Abstract
What does it mean to decolonize? At one level, decolonization refers to the attainment of political sovereignty. The transfer of power from colonial to regional and indigenous authorities, however, also involves a handover of political forms and institutions. This process leaves behind some of the narratives that accompany coloniality, even if refashioned versions of these. This enduring coloniality resides within and proliferates through the categories of political discourse. In India, we may find its continual hum in tirades against ‘corruption’ or in laments that Indians lack a ‘civic sense’. The decolonial project, having found expression in nationalist movements, in political and epistemic resistance, and in reform and revival, therefore continues to be undertaken in the language of coloniality, which obscures all that resides outside the colonial worldview.
I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him.
For generations now, philosophers and thinkers shaping the nature of social science have produced theories embracing the entirety of humanity. As we well know, these statements have been produced in relative, and sometimes, absolute ignorance of the majority of humankind, i.e., those living in non-Western cultures. This in itself is not paradoxical, for the more self-conscious of European philosophers have always sought theoretically to justify this stance. The everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of ‘us’, eminently useful in understanding our societies. What allowed the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were completely ignorant?
Decolonizing and ‘spiking prahper Ingleesh’
In the days before access to information became as easy as clicking buttons on a mobile phone, an enterprising phone-in information service, tantalizingly named ‘Ask Me’, was very popular among the residents of Bombay. An Oxbridge-educated English friend, who was then working in and on India, had little luck with the service. After being asked to repeat his request a few times, an annoyed woman snapped at him in a Maharashtrian accent: ‘Saar I cannot able to understand you, pleasse spik prahper Ingleesh’. Bemused, he later said to me: ‘Well, if this isn’t the Empire speaking back …’
I have often thought back upon this incident and reflected on the manner in which an Englishman is told to speak proper English by an Indian woman. It does offer an opportunity to claim a certain pride and delight in India, perhaps even some historical optimism about it, for taking on the very language of the colonizers and making it its own, while ascribing to this adapted language, even if inadvertently, a higher status than the ‘original’. Might one then say that colonial categories and institutions too have travelled a similar path? Since we now speak with apparent ease of ‘Indian democracy’, ‘Indian secularism’ and the ‘Indian citizen’ in the same way that we speak of ‘Indian English’, perhaps the categories, concepts and institutions that were once recognized as deeply colonial – even thought of as markers of colonialism – have become ‘Indianized’. We may read this as writing/speaking back or as ‘mimicry’ that disrupts the complacence of the colonizer by presenting to him a (distorted) reflection of himself, exposing the hollowness of the very codes that gave validity to the ‘authentic’ (Bhabha, 1984). And yet, even the subversive power of this mimicry can hardly allow us to sit back in our chairs, feel satisfaction at a job well done and claim that now we have truly decolonized.
What then does it mean to decolonize?
At one level, the answer seems simple: to decolonize is to attain political sovereignty. India has achieved political independence from British colonial rule, and we can date the precise moment of the event of decolonization in India, so understood, to the midnight of 15 August 1947. And so we call ourselves ‘postcolonials’, claiming to have overcome the violence, perils and traumas of colonialism. Here, the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ is much more like the ‘post’ in ‘post-traumatic’ than the ‘post’ in ‘postmodern’ (Appiah, 1991). 1 Perhaps less crudely, we may think of decolonization as the ‘process whereby colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states’ (Duara, 2003: 2, emphasis added). To understand this process of transfer – the transfer of control over the institutions and forms of governance that were part of the imperial cultural context – would also be to acknowledge that the transfer involved, to no small degree, a process of translation and transformation of political forms and institutions. That is to say, colonial rule instituted certain forms and practices of governance that were inherited by the decolonized regions. And this is where the story of decolonization gets murky.
‘The tiger’s nature but not the tiger’
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one of the most influential and innovative leaders of the Indian anti-colonial movement, recognized the difficulty involved in ‘decolonizing’
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or even in imagining what a decolonized society would look like. In his Hind Swaraj, Gandhi discusses what Swaraj or ‘self-rule’ means. It is written in the form of a polemical dialogue between an editor and a reader, with Gandhi taking on the role of the editor. The reader presents a familiar picture of an independent India: … it seems to me we shall still keep their constitution, and shall carry on the government. If they simply retire for the asking, we should have an army etc., ready at hand. We should therefore have no difficulty in carrying on the government. (Gandhi, 2009: 26)
To decolonize, according to the reader, is thus to effect a transfer of authority and control over institutions of governance, such as the law courts, the army, the constitution and so on, over to Indians. The reader further posits that once we have achieved powers similar to those that all sovereign states enjoy – our own arms and ammunition, our own armed forces and so on – we will hoist our own flag, announcing to the world our independence from colonial rule. Gandhi, speaking through the editor, points out that, in effect, this independence would be English rule without Englishmen. For in inheriting and preserving categories and institutions not merely instituted by the colonial rulers but which also are part of what we might call their ‘historical ontology’ (Foucault, 2000), we desire in fact ‘the tigers nature but not the tiger’ (Gandhi, 2009: 7).
