India’s Conservative Revolution: The Postcolonial Left meets the Hindu Right

A strange thing happened at a conference on “Decolonization of the Indian Mind” organized by a Hindu nationalist outfit and attended by the bigwigs of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the politburo of the Hindu Right. ^[1] One of the speakers, Rakesh Sinha, a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament and a member of the RSS, gave a presentation that would fit right into a seminar on postcolonial and decolonial theory in any Indian or American university.^[2]

Speaking in chaste Hindi, Sinha took his rapt audience through the depravity of colonialism, its lingering after-effects, and the need to replace the stories the West tells about history, reason, and progress with Indian metanarratives. The purpose of decolonization, he said (roughly translated), was “the colonization of the West by a Hindu metanarrative – not to enslave it, but to save it from itself.” This “long journey” to the conquest of the West has to begin at home because only after we get rid of the Western mindset in our own colleges and universities can we aim at installing “Vedas and Upanishads as core courses in Harvard University.” Sinha’s missionary ambition is an echo of Modi’s oft-repeated promise to make India the Vishwaguru, the guru to the world.

Artist: Drew Martin

What would bring about this decolonization at home and abroad? The first step is to put Europe in its place and reject the pretension of universality of its ideas. At this point, Sinha dips into Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and the postcolonial “breakthrough” he has inspired. He gives three cheers to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, an acclaimed classic of postcolonial theory. He heaps praise on Chakrabarty for his courage to declare Europe a “mere province,” and not the whole universe. Chakrabarty is a true nationalist, says Sinha, because “what was the task of rashtrawadis (nationalists), that task has been carried out by Dipesh Chakrabarty.” He then exhorts his audience to learn from postcolonialists and subalternists despite their supposedly Marxist sympathies, “just like Lord Rama sought wisdom from the demon-king Ravana.”

Strange Bedfellows

Such enthusiasm for left-leaning luminaries of the postcolonial pantheon – everyone from Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Franz Fanon to Edward Said, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, and Ashis Nandy – at a gathering of hard-core Hindu Right may appear out of place at first sight. But, as I argue in my recent book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason, the warm public embrace of the Postcolonial Left by the Hindu Right was far from unexpected. Indeed, this public lecture – “liked” over 2,000 times on YouTube – is only the visible tip of the iceberg that I bring to light in my book.

The Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right, my book demonstrates, have become strange bedfellows. Postcolonial theory, along with its younger cousin, decolonial theory, is providing fresh ammunition and scholarly respectability to the Hindu Right. The shared ground between the two “enemies” is not limited to name-dropping or superficial appropriation of post-ist jargon. Rather, there is a deeper ideological convergence in their evaluations of modernity and traditions, science and religion, and universalism and cultural particularities. The Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right are on the same page when it comes to defending traditions against modernity, popular religiosity against secularization of the mind, and the discursive construction of reality (or rather, “reality”) and the cultural embeddedness of ways of knowing and living. Above all, both sides rage against the “colonization of the Indian mind” by Eurocentric ideas that are robbing us of authenticity.  Both are singing the same song, with the same refrain: Down with Eurocentrism! Decolonize Now! Swaraj in ideas!^[3]

The contemporary Hindu Right, I argue, is only the latest chapter of the conservative revolution against Enlightenment rationalism and secular humanism that began with the Indian Renaissance in the late 19th century.  Like the conservative revolutionaries in the Weimar Republic who declared war against the French Enlightenment and British liberalism because they were alien to the kultur of the German volk, India’s conservative revolutionaries, too, sought to defend and revive India’s Volksgeist, which they claimed lay in Hindu “spirituality,” against the “materialist” and “atheist” West. To that end, they sought to purge the alien ideas they encountered under the British in the uniquely Hindu style of hierarchical inclusivism.^[4] They did not reject the Enlightenment ideals of scientific rationality and liberalism outright – for an open confrontation of contradictions has never been the Hindu way. Rather, they turned the ideas they found threatening into inferioradjuncts of the spiritual holism and integralism of Hindu dharma. They accepted the letter but denied the spirit of liberal ideas.

