[This post is the sixth 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.]

This short essay builds on the articles published in this series and has already explored the various ways in which the concept of de-colonization is articulated, appropriated and adapted in various historical contexts in India and elsewhere. This note aims to map, in a preliminary fashion, the divergent engagements with questions concerning caste across three key groups – colonialists, nationalists (including the Hindutva nationalists), and postcolonial and decolonial practitioners in the last two centuries. This note does not purport to break new empirical ground but instead assembles and juxtaposes existing academic and public arguments to construct a focused framework for comparison.

It is important to begin with the now established argument that concepts are not static but dynamic entities, formed, transformed and deployed along historical processes. In larger Humanities and Social Science disciplines, historians, philosophers, anthropologists and linguists have increasingly shifted the question from ‘what does a concept or a category or just a noun mean’ to ‘what does it do’.  This shift posits that meaning is not a stable core but a secondary effect created from practice through a process of ‘densification’. We can observe this in Foucault’s inquiries into the concept of madness or Wittgenstein’s exploration of the performative nature of language. While the dominant forces have the power to deploy a category more widely and to limit its interpretations or in other words have the power to solidify and concretize the uses and effects of the category, they cannot guarantee to reduce this category to a singular use/meaning or limit its interpretation.  Hence the importance of the analysis of the travel and transformation of categories in various routes, its adaptations and mutations across various historical contexts and times.

Colonialism held divergent meanings and ‘affected’ differently for different groups of colonised, who in turn responded differently in varied temporal and spatial contexts. In what follows, I will briefly describe how colonialism affected the discourse and practice of caste and how different sections of the colonised reciprocated and acted on these colonial interventions. By doing so, I will demonstrate that, while colonialists, upper caste and Hindutva nationalists, and Leftists at some or other point have taken ostensibly anti-caste positions, their intentions or outcomes were not similar and all of them varied drastically from the radical project of annihilation of caste proposed by Ambedkar.

A parallel divergence exists within academic scholarship, where the analysis of caste from nationalist, postcolonial and decolonial perspective have criticized caste system but from different standpoints and with different objectives. It will therefore be both analytically trivial and politically dangerous to equate Ambedkar’s radical anti-caste position with Hindutva rhetoric against caste. Similarly equating a genuine decolonial position on caste with Hindutva’s strategic engagement with caste or about any other issues, can only stem from either a misreading or a cynical anxiety of losing one’s own relevance.

Colonial practice was never governed by a single monolithic principle; instead it was characterised by contradictions, ironies and exceptions that became the very norm of colonial rule. A pivotal moment in this history was the orientalist introduction of ‘Hindu’ as a unified religious category which fundamentally reshaped the colonial discourse on caste in India. Earlier, the category jathi dominated in the organisation of social practices and in the reflection of these practices. This does not mean jathi remained static in the precolonial period. As a dynamic system jathi underwent many transformations but remained hierarchical all through this period. The orientalists understood jathi as the essential principle of Hindu religion but also created a historical myth in which there existed a Hindu golden past which was destroyed by the Islamic invasions. This enabled many problematic concepts such as the idea that Hindu religion existed from the Vedic period onwards, and that all precolonial kingdoms were religious or something articulated as Sanathana Dharmam was part of this Hindu religion.

These notions are dominant even in contemporary debates and in common sense. The Hindutva history is completely premised on this colonial historical myth (not on the postcolonial or decolonial critique of these concepts) which the Hindutva propagandist will never admit. While they wholeheartedly embrace this part of colonial history, they vehemently oppose the theory of ‘Brahmanical despotism’ which was also an integral part of the colonial understanding of the Hindu religion.  In the so called ‘decolonisation project’ of the Hindutva only the latter part is to be decolonised. To be exact, even the other versions of nationalist history in the first half of the twentieth century – Gandhian, Ambedkarite, Nehruvian, Marxist – incorporated some or other elements of this colonialist orientalist interpretation. Decolonisation project attempts to point out not only the overlaps of the nationalist project with colonial one, but also focuses on how this enables the current forms of domination and subordination.

Postcolonial and decolonial histories challenged both colonial interpretation of caste and its nationalist adaptations as well. Nicholas Dirks explained how caste identities were re-constructed and even rigidified through various colonial governing practices. This was often misinterpreted as though he was arguing that caste was a pure colonial construction, which is clearly a Hindutva argument which, unlike Dirks, completely overlooks the inhuman caste domination and violence in the precolonial period. G Aloysius in his book Nationalism without a Nation analysed how caste was central to the nationalist political position of anti-colonialism. Lata Mani’s work on Sati (Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India) shows how colonialist and the upper castes together reconstructed ‘traditions’ which also became the basis for the reform narrative which attempted to separate good traditional practices from superstitions.

