[This concluding 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’.]

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In a superbly crafted, and provocative, essay titled ‘In Defense of Presentism,’ the historian David Armitage (2023) has tried to re-present the prospects of ‘presentism’ for historians particularly (even though the essay has its lessons for various practitioners across domains, critical or otherwise).  As he notes: ‘Historians are trained to reject presentism: we are likely to argue that our duty is to the past and its inhabitants – and not to the present and certainly not to the future.’  But, as he shows with great analytical acuity and detail, historians are deploying the word ‘presentism’ in a variety of ways, which he then goes on to unravel, while making a case for what historians ought to be opposing and what about the present they can comfortably be accepting.  My brief is surely not to detail the intricacies of Armitage’s argument for my readers here – although I would urge them to read and absorb the essay themselves (even as my moves here have been made possible by it).  Rather, my effort is to quickly address some critical aspects of the ‘presentism’ that underwrites contemporary scholarship in India (and elsewhere) – although, again, for the purposes of this formulation, I shall limit myself to Meera Nanda (2025) and the terms of her critique of postcolonial and decolonial theory (henceforth PDT).  My own relationship with PDT has been an ambivalent one – and, hopefully, a recent contribution will clarify that (Hegde 2025) – and there are also aspects of the critique mounted by Meera Nanda that I agree with.  But this is not the ground that I will be traversing here in this short note. Continue reading A Shadowed Present and the Onus of Thought – Remarks, Non-Polemical or Otherwise: Sasheej Hegde →