The contemporary Hindu Right has inherited this conservative drive to rejuvenate the Hindu soul and purge it of impurities. To that end, the Modi administration has launched a campaign to “decolonize the Indian mind,” which has injected a heavy dose of ancient Hindu sciences and philosophy into all levels of education, from primary schools to “centers of excellence” in universities.^[5] The “decolonizers” are mining the scholarly work of postcolonial and decolonial theorists because they find their critique of the “epistemic violence” of Eurocentric conceptual categories congenial to their agenda of “Making India Great Again,” by making it Hindu again. ^[6] They see the Postcolonial Left as the enemy of their enemy, and therefore, their friend.

***

For nearly five decades, starting with the Emergency (1975-1977), India’s first brush with authoritarianism, prominent Indian intellectuals who claim to speak for social justice and cultural rights of the marginalized have been waging a war against the ideal of secular modernity that India set upon at the time of Independence. They believe that India’s experience of modernity is not organic because the elites running the show have accepted the colonial legacy of scientific reason and secularization as universally valid and universally desirable.  Instead of universality, the critics find a deep difference, even incommensurability, between India and Europe.

These anti-secularist intellectuals see the critique of colonial legacy as a precondition for creating a modernity that is authentically “our own.” Our critics insist that Kant’s directive of escaping the tutelage of all external authorities by daring to think for oneself — the famous Sapere Aude! “Dare to use your own reason” — will not work in India in the manner it worked for Europe in the Age of Enlightenment. For the once-colonized, the Kantian spirit of Sapere Aude! demands that we first escape the apprenticeship of our erstwhile colonial lords and masters before we can dare to think for ourselves, on our own terms and in our own cultural idiom. Thus, to live more authentically and chart our independent course in the modern world, they argue, we must rediscover the indigenous modes of living and thinking that are still alive among the non-modern masses who are marginalized and condescended to by the elites with colonized minds.^[7]

To that end, this segment of the Indian Left has produced withering critiques of the “Western” values enshrined in the Constitution, especially the commitment to secularism and the cultivation of a skeptical and secular worldview. They see these values as cast-off clothes of Europe that don’t fit Indians and turn them into pathetic mimic men. What unites these critics is a suspicion of the Enlightenment ideal of rational progress – the belief that there are universally valid ways of knowing (that of modern science) that are objectively superior to others, and that with better knowledge, we can make genuine progress toward making a better society. Theirs is a total critique of modernity that conflates validity claims with power, leaving reason incapable of doing its work of ideology critique. They see scientific reason itself as a metanarrative tainted by Western metaphysics, colonial domination, Orientalism, and racism. We will refer to these critics of Indian modernity collectively as the Postcolonial Left.

The rise to academic prominence of the Postcolonial Left through the last quarter of the 20th century coincided with the meteoric rise of the Hindu Right in India.  The same shock to the Indian polity — the imposition of the Emergency that lasted from 1975 to 1977 — that led many on the Left to rethink the trajectory of Indian modernity, also brought the RSS into the public sphere from which it had been banished after the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. The same turn away from state-led development to a neoliberal market economy that enabled “Third World” intellectuals to move to centers of learning in the “First World” where they would take a poststructuralist turn, also brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political front of the RSS, to the commanding heights of Indian politics. ^[8] By the late 1990s, the BJP had abandoned its earlier view of the state as a protector of society against the markets and embraced the market (or rather, crony capitalism)^[9] as the main driver of societal transformation. The BJP has adroitly welded neoliberal economic policies with a toxic civilizational populism that pits an “us,” the bearers of traditional Hindu values, against “them,” the non-Hindu minorities and the godless, Westernized “elite.” We will refer to the 21st-century manifestation of Hindu nationalism as the Hindu Right.

