Opinion On the decolonisation debate, both sides are wrong — we need a middle ground

As Mehta himself points out, colonialism resulted not only in a general devaluation of the knowledge systems of colonised societies, it also estranged them from their own pre-modern pasts. Alienated from their own intellectual traditions, and equally unable to place themselves within European traditions on their own terms, colonised subjects ended up with what KC Bhattacharya tellingly termed a “shadow mind”. Instead of genuine creative thinking about their own societies, the shadow mind allowed the colonised merely a semblance of thought.

The original call for a decolonisation of the mind, or better still, for achieving “swaraj in ideas”, was a response to this situation of cognitive slavery. It sought to recover an authentic Indian self which colonialism had rendered inaccessible. But far from peddling a narrow parochial agenda, it was, at heart, a genuinely cosmopolitan project. It acknowledged the need to learn from other traditions, but at the same time recognised that genuine learning can take place only on one’s own terms. To invoke a Gandhian image, the idea was not about shutting the windows of one’s house to winds blowing from the outside, but rather about not allowing oneself to be swept off one’s feet.
Much before it was appropriated by Hindutva ideologues to dress up their politics of resentment, then, the idea of a decolonised mind was associated with an altogether more self-confident strand of modern Indian thinking. Mehta’s critique at times unfairly paints these two starkly different approaches to decolonisation with the same brush.

Even though Mehta is no doubt aware of the existence of this earlier strand of modern Indian thinking, it goes largely unacknowledged in his essay. When he does refer to it, it is only to denigrate it. He writes, “There is no self-awareness of why similar previous calls to ‘decolonise’ and produce an ‘Indian’ science, or sociology or political science, often ended up producing things that were neither Indian nor science or sociology or political science.”

This sweeping condemnation of the entire project of fashioning a distinctive Indian response to Indian modernity could not have been delivered with greater contempt. In one fell swoop he dismisses the work of thinkers who have spent their lives carefully sorting out the methodological issues involved in developing an Indian approach to knowledge about Indian society and politics. But surely, the arguments that they have produced cannot simply be brushed aside with literary flourishes. One needs to provide counterarguments, of which none are to be found in his essay.

In this, Mehta is not alone. According to a widely shared view within Indian academia, theorising Indian society and politics essentially means applying to the Indian case theories developed by Europeans and Americans to make sense of their own societies. No matter that these theories have not been written to make sense of Indian realities. No matter that they employ a conceptual vocabulary that is utterly alien to those whose activities are sought to be explained.

Sudipta Kaviraj has noted the linguistic estrangement that results from this “under-labourer view” of theorising. When the language of analysis diverges sharply from the language of practice, what results is akin to what in photographic parlance is called a “double exposure”. The superimposition of concepts taken from Western theory on to concepts employed by Indian practitioners produces not illumination but rather obfuscation.

This brings us to another lacuna in Mehta’s critique of the current discourse about decolonisation. It fails to ask, let alone answer, why this parochial inward-looking intellectual movement is gaining ground in India today. The reasons for the increasing popularity of the current discourse on decolonisation have a lot to do, I suspect, with the dissatisfactions resulting from a social theory that stubbornly refuses to speak to Indians in their own language.

One of the most insidious effects of colonialism has been the degradation of the very ambition to think on our own — on our own terms, and with our own concepts. Not only have we in India by and large failed to develop a self-confident thinking about our own society and politics, still more disturbingly, we seem ready to give up even the ambition to do so. The shadow mind of which Bhattacharya spoke is still very much with us today.

That is why those among us who believe in the project of a swaraj in ideas must reject the false choice between the parochial nativism of the Hindutva ideologues and the false cosmopolitanism of those who deny the very need for decolonisation of knowledge systems. Instead, we must chart a path between these two equally unpromising alternatives. In Kaviraj’s words, we must climb the edifying ladder of Western theory to learn what it means to theorise, but once the time comes to think for ourselves, we should have the self-confidence to kick the ladder away.

The writer teaches Political Theory at Ashoka University