In rejecting the ‘tiger’s nature’, Gandhi is not calling for a banishing of the legacy of the Empire simply because it is foreign, although it is certainly tempting to read it as such, in the light of his critique of the railways, doctors and lawyers, and his boycott of foreign cloth. Nor is his claim one of an essential difference between the Indians and the English such that English institutions would be essentially incompatible with Indian civilization. Rather, he draws our attention to the connection between political forms, categories and institutions that masquerade as ‘universal’ and colonial rule (between the tiger’s nature and the tiger). Gandhi had, as early as 1909, recognized and initiated the process of ‘provincializing Europe’.
Once the link between the concepts with which we imagine a decolonial society and colonialism is made apparent, it opens up the possibility of imagining – and one need not follow Gandhi’s imagination here – alternative ways in which a decolonized society would understand, represent and conceive of itself. 3
Rabindranath Tagore, poet, Nobel laureate and a pan-Asian figure of anti-colonialism, wrote extensively on this discomfort with the idea of an Indian nation modelled along the lines of the British nation. While Tagore’s (1917) dissatisfaction with the nation as a form of governance is principally due to what he describes as its mechanical and instrumental nature, 4 he acknowledges that being a product of Europe’s lived past, the nation is a solution to its problems. The nation, it needs to be mentioned, is not merely a product of Europe’s past in the same way as, for example, gin and tonic or cricket, both of which have been smoothly transmitted to and joyously assimilated in parts of Asia, especially South Asia. It has defined a particular way in which subjectivities are constituted and shaped, or what Foucault calls the ‘historical ontology of ourselves’, the West (Foucault, 2000: 286). 5 Thus, when an Asian society attempts to understand and shape itself into a nation, it ‘in fact, is attempting to take unto itself a history which is not the outcome of its own living …’ (Tagore, 1917: 128).
‘Modern civilization’
… it is not necessary for us to have as our goal the expulsion of the English. If the English become Indianized, we can accommodate them. If they wish to remain in India with their civilization, there is no room for them. (M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj)
Both Gandhi and Tagore, although they disagree on several issues, converge significantly at one point – they both reject the use of certain categories, such as the nation and its cognates, in representing and shaping India. These categories, which are seen by many as ‘gifts of colonialism’, are a product not just of colonial thought but also of an imagined modern European history. For Gandhi, these categories and ways of thinking are symptomatic of a ‘modern (or Western) civilization’, and for Tagore, they are ‘lessons from history contrary to the lessons of our ancestors’.
What was it about ‘modern civilization’ and ‘history’ that Gandhi and Tagore see as harmful to India, in particular, and to the non-Western world at large? Their movement against colonialism – rather against what they recognized as the evils of colonialism – allows us to reflect on a significant decolonial project that seems to have been pretermitted in our pursuit of an economic and political advancement of Asia or what has come to be called ‘Asian supremacy’. While attempts have been made to ‘decolonize the mind’ (Ngũgĩ wa, 1986) and ‘decolonize the imagination’ (Pieterse and Parekh, 1995), these projects too revert to issues of national identity and indigenous pride. Thus, before we can ask what it means to decolonize, we need to understand what it was about colonialism that was undesirable or worth rejecting. And why.
We return here to Gandhi’s dialogue with the reader, to whom he poses the question, ‘Why do we want to drive away the English?’ (Gandhi, 2009: 26). The reader’s answer is one that largely captures a common cry against colonialism: Because India has become impoverished by their Government. They take away our money from year to year. The most important posts are reserved for themselves. We are kept in a state of slavery. They behave insolently towards us and disregard our feelings. (Gandhi, 2009: 26)
While economic, political and ethnic/racial oppressions are the obvious and visible effects of colonialism, ameliorating these does not end colonialism. This oppression is not even the most enduring or harmful effect of colonialism. ‘If they do not take our money away, become gentle and give us responsible posts’, Gandhi (2009) asks in response, through the voice of the editor, ‘would you still consider their presence to be harmful?’ (p. 27). Indeed, most people would. Gandhi does not provide an easy answer to the question of what it is about colonialism that is pernicious for India. We do, however, glimpse a clue to his critique of ‘Western civilization’.
The story of Gandhi’s quip about Western civilization being a good idea is well known. His own translation of Hind Swaraj from Gujarati into English contains a chapter entitled ‘What is true Civilization?’ In it, he asserts that the English people are not ‘bad at heart’, but that it is their civilization that is responsible for their degradation and degeneration. How does Gandhi understand civilization if not as a people and their practices? Perhaps a look at the original Gujarati text will untangle this seeming puzzle. In the 1909 Gujarati text, Gandhi (1922) uses the terms ‘sudhāro’ (good practices/improvement) and ‘kudhāro’ (bad practices/deterioration) to refer to what he later translates as Indian civilization and Western/modern civilization, respectively: Sudhāro is that conduct which shows man how to perform his duty. To perform his duty, is to adopt ethical conduct. To adopt ethical conduct is to be able to gain control over ones mind and senses. In doing so, we know ourselves. This itself is su- as in ‘good’ practice. What is converse to it is kudhāro. (p. 47)
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We may now be able to appreciate why the terms ‘sudhāro’ and ‘kudhāro’ are not simply synonymous with Indian civilization and Western civilization, respectively. The Indian ‘civilization’ or ‘sudhāro’ can also become ‘kudhāro’, as Gandhi suspects it will if we continue to follow the ‘kudhāro’ that the West has introduced to us. This also explains why Gandhi is able to say that it is not the British people but their ‘kudhāro’ that is at fault (Ashar, 2008). The purpose, as it were, of ‘good practices’ or ways of doing things (be they ways of governing, belonging, instructing and so on) are to be able to ‘know ourselves’. Categories and institutions that were introduced as a result of colonialism, and form a part of the kudhāro, obstruct precisely this ability to deliberate and understand or ‘know ourselves’. This ‘experience-occluding’ (Dhareshwar, 2010) character of their kudhāro is what is deplorable about the West and the reason why the decolonial project – in Gandhi’s words the attainment of Swaraj – becomes so critical.
‘Lessons from history’
The educated Indian at present is trying to absorb some lessons from history contrary to the lessons of our ancestors … We, in India, must make up our minds that we cannot borrow other people’s history … (Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism; emphasis added) … insofar as the academic discourse of history – that is ‘history’ as a discourse produced at the institutional site of a university – is concerned, ‘Europe’ remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories, including ones we call ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Kenyan’, and so on. (Dipesh Chakrabarty, 1992, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’)
What Gandhi identifies as kudhāro, Tagore speaks of as ‘history’. This history – and we could in fact think of it as History – he identifies as contrary to the ‘lessons of our ancestors’ and not as ‘our history’. What was understood, and indeed practised as history in the 19th and early 20th century, was a certain form of structuring and thinking about the past and present that we now refer to as ‘historicism’. Historicism not only facilitated colonialism (Prakash, 1995) but also, in one clean sweep, placed India in the kingdom of History, placing it far behind Europe along the trajectory of development, the ultimate goal of which was European political modernity. (We may simply say political modernity, for there is only one kind of political modernity that we know of). Universalizing its own historical trajectory, this modernity remains distinctly European – at least theoretically. The achievement of this political modernity is attended by concepts that are both constituted by and constitutive of this modernity through historicism. Thus, to be permitted into the realm of sovereign rule, or representational government, one needs to demonstrate adequate political maturity, which in turn can be demonstrated by being a representational polity!
Postcolonial, poststructuralist and postmodern scholars have levied sharp critiques against historicism. Without surveying these different charges and stances, I highlight the significant points of play of historicism in its interaction with the colonial question and the implications of the ‘politics of historicism’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) for the colonial world.
The normalizing of cultural difference
The discourse of the exotic (and savage, lazy, corrupt and despotic) Oriental as the Other of the rational European dominated the early attitudes towards the Empire and the new world. Edward Said (1978) tells us how Orientalism, which is better grasped as ‘a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than … as a positive doctrine’, represented the Oriental not just as an object of endless fascination but also one who was almost completely obscure and inscrutable. The 19th century, on the other hand, found itself much less tolerant of the arcane native. This was owed in no small part to the practical need to govern and legislate. Scepticism towards the idea of incommensurable cultural difference can be gleaned from 19th-century colonial accounts in almost any domain. Prominent examples include T. B. Macaulay’s (1999) infamous Minute pronouncing that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ or Charles Napier’s (1851) sarcastic retort when told that sati was a custom among the natives: Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
The movement from accounts of cultural incommensurability and unintelligibility to attempts at cultural comparison was made possible by the frame of historicism. Tracing these changes, Partha Chatterjee (2011) identifies the arrival of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian theories of legislation as the critical moment in the turn away from cultural difference to a comparative paradigm. Faced with a stalemate in the debates between those in favour of respecting (or, rather, tolerating) the ancient cultural norms and laws of India and those arguing for the introduction of high British principles, an innovative resolution was found, Chatterjee argues, in Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation. Bentham posited England as the yardstick with which to compare all other countries, governments and civilizations, especially those under the care of the Empire. Then, measuring their ‘deviation’ from the norm that was England, he allowed policy differences across countries so as to create modes of governance that would bear just the relationship to the conditions in their respective societies as would be appropriate in light of the historical trajectory of the political structure in England. A single standard was thus used to evaluate the political status (whether mature or immature, advanced or not) of all societies in the world.
Taking from Ian Hacking, Chatterjee (2011) highlights two distinct but related notions of the norm that emerged in the 19th century: ‘one, the normal as the right and the good – the normative, as political philosophy, for instance, would have it – and the other, the normal as the empirically existent average or mean, capable of improvement’. So while England, with all its sociopolitical problems, could hardly claim to be consubstantial with the normative ideal of political philosophy, it was most certainly the embodiment of the statistical normal. The process, therefore, may be thought of in terms of the statistical normalization of whole societies, whereby they were located along a distribution of standardized values