***

My book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism, recounts the intellectual history of the past 50 years and looks at the disaster that follows when cultural despair leads the Left to renounce the promise of the Enlightenment. I offer a two-part argument. First, I establish that Hindu nationalism belongs to the family of conservative revolutions against the Enlightenment and liberalism, of the kind that brought down the Weimar Republic and prepared the cultural grounds for Nazism. India’s conservative revolution began in the late 19th- early 20th century with Swami Vivekananda, Bipin Chandra Pal, Sri Aurobindo, and other leaders of the Swadeshi movement, and continued through Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian National Congress. These pioneers of Indian nationalism sought to domesticate the liberalism they encountered under colonialism by subsuming modern science into Hindu mysticism, ^[10] while defending the institution of caste as a superior, more harmonious, and communitarian alternative to the liberal ideal of rights-bearing individuals thrown into the vagaries of the marketplace.  Their objective was to revive the eternal “soul” of their ancient nation, which was to direct India’s tryst with the modern world.  India was to seek its own “alternative modernity” that was compatible with the “eternal” values of its Hindu civilization. The Indian Constitution, written at a time when India had gone through the trauma of Partition and when secular liberals like Nehru and Ambedkar had the upper hand, was a departure from the Hindu revivalism that was a prominent feature of Indian nationalism. The conservative revolution did not just turn over and die once the Constitution came into force:  It continued to live a subterranean life in the “Sangh Parivar,” the family of Hindu supremacist outfits directed by the RSS, which now controls the levers of power.

The second part of my argument is that postcolonial theory’s romance of the virtuous, non-modern “subaltern”^[11] victimized by Western rationalism and secularism shares the spirit of Weimar conservatives who sought to defend the kultur of the German volk against the soulless and materialistic Zivilisation. Like the Weimar conservatives, Indian postcolonial thinkers were driven by a cultural despair over the “nonsynchronous contradiction,” or Ungleichzeitigkeit (literally, unequalness of time) caused by the rapid but uneven spread of capitalist modernization that had led to radically different lifeworlds existing together at the same time, in the same space, and often in the consciousness of the same person. Their cultural despair drove a sizeable segment of the Indian Left, like their Weimar counterparts, to seek an exit from modernity (or, rather, “colonial modernity”) itself.  They sought an “alternative modernity” that would be guided by the traditional values of the non-modern masses who were being left behind by modernization. Unlike the Hindu conservatives, they were motivated not by the dream of reviving the Great Vedic Tradition, but by a sympathy for the marginalized masses whose lifeworld they feared was being trampled by the modernizing zeal of the technocrats and elites running the show. The problem, however, is that the “little traditions” of the subaltern derive their sense of the sacred from the same Great Tradition that the Hindu nationalists want to revitalize.

In their critique of modernity, however, the postcolonial thinkers have ended up meeting India’s realconservative revolutionaries who have been “provincializing Europe” long before it became a fashionable leftist slogan. Postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars have stigmatized the same Enlightenment values of scientific rationalism, secularism, and individualism as “Eurocentric” and culturally alien to the folkways of the subaltern, which the nationalist thinkers from Vivekananda to Gandhi had deemed too materialistic and individualistic for a nation as “spiritual” and as integrally “communitarian” as India. While the nationalists had treated the “spiritual” as the unchanging essence of India, postcolonial thinkers treated the “subaltern” as the bearer of an unchanging and non-secular consciousness that valued community, religion, and honor instead of material interests and utilitarian calculations. ^[12] Just as the nationalists had sought an “alternative modernity” that would deliver the material goods made possible by modern technology without the Western “vices” of individualism, materialism, and atheism, postcolonialists have sought a modernity that values the values of the non-modern subaltern. Meanwhile, the old idea of modernity as disenchantment and a progressive decline of ignorance, blind faith, and the chokehold of traditions has died a slow death.

But the anti-modernist Left has met the Hindu Right only halfway, for they have no sympathy whatsoever for the civilizational populism that the latter has ignited. No votary of postcolonial/decolonial position has ever condoned the vicious Islamophobia of the Hindu Right or approved of the authoritarian turn that India has taken under Modi. For all their critique of Eurocentrism, postcolonialists remain committed to the political values of egalitarianism and liberal democracy. The anti-Enlightenment Left has met the Hindu Right on the metapolitics, but not on politics.

But – and here is the rub – their relentless attacks on the foundations of secular modernity have disabled a rational critique of Hindu metaphysics and the deadly traditions it sanctions and have thereby allowed the fire of Hindu chauvinism to spread. By recklessly propagating the cult of the non-modern subaltern, the high priests of postcolonial/decolonial theory have succeeded in tilting the intellectual center of gravity toward a politics of nostalgia and revival, which is the natural terrain of the Right. Consequently, there is now a void where there should have been a strong, principled, secular democratic front against Hindutva’s onslaught on all that was once decent and promising in the idea of India.

Before we examine the intellectual debt that the Hindu Right owes to the Postcolonial Left, it would be useful to examine the axioms of postcolonial thought that have dominated the intellectual scene in India.