The idea that jathi was an exception that accidently emerged in the long history of Hindu religion was central to Hindu reform attempts and this was the exact point that Ambedkar rejected in his essay ‘Annihilation of Caste’.  While this essay premises existence of Hindu religion based on Shasthras (Orthodoxy), which one can now see as an orientalist construction, his arguments were anchored against the colonial and nationalist narratives of a Hindu golden past and against the possibility of an egalitarian reformed Hinduism as depicted by Hindu reformers of the period. The fact that the Hindutva propagandists attempt to make him one of the many Hindu reformers does not make him a ‘strange bedfellow’ or ‘enabler’ of Hindutva politics. On the contrary, his political philosophy has become the inspiration for anti-Hindutva politics in the twenty-first century.

Ambedkar’s critique focused on the social practices and political ideology of casteism embedded in Hindutva politics. Decolonial historians have extended this critique by analysing the role of caste not just in traditions but also in what is described as modern as well. This scholarship is inspired by feminist standpoint theories and black and queer feminist (many among them are scientists) critique of Science (Sandra Harding, Karen Barad, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein etc.), critique of modern forms of knowledge production from indigenous perspective (Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Dian Million, Candis Callison) and Indigenous critique of modernity and its genocidal developmental practices in India (Abhay Xaxa, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Jacinta Kerketta) and so on. In a close reading of these works one could easily recognize that they are all part of a politics that challenges racist, casteist, patriarchal dominations and other right wing ideologies.

Ajantha Subramanian in her book Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India shows how brahmanical notions of merit were embedded from the very beginning of IITs in India. Her analysis shows that the upper caste dominance in the so-called Nehruvian temples of modernity is not an exception but by design. The history of IIT Roorkee will also tell a similar story.   Started as Thomason College of Civil Engineering in 1847 to train Indians as engineers for the Ganga Canal Project, the engineering education here was based on the workshop model as it was in Europe and other places. However as most of the students in the first three batches were upper caste Bengalis, the learning based on doing was not successful. After an inquiry committee report it was decided that there should be a three tier system in which the top tier will be a fully theoretical (mental labour based) education in the classroom, the middle level will be half classroom and half workshop based and the lowest level will be fully in the workshop. This is the model that was replicated in technical education as the three tier system of Engineering College, Polytechnic, and ITIs. Here caste hierarchy was clearly mapped into the hierarchy of knowledge in which mental labour is separate from the manual labour and superior to the latter. This separation of theory from practice (mental labour from manual labour) is central to all forms of modern knowledge practices not only in India but everywhere in the world. Hence wherever these institutions emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they incorporated the local power hierarchies into their notion of knowledge. Considering this history, it is not an accident that the Science and Technology institutions and science and technology departments in Universities are the worst domains of caste discrimination and exclusion.  This is not to say that Social Science as a discipline or the departments are egalitarian. It is the same modernist and casteist notion that established the divide between theoretical Brahmins and empirical Shudras, a Gopal Guru has already pointed out.

In my book Caste, Knowledge and Power: Ways of Knowing in the Twentieth Century Malabar, I have demonstrated that caste discrimination in the domain of knowledge production in India is not just institutional but epistemological as well. Hence, I have argued that the dominant form of modernity in India in general and its forms of knowledge production in particular need to be understood not as Western, Scientific, Eurocentric or Universal but as Colonial-Brahmanical. Brahmanical understanding of jathi and gender are part of the epistemology and practices of all modern institutions. In other words, any attempt of decolonisation will be anti-colonial as well as anti-Brahmanical and will inherently be an anti-Hindutva project as well.

In conclusion, It is critical to recognise that the Hindutva appropriation of icons like Gandhi or Ambedkar, their attack on Nehru or their revivalist understanding of Science and Technology, should not circumscribe one’s own critique of Gandhi or Nehru or Science or be apologetic in fear of appropriation. An appropriate response would not be that ‘we are not abandoning rationality’ or ‘we are not relativists’ or ‘we believe in different kinds of Science’. Rather, we must reject the foundational role of the very binaries of – Rational/ irrational, absolute / relative, modernity / tradition – to advance a politics of equality and fraternity. The more productive analytical framework would be to ask what these concepts do: Do they enable and intertwine with other actions for a more democratic and equal world or do they reinforce social hierarchy?

Sunandan KN is Associate Professor, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. The opinions are personal.

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