[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’.]

Register

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.

My focus, necessarily, is the ‘presentism’ of Meera Nanda’s prognosis (namely, to use her framing words, ‘the story of two strange bedfellows, the Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right,’ that ‘far from an avant-garde progressive movement, postcolonialism in India bears a strong family resemblance, in context and content, with “conservative revolutions” of the kind that brought down the Weimar Republic and prepared the grounds for the Nazi takeover’. Rendering this as a form of ‘presentism’ – and please note this is not a derogatory word for me, as my allusion to Armitage also clarifies – may seem somewhat placatory, but my effort will be to draw the limits of this form, in that the terms of Nanda’s critique as rendered translates into an ideological foreshortening of the very historicism that makes it plausible (or even possible). Note, in advancing this line of analysis, I will not be making my way exegetically through Meera Nanda or the contours of her work; rather fostering a quick thought about a form of ‘presentism’ that is constitutive of our shadowed present. And, lest my moves here seem somewhat conciliatory, I must confess that I do not live my scholarship as a kind of combat sport, howsoever much the latter modality might be warranted in our present, the India of 2025.  I am most pleased, yet, to be a part of this forum, even though I may not entirely agree with its framing ‘Decolonial Imaginations.’  The word ‘imaginations’ is too prosaic, and the word ‘decolonial’ is too final.

Traversal

My co-panellists on this Forum have canvassed various possibilities and tried to sound the limits of Meera Nanda’s critique of PDT, in particular. Their formulations have ranged far and wide, deep and near, subterranean and overlapping – from the ‘gross oversimplifications’ of Meera Nanda’s framing (Shamayita Sen) and the ‘philosophical gaslighting’ of the prognosis on offer, including the larger problem of the ‘decolonization of knowledge’ that needs to be faced (Aditya Nigam) to the laying bare of ‘the anti-colonial rhetoric of [-] right-wing projects’ and the ‘misappropriation’ that underwrites them (Ishan Fouzdar); about the presuppositions ‘underlying critiques that see decolonial thought as complicit with right-wing appropriations of it’, as about ‘[what is going on, exactly] when Hindutva claims to be decolonizing?’ (Nivedita Menon), and into a ‘[re]characterization’ of ‘our current moment,’ together with a positing of W. E. B Du Bois and D. D. Kosambi as ‘theorists of the future’ (Meghna Chandra and Archishman Raju); straddling the imperative of ‘thinking outside modernity’ with an attention on ‘what concepts do’ as they travel across contexts and times (K. N. Sunandan), alongside mediating an interface between modernity, colonialism and science, with an insistence on ‘extending the “post-colonial”’ rubric to a range of scholars of ‘premodern science’ in India (K. Sridhar), while again adverting to the pitfalls of a ‘decolonization turn[ed] inward’ and the concomitant ‘dangers of methodological nationalism’(Sabah Siddiqui); and, finally, in a kind of re-iteration, magnifying the ethical and analytical imperative of ‘demarcat[ing] between the right and the left’ and ‘avoid[ing] dangerous opposition between the “kinds of left”’ (Gita Chadha). The fact is that they all do hit home, problematizing sharply the space of Meera Nanda’s diatribe, and the ground of debate and/or contention seems full and indissolubly complete as a result. Is there some space for more? What is the onus of thought in a shadowed and overwrought present, as all my co-panellists are urging (and, in a manner of speaking, Meera Nanda is also imploring in a mode, so combative and impatient, that it refuses to discern the fluxes and the nuances that must enter for all forms of ideological critique to be sustaining and/or credible across publics)?  Clearly, I take it that we are all striving for a ‘history of the present’; and, I am fixing on the label ‘presentism’ for this purpose, reading into Meera Nanda, unquestionably, the shades of a ‘history of the present,’ but translating into a form of historical narrativization that renders null and void all serious discussion of causation and epistemology (including values and/or ethics, although, as Armitage would have it, such a denouement would not be inevitable for the ‘presentism’ that he strives to defend).  I will get to the dimensions of this latter point, the one that I have just stated in parenthesis, in my short final section.