The Axioms of Indian Postcolonialism

Indian intellectuals have played an outsized role in the creation and elaboration of postcolonial theory. Two out of the three founding figures of postcolonial theory, the so-called “Holy Trinity” – Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha – are of Indian origin, now living in the United States. The scholars whose names have become virtually synonymous with postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies – notably, Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Vinay Lal, Aditya Nigam, and Nivedita Menon – all have roots in India, and some of them live there permanently or part-time.

I have suggested that there is not one, but two origin stories of the sensibility that calls itself postcolonial – one American and the other Indian. The first began in 1978 in the literature department of Columbia University in New York City with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism. The second began around the same time in post-Emergency New Delhi in the writings of Ashis Nandy, the self-described “anti-secularist,” and among a group of historians belonging to what came to be known as the Subaltern Studies Collective, who were beginning to explore Indian history from the perspective of the non-elite masses. As many of these scholars moved to American and other European universities, their concerns with the direction of Indian modernity merged with the Saidian-Spivakian stream, which itself was a part of the poststructuralist and deconstructionist stream of social theory that declared an end to all universally shared norms and ideals. As the Indian stream made contact with poststructuralism, it imbibed the latter’s anti-realist, constructivist, and relativist epistemology, and its focus shifted from the lives of the subaltern to a textual and metatheoretical critique of colonial modernity.

There is no founding document or manifesto of postcolonial theory. In my reading of the postcolonial literature as it evolved from Nandy’s initial intervention, I have identified the following four themes that have dominated the Indian debates:

First, beyond economic and political injustice, colonialism committed another kind of injustice, namely, “epistemic injustice” that results in mutilating and silencing the worldview of the colonized people.

Second, epistemic injustice did not end with the formal end of colonialism. Colonialism has an afterlife in India because Indian elites – be they Marxists, secular-minded liberals, or Hindu nationalists – continue to do what the colonial powers used to do, namely, judge the folkways of the common people against Western norms. Liberals and Marxists try to reform the subaltern consciousness through inculcation of scientific rationality, while Hindu nationalists try to reform Hinduism by fitting it into a monotheistic and scientistic mold.  Secularists and Hindu nationalists, according to postcolonial critics, are equally colonized because they measure the lifeworld of the non-modern masses against European standards, which they deem to be universally valid and universally desirable.

Third, the non-elite masses (the subaltern) have a mental and moral landscape that is independent of the Westernized secularists and the self-Orientalized Hindu elites. In the subaltern mind, the gods are real, Puranic myths are more meaningful than the history as told by historians, and the natural world has fuzzy edges that are not clearly demarcated from the spiritual (the Absolute Spirit, Brahman, that manifests itself as matter),  or the supernatural (the shakti of gods and goddesses). In the subaltern world, community counts more than utilitarian calculations of money-making and competition, living with nature counts more than productivity and efficiency, and tolerance of difference is the norm. To think that the subaltern view of the world is merely a leftover from the past, or a premodern survival, and to expect Indians to become more secular and utilitarian as the country modernizes, is to remain imprisoned in a Eurocentric mindset that sees the West as the end of all history and the goal of all development.

Fourth, the recovery of subaltern consciousness is necessary for epistemic decolonization that would end the “violence” of the post-Enlightenment episteme. The subaltern lifeworld must become a living option for the elite if we want to feel at home in “our modernity,” rather than forever exist as consumers of imported ideas. It is necessary, therefore, to “provincialize” Europe so that the shoots of an alternative, indigenous modernity can have a chance to grow.

Along with these founding assumptions, two other tropes have been influential in India, namely, “strategic essentialism” as theorized by Gayatri Spivak and “hybridity” as theorized by Homi Bhabha.

Strategic essentialism has served as a permission slip to use ideas opportunistically to “fight the other side.”^[13] As Spivak herself put it:

It is absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism [and] universalism… But strategically we cannot…You pick up the universal that will give you the power to fight against the other side, and what you are throwing away by doing that is your theoretical purity (1990, 11–12, emphasis added).

As we will see below, strategic essentialism has been put to work by the Hindu Right to appropriate Orientalist essentialisms when they bolster their pride and condemn them in a Saidian sense of being constructs of colonial power when it comes to problematic issues like caste and patriarchy.

