s ‘glorious’ past was feudal, casteist, deeply patriarchal and homophobic and b) how immanent correctives to that past have been present within that past and how these may or may not be combined with critical tools acquired through the colonial modern alone. Scholarship in this domain from a Marxist, feminist and anti-caste perspective is superbly handy. And sticking to this scholarship is an act of taking academic sides as much as it is a moral choice to be on the side of the margins. One must risk the divide that this creates in the classroom and hope that at least some students will devote themselves to the idea of epistemic pluralism and justice. Similarly, let me also share the dilemma in a feminist theory class on sexuality and how the demarcation can be achieved in this context. In this class, practicing RPDC(L), is an interesting exercise. Since students must be exposed to the ‘indigenous’ discourses on gender fluidity, they must respectfully be presented with narratives of those like Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi’s. Tripathi, the right-wing kinnar-activist politician who speaks of how gender fluidity was present, and validated, in Indian traditions is a phenomenon. Like many others in the queer movement who take this route, Tripathi attempts to argue, I interpret, for the rights of queer people based on the idea that ‘it was always there’ in Indian culture and that is why now we can take pride in it. The glorification of femininity, the cultural nationalism, the identity politics in this telling of the butterfly story, is correctible by contrasting it with the telling of the rainbow coalition possible in the telling of Disha Pinky Sheikh, a telling that I see as bringing forth questions of caste discrimination, class politics and gender hierarchies present in Indian traditions of sexuality. And perhaps as arguing for, I interpret, a constitutional basis for the rights of citizenry without having to justify it as a ‘good Hindu’ practice. If and when asked to evaluate the two, and given the anxiety that that evaluation produces, the student may or may not choose as they wish to but at least the pedagogic demarcation is achieved. Naturally, the RPDC(L) pedagogue, if they must, will position themselves with Disha Pinky Sheikh over Lakshmi Tripathi, but with due pedagogic respect to both, as the classroom space demands.[11]

It is multiple and scores of such things one must continuously invent to find ease from the anxiety of being ‘appropriated’, and the agency that this anxiety brings in

In conclusion I wish to identify four principles of feminist knowledge production that have helped me in the exercise of demarcating RPDC(L) from RPDC (R) in the spheres of theory and practice. These are: situatedness of knowledge claims and their partial nature, the use of ‘double vision’ as a tool of standpoint methodology to foreground epistemes of deferring margins, the magnificent principles of critical intersectional analysis and finally, the transformative potential of the principle of reflexivity. These four principles can work rather well in lessening some of the anxiety of the drill as we march left-right-left. Educating ourselves, and others, on these principles might not be a bad idea.

Gita Chadha is Professor of Social Science, School of Arts and Sciences Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. In this article, as in everything else the author writes, the opinions and views expressed are her own and are not that of the organization that she is employed with.

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[1] The ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s played out in India too and the debate can be found in this link: Debate in Economic and Political Weekly [Bombay].

[2] Faye, Jean Pierre (1972) Narrative theory: introduction to totalitarian languages. Critique of reason, narrative economy, Collection Savoir (in French). Paris: Hermann Publishers. p. 124.

[3] A phrase commonly used by many of my very scientistic friends and colleagues, and one that has always made me wonder how much more difficult rocket science really is than reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I allow myself to indulge in this jibe, since the subtext of some of the present controversy is the wars that get set up between science and social science.

[4] Nandy, Ashis (1981): Counterstatement on Humanistic Temper, Centre for Studies of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

[5] Nandy, Ashis (1988) Science Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem to Modernity, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

[6] Uberoi, J.P.S. (1978) Science and Culture, New Delhi: Oxford University Press;

(2002) The European Modernity: Science, Truth, and Method, New York, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

[7] Nandy, Ashis (1980) Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

[8] Kumar, Deepak (2006), Science and the Raj, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

[9] Babar, Zaheer (1998) The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization and the Colonial Rule in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

[10] Krishna, Sumi and Chadha, Gita (2015) Feminists and Science: Critiques and Perspectives in India -Vol. 1, Stree Publishers.

(2017) Feminists and Science: Critiques and Perspectives in India – Vol. 2, Kolkata: Stree Publishers, Kolkata and New Delhi: Sage Publications.

[11] There are brilliant audio visual texts available freely on the internet that can be used in the classroom to demonstrate the individual gender performances of Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi and Disha Pinky Sheikh.

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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

When Decolonisation Turns Inward – On the Dangers of Methodological Nationalism: Sabah Siddiqui