The genealogy underscoring Meera Nanda’s ‘history of the present’ is a straightforward one, and I am not going to detail it here.  She reads a ‘Weimar moment’ in contemporary India, maintaining that ‘its intellectual landscape bears a comparison, in context and substance, to the Weimar republic before it fell to the Nazis’ and that this ‘can illuminate the dilemmas and challenges facing India’s faltering democracy.’ A specific historical construct, namely, ‘conservative revolutionaries’ mediates the juxtaposition effected, reading a parallel between ‘[t]he role the conservative revolutionaries played in the downfall of the Republic’ and ‘the dangers of the intellectual assault on modernity from the left and the right wings of postcolonial studies.’ I am not getting into the simplifications of the intellectual histories being juxtaposed – it obviously does not do justice to either modern/contemporary India or Germany between the two world wars.  The symmetry being mediated by the ideological construct ‘conservative revolutionaries’ is too stark for any historicization to strike home, whether in early 20^th century Germany or late 20^th / 21^st century India. But, even if the intent is to zero in on contemporary India with its triumphalist Hindu nationalism – that the comparison is meant to highlight imminent, or ongoing, dangers for India’s integrity as a democracy – the ‘history of the present’ on offer is still truncated, and even methodologically faulty. My co-panellists have highlighted aspects relating to the former (the truncated ‘history of the present,’ that is); let me dwell on the methodological problem underpinning the comparison on offer.  Even as we all obtain, and remain, as ‘presentists’ for the history of the present that one is after, we must be surely guarding against methodological flaws in our styles of reasoning and argument. The structure of this delineation will also enable me to highlight another order of problems attaching to the ‘presentism’ of Meera Nanda’s historicization on offer, one having to do with the relation between explanation and justification in historical accounts, particularly of modern science and its rationality.  [I underscore the latter particularly, given Meera Nanda’s own self-confessed training as a philosopher and historian of science, and her recourse to the nature and dimensions of Weber’s sociology of modernity issuing off the key concepts of rationality and disenchantment. I may not be able to dwell on this extended topography of argument as presented in Meera Nanda though, here.]

Summarily, the challenge before any comparative methodology is how to make a comparison possible – undeniably, that the units (or grounds) being compared are similar enough, in certain respects and for certain theoretical/historical purposes, to yield a comparison – and yet different enough to make the overall exercise interesting and/or productive.  Meera Nanda does offer some grounds for the former, but undoubtedly does not engage the latter. This disjuncture does have implications for the historicization being attempted, not quite only in the sense of disallowing any historical nuance across the terrains being probed and/or compared, but more importantly in attending to the specificity of the ideological configurations being brought to bear on the historical narrativization overall (whether it be Weimar Germany and/or contemporary India). But of course, as already emphasized, Meera Nanda’s focus is contemporary India and the comparison being instituted is meant to yield a window into the latter as a kind of history of the present. This, again, requires some analytical disaggregation of the grounds of difference – as against, shall I say, the perfunctory analytical synthesis of the kind attempted by Meera Nanda across the space of her book (so that the supposed ‘context’ and ‘arguments’ of a postulated ‘Postcolonial Left’ is made to yield a commensurate pathway into, whatever that means, the ‘palingenetic modernism of the Hindu Right,’ as supposedly captured through its modern antecedents and their ‘contemporaries’).  Again, I cannot be getting into the refractions of this supposed analytical synthesis – the ideological travesty and the epistemic confusion that it can translate into – but I would want to take my demand for analytical disaggregation forward, albeit formulaically.

Efforts to historicize domains of difference across the historical fields (being) compared require appropriate measures of analytical disaggregation to yield insights that could be both particularizing and generalizing. This obviously requires greater and more detailed attention to the social life of objects and categories internal to historical fields (whether in the past and the present, and across national domains). The question here is, specifically, about how categories and systems and practices of classification work in a variety of contexts, through time and across domains, without flattening their differences across the contexts (being) traversed; and, what is more, paying the requisite attention as much to the nature and dynamics of the boundaries being drawn as to the cultural and social-organizational materials that encompass them. Thus, even as Meera Nanda’s deploying of the ‘Weimar moment’ (and the role of the ‘conservative revolutionaries’ thereon, as emphasized, her prime theoretical construct) to yield specific judgments about the role of the ‘Postcolonial Left’ and their mediation into the ‘Hindu Right’ is, or has been received as, normatively sharp, it is still analytically deficient for the purposes of theorizing (for want of an appropriate phrase) the ‘different differences’ across the various contexts being juxtaposed and probed. [The phrase ‘different differences’ is drawn from the sociologist and science studies scholar Steven Epstein, who is traversing a wholly different context, namely, medical research (see Epstein 2007).]  Obviously, the ground of these ‘different differences’ can, and must, remain historical through and through, even as one is striving to historicize modern categories of difference and the work internal to them across historical fields and national contexts.