Homi Bhabha’s concept of “hybridity” and its cognates – Nandy’s “critical traditionalism,” Nigam’s “borderless philosophy” — are like the holy water of Ganga that can remove the sin of essentialism and confer “agency” and even “resistance” to the colonized. The problem with the hybridity talk is that, as I elaborate in my book, hybridizing, or combining any idea with any other, regardless of the contradictions, is how Hindu hierarchical inclusivism has always worked.  Hinduism thrives on encapsulating contradictory ideas into its own all-encompassing spiritual monism. A classic example of such “hybridity” is how Vivekananda managed to read Darwin’s purely naturalistic idea of natural selection, which has no room for divine agency, into the spirit-centered cosmology of Vedanta and Yoga. Hybridity is no “resistance” to colonialism; it is rather how Hinduism “modernizes” and rejuvenates itself by assimilating and disarming foreign ideas.

Hindu Postcolonial Studies

As we saw with the conference on decolonization this essay opened with, the intellectual harvest of postcolonial theory did not stay confined to academia. It did not take long before what I call “Hindu Postcolonial Studies” began to take shape. This “school” is made up of Hindu nationalist intellectuals who embrace the Saidian critiques of the colonial construction of India from a distinctly dharmic perspective. Whereas the Postcolonial Left challenged Eurocentric metanarratives to let the subaltern speak, the Hindu Postcolonial Studies combats “colonial consciousness” to empower the Hindu majority and to make India the guru to the world.

In the last two decades or so, a new breed of Hindu Right intellectuals have emerged who call themselves “baudhik Kshatriyas” or intellectual warriors (Kshatriya being the traditional warrior caste). If you read the recent writings of some of their superstars whose books sell like hot-cakes in India  – Koenraad Elst, the Belgian Islamophobe and a pagan with dubious connections with European New Right,  Balagangadhara, another Belgium-trained critic of “colonial consciousness,” Rajiv Malhotra, the well-known muckraker who runs the US-based Infinity Foundation that propagates Hindu exceptionalism, and J. Sai Deepak who wants to decolonize the Indian Constitution   – three things become clear.  One, they share the postcolonialist impulse to “reverse the gaze” and judge the West from a Hindu perspective; two, Edward Said and Walter Mignolo (the guru of decolonization) are their guiding stars whom they appropriate “strategically,” and finally, they share the anti-realist, social-constructivist epistemology of postcolonial theorists while “strategically” rejecting their anti-essentialism.

The indigenists among the anti-modernists (Ashis Nandy, Aditya Nigam, for example)  have long criticized Hindu nationalists for being mentally colonized because they don’t respect the tolerant folk religiosity of the subaltern, and cast Hinduism into a Semitic mold (by adopting features common to Abrahamic religions such as a single canon of sacred texts, a preference for monotheism which they find in Advaita Vedanta, a Vatican and Mecca-like center which they are building in Ayodhya). This exact criticism shows up in Koenraad Elst’s 2001 book, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, where he accuses the RSS of being too secular and not defending the pagan practices of ordinary Hindus because of their bias toward monotheism. Elst demands that RSS stop seeking the approbation of secular elites, give up the Indian version of secularism as equal respect of all religions, and openly declare Islam and Christianity to be not religions, but monstrous and murderous ideologies which have no place in India.

Balagangadhara places himself squarely in the tradition of Edward Said and promises to unleash thereal radicalness of Said’s writings that his other followers have, presumably, failed to grasp. Said is put to work by Balagangadhara to claim that there is no such thing as a “caste system” or even a religion called “Hinduism” in India; they are constructs of the “paranoid consciousness,” or hallucinations, of British Orientalists and administrators who mistook their subjective experiences shaped by Christianity for the reality of India.  Here, the Saidian/Foucaultian anti-realist chickens truly come home to roost:  All social scientific knowledge of non-West is Orientalist because its background assumptions are European/Christian. Balagangadhara goes on to cite the postcolonial literature to repeat the familiar refrain of the continuing colonization of consciousness and experience in postcolonial societies. In his telling, we in India live in the matrix of “colonial consciousness” spun out of paranoid fantasies of our erstwhile rulers.

