[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. Continue reading Decolonizing the ‘Colonial-Brahmanical’ – Thinking outside Modernity: Sunandan K N →