I realize, of course, that the challenge of explaining concrete and historically situated configurations of cultural differences is an immense one – and that Meera Nanda’s problem is not quite this – but my point, necessarily, is that even for her problem to take-off in the comparative vein that it does, it must yield to the analytical disaggregation of the fields and periods in contention. The relationship between specific contextual conditions and the self-reinforcing causal processes in any given historical moment merit some serious consideration than what Meera Nanda’s theoretical and historical framing can muster. [Additionally, I think, any comparison runs the risk of ignoring the historicity of the very categories being deployed, but that is another axis of problematization that has already been flagged by my co-panellists. Even here, yet, I would urge greater reflexivity with respect to our categories and attendant analytical operations, something that I have urged in a recent essay (Hegde 2025).  The sociologist in me is also open to the possibility that some order of comparisons can even highlight the historicity of the units and/or periods being compared, but this must be weighed alongside the cautions that I have recorded in the preceding lines and paragraphs.]  At the least, let me reiterate that the analytics of Meera Nanda’s comparative historical framing, although meant to reinforce a critical understanding of India’s present, ends up having the effect of closing the critical model in on itself, and away from the historical object that it is addressing, namely, Hindu nationalism.  I agree that one must strive after a theory that matches the object; but equally, one must be attentive to the risks of excessively matching the object to the theory, even of sliding from the model of reality to the reality of the model. In fact, the way the theoretical construct ‘conservative revolutionaries’ is bandied about, across historical contexts and into India’s present, clearly suggests the contours of this sliding internal to Meera Nanda’s framing and the consequent obscuring of the very content and edifice of Hindu nationalism and/or India’s present. Clearly, the question of the mechanisms producing the conformities of our shadowed present require a sharper historical and ontological identification than what Meera Nanda’s model can muster; in short, the model cannot quite be both the foundation and the end of the analysis.  [On the sliding from the model of reality to the reality of the model more generally, see specifically Bourdieu 1977: esp. Ch.1. The anthropological context of this locution is not necessarily a limitation; quite definitively, it holds lessons for all forms of critical practice, historically-ordered or quite resolutely ‘presentist.’]

Allow me, in this light, to address briefly that other problem that I sounded out above as it relates to the ‘presentism’ of Meera Nanda’s account: the relation between explanation and justification, particularly with reference to modern science and its rationality. The ground here is a hotly debated one – although, if I may disclose so, I am one with Meera Nanda on the (shall we say) ‘single modernity’ issue, while admitting to differences on the question of how best to characterize its configurations between and across (modern) nation-states – and it befuddles me that her training in the history and philosophy of science evades the question of the relation between explanation and justification altogether.  [This is as true of her preceding work, in particular her Prophets Facing Backward (Nanda 2004), but let me not tread this exegetical path here!] Permit me a formulation on the question, all the same, which has some lessons for Meera Nanda (as, indeed, for all of us).  The basic problem, and I am simplifying a rather complex ground of debate among historians and philosophers of science, is this: whether the function of justification in the context of modern scientific rationality can be free of historical and sociological warrants (as distinct from, say, purely rational warrants)?  If I might name an authority here, Thomas Kuhn, had held that, insofar as theory choice within science is concerned, there is no possibility of choosing between competing theories on the basis of logic and experiment alone (rational warrants); also that our traditional concepts of falsification and confirmation would have to be radically revised if they have to have a bearing on the choice of theories and the practice of science (see, among others, Kuhn 1970).  In other words, the conception of science as an exemplar of rationality would have to be revised (note, not quite given up; Kuhn himself makes do with a more ‘naturalistic’ conception of rationality). Is the Kuhnian spin enough to accommodate the challenges of scientific rationality and its justification?

I concede that much turns on the precise import of ‘justification’ here; and, I am not entirely sure that the ground as rehearsed, perfunctorily though, is sufficient.  In fact, I believe the ground as recalled above conflates the question of the relation between explanation and justification which must be resisted, even as it affords a more robust practice-centred conception of science. My point here is that Meera Nanda’s historicist account of modern science and its rationality (as routed through Max Weber, and a not very dimensional Weber at that) would also have to accommodate the implications of this conflation, the compromise that it effects on not quite only the logical question of valuation and objectivity in science and policy (which, incidentally, Weber commented on quite extensively in his methodological writings) but also the normativity of science and its rationality itself. With specific reference to this latter nuance, particularly, it seems to me that Meera Nanda’s aim is to produce an answer to the normative question which justifies the normativity of science by supposedly explaining it. A model for this sort of justificatory structure is provided by Meera Nanda’s own account encapsulating Part I of Chapter 1 – the section underscored as ‘What Do We Mean When We Say “Modern”?’ – of her overall framing, which has to do with a certain sociological foregrounding of the normative question of science under conditions of modernity and their overwhelming power of ‘disenchantment’.  The problem with this order of historical and theoretical description is that, arguably, it seems to work off the understanding that explanations of, in context, how the ‘disenchantment’ which follows in the wake of science represents features of the real world to us (its subjects) can sustain the claim that ‘disenchantment’ really is the foundation of science (or, for that matter, modernity). I am not so sure, from my own fragmentary understandings of the historical record, that this conclusion is sustainable, even philosophically and not to speak of sociologically. Weber himself, if I may, is ambivalent about the ‘disenchantment’ bit and the precise contours of this supposed interface with ‘secularization’ is somewhat unclear, both within Weber and beyond; and, besides, a process that seems theoretically postulated and/or mandated could always stand in an uneasy relationship with its empirical and historically ordered manifestations, which would require us to constantly revisit our theoretical postulate/mandate.  [My own intuitions work off matrices of individuation and autonomy – the latter representing the strength of the ’unconditioned’ really, an axis of interrogation very much subsumable under the pales of science and its rationality proper as enumerated both historically and philosophically.  Broadly, in keeping with this orientation, I am not quite prepared to be a complete sceptic about reasons and values either; and, what is more, I do not think my PDT counterparts are positing so also, as my co-panellists each assert in their specific ways.]

But, of course, one could ask: why shouldn’t the explanation of science and its rationality not sustain it in the sense of providing a normative reason for endorsing it? In other words, why should science not be sustained, rather, by what is stated in the explanation of it? My immediate response to this, necessarily, is that even where explanation endorses (or prevents) a judgment, there may still be the question of what is doing the justificatory work here vis-à-vis the judgment (as distinct and separate from the explanation that makes the judgment possible). I admit this is being too abstractly posited – and my brevity compounds the situation (although, admittedly, I need to think this out more) – but I think it opens a space where the precise order of the relations between explanation and justification in Meera Nanda’s breezy account could be problematized.  PDT’s supposedly shadowy present need not still yield the judgment that Meera Nanda is offering; that some other shadows are overseeing the process of her appraisal; and that, truly, the whole point of ‘ideology critique’ – if ever, there is to be a point to it – is to free agents from a kind of coercion that is partly also self-imposed.  I am afraid I cannot push this last point further, although it remains key to my current orders of work.

III. Close

Let me, in a final bend, return to the historian David Armitage, from whom I had initially set out.  Armitage, in defending a ‘presentism’ for historians, moves to the philosophy of time underlying Augustine as presented in the latter’s Confessions.  I will not reconstruct that ground here, but shall yet note, with Armitage, the following: ‘Confusion about the meaning and import of presentism has led to multiple babies being thrown out with the bathwater: worthwhile campaigns to root out teleology, to refute idealism, to judge the past on its own terms, or to resist the narrowing of historical horizons to the last few decades, all under the name of presentism, have closed off productive avenues for historical research and reflection. They have effectively rendered causal explanation null, prevented serious discussion of historical epistemology, broken the ancient tradition of history as a teacher of life (magistra vitae), and until recently discouraged the emergence of a rigorous “history of the present”.’ Accordingly, even as the ‘presentism’ of Meera Nanda’s prognosis has something to recommend itself for, it also closes off in the vehemence of its rhetoric and the grand sweep of its historical-sociological and theoretical moves a longer, closer, and harder look at the present that is our India of 2025 and the Hindu nationalism that seems to be configuring it. The specific normativity that attaches to this latter object requires our nuanced and undiminished attention, even as we attend (as I have tried to disclose, across the arc of my second section) to its demands, historical epistemological necessarily, on my register. Summarily, as a necessary constituent of the very onus of thought, we cannot be obscuring the distinction between ‘the things of logic and the logic of things.’

Sasheej Hegde has taught sociology at Goa University and University of Hyderabad, and has recently (May 2024) retired from the latter institution.  He is now an independent researcher, currently based in Hyderabad, Telangana.

References:

Armitage, David.  2023.  In Defense of Presentism.  In Darrin M. McMahon (ed.), History and Human Flourishing (pp.44-69). New York: Oxford University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre.  1977.  Outline of a Theory of Practice.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Epstein, Steven.  2007.  Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hegde, Sasheej.  2025.  Criss-Crossing Theory, History, and Method: New Measures of Reflexivity.  Social Scientist, Vol. 53 (7-8): 23-46.

Kuhn, Thomas S.  1970.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Enlarged second edition.

Nanda, Meera.  2004.  Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodernism, Science, and Hindu Nationalism.  Delhi: Permanent Black.

Nanda, Meera.  2025.  Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason.  London: Routledge.

Links to earlier essays

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

Left, Right, Left – Notes on Radical Post/De-Coloniality: Gita Chadha