Rajiv Malhotra is better known for his harassment of scholars than for his scholarship. With his best-selling books, especially his 2011 Being Different: Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, he has established himself as a voice for Hindu (or rather “Indic”) supremacy.  He places himself in the Saidian/postcolonial tradition, which he praises for “reversing the gaze” on Western universalism. But he takes postcolonial studies to task for not going far enough and for going too far. Followers of Said have been too defensive because they only try to “rescue the depiction of India from Eurocentrism” without challenging Eurocentrism with Dharma-centrism. He blames this timidness on their remaining wedded to the secularist assumptions of conventional social sciences. Postcolonial theory, on the other hand, has gone too far in its skepticism of all metanarratives because it threatens the Indian metanarrative and leaves Indians defenseless in the face of the West. For Malhotra, postmodern skepticism is fine when unleashed on the West, but illegitimate when directed at the “eternal” truths of dharma.

Finally, J. Sai Deepak’s 2021 book, India that is Bharat, derives absolutely reactionary conclusions from postcolonial and decolonial theories.

The Postcolonial Left decried secularism for being unfit for India because it was a “gift” of Christianity, berated scientific rationality as silencing local knowledge, condemned human universals as Eurocentric, and dreamed of indigenizing our sciences and decolonizing our minds. The Decolonial Left went further and insisted on complete “de-linking” from European universals in favor of creating a “pluriverse” where different cultures would be free to cultivate their gardens as they pleased.

These chickens come home to roost in Sai Deepak’s work, which demands a total rewrite of the idea of India, including its constitution. India has to stop thinking of itself as a territorial nation and proudly reclaim its status as a civilizational state. This would require, as a first step, that it give up its current name, India, and begin to proudly call itself Bharat, the name that honors the “Emperor Bharata” of the Mahabharata.

The second step would be to cleanse the Constitution of its Western–Christian “onto epistemological and theological” assumptions. This would require reengineering the state whose “civilizational duty” would be to protect the country as the “homeland for Indic consciousness” and where those with non-Hindu worldviews (the Muslims, Christians, and non-believers) would become second-class citizens.

Sai Deepak’s book is a paean to decolonial theory (especially Walter Mignolo, who wrote a glowing blurb for it, which he later withdrew), and a homage to Balagangadhara’s theory of colonial consciousness. If anyone needs proof of the reactionary implications of postcolonial and decolonial theory, they ought to take a good look at this book.

If this sad saga has any message for the Ivory-Tower Left, it is this: Be careful of what you wish for.

References

Balagangadhara, S.N. 2012. Reconceptualizing India Studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe. London: Princeton University Press

Chatterjee, Partha. 2010. Empire and Nation: Selected Essays. New York: Columbia University Press

Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism. New Delhi: Navayana Publishing

Dirlik, Arif. 1994. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry: 20: 328-356.

 Elst, Koenraad. 2001. Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa and Co.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2024. Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India. NY: Oxford University Press.

Kaiwar, Vasant. 2009. “Hybrid and Alternative Modernities: A Critical Perspective on Postcolonial Studies and the Project of Provincializing Europe.” In From Orientalism to Postcolonialism: Asia, Europe and the Lineages of Difference, edited by Sucheta Mazumdar, Vasant Kaiwar and Thierry Labica, 206-238. New York: Routledge.

Malhotra, Rajiv. 2011. Being Different: Indian Challenge to Western Universalism. New Delhi: Harper Collins.

Mounk, Yascha. 2023. The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. New York: Penguin Press.

Nanda, Meera. 2020. “Science Sanskritized: How Modern Science Became a Handmaiden of Hindu Nationalism.” In The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions, edited by Knut Jacobsen, 264-286. New York: Routledge. Reprinted in Nanda (2024).

Nanda, Meera. 2024. A Field Guide to Post-truth India. Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective.

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

Sai Deepak, J. 2021. India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilization, Constitution. New Delhi: Bloomsbury.

 Spivak, Gayatri and Sarah Harasym (ed.). 1990. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.New York: Routledge.

[1] The conference was organized in 2017 by Bharatiya Vichar Manch, based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. BVM calls itself an “intellectual movement” and organizes discussion forums on current affairs. It runs a very active YouTube channel, preferring videos over the printed word. Rakesh Sinha’s lecture can be watched at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9xJl-RmvEY

[2] Sinha’s lecture drew upon his 2016 publication Swaraj in Ideas: Quest for Decolonization of the Indian Mind, published under the auspices of the Indian Policy Foundation, which he was the founding director of. This book is available at https://www.ipf.org.in/encyc/2020/10/23/2_07_40_08_Books_1.pdf

[3] Swaraj is a Hindi word for “one’s own rule” or “self-rule.”

[4] Hierarchical inclusivism is a dominant trait of modern as well as medieval Hinduism which treats various philosophical schools and religious traditions as not erroneous or false, but as falling short of the fullness of the ultimate truth known only to Advaitic (non-dualist or monistic) tradition of Hinduism. Thus, neo-Hinduism propagated by such figures as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) and S. Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) affirms the truth of all religions – and mutatis mutandis, all worldviews and knowledge systems – as valid at a lower level which is ultimately contained in, and transcended by, the knowledge of the transpersonal Absolute indicated by Advaita, the apex of Hindu theological and philosophical wisdom.

[5] For a critical look at Modi’s National Education Policy, 2020, see my 2024 book, Field Guide to Post-truth India.

[6] Modi adopted the MAGA mantra for India at his last meeting with Trump before the two had a falling out. See “MAGA plus MIGA becomes mega partnership for prosperity: PM Modi,” The Hindu, Feb 14, 2025.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/maga-plus-miga-becomes-mega-partnership-for-prosperity-pm-modi/article69218015.ece

[7] That the use of reason for the once colonized must lead to a renewed appreciation of the pre-colonial past is most forcefully argued by Partha Chatterjee, a leading light of Subaltern Studies.  In an essay titled “Our Modernity,” Chatterjee argues that whereas a European Enlightenment thinker like Kant can rhapsodize about the modern as an escape from the past, we, the victims of colonialism, have no choice but to see “our modernity” as an escape from our colonized present and to “transpose our desire to be independent and creative ..to our past” because until we undo the regime of colonial knowledge, “we would forever remain consumers of universal modernity; never would we be taken seriously as its producers” (2010, 151, 146).

[8] Arif Dirlik (1994, 329) famously answered the question “When exactly … does the ‘post-colonial’ begin?” with a simple one-line statement: “When Third World intellectuals arrived in the First World academe.” As Vasant Kaiwar (2009, 206) elaborates, “Postcolonial studies were, at least at their inception, a metropolitan phenomenon, taking place in a context of deep restructuring in the former colonies of political-economic, intellectual, and academic life that coincided with the more or less thorough abandonment of state-originated projects of development…” The Postcolonial Left, ensconced in the First World academe, abandoned any engagement with the restructuring of political economy under neo-liberal globalization and took a culturalist turn that fitted well with the accent on postmodernism and multiculturalism that dominated the metropolitan universities in the last quarter of the 20th century.

[9] Christophe Jaffrelot’s 2024 book, Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India, offers a good account of the beginnings of crony capitalism in India.

[10] See my “Science Sanskritized: How Modern Science Became a Handmaiden of Hindu Nationalism” (Nanda, 2020), reprinted in Nanda 2024.

[11]The category of the “peasant,” the paradigmatic subaltern of Subaltern Studies, expanded to include non-modern elements of culture that even the elite share. Thus, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words:

“The “peasant” acts here as a shorthand for all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, non-secular relationships and life practices that constantly leave their imprint on the lives of even the elites in India and their institutions of government. The peasant stands for all that is not bourgeois in Indian capitalism and modernity (2000, 11, emphasis added)

[12] As Vivek Chibber has correctly pointed out, the postcolonial insistence on finding indigenous theoretical categories stems from the belief that the Indian peasants and workers “are motivated by an entirely different kind of psychology, namely, a psychology specific to their pre-bourgeoise culture wherein choices were not made on rational grounds to serve material interests. Rather, workers’ choices reflected the premium they placed on community, religion and honor” (2013, 18).

[13] It is not just postcolonial thinkers, but scholars from many diverse disciplines who have embraced the logic of strategic essentialism. As Yascha Mounk remarks, it has become commonplace for activists in the United States to “preface their remarks by acknowledging that race (or gender, or ability status) is a social construct, before going on to make surprisingly essentializing claims about what ‘Black and brown people’ (or women, or the disabled) believe” (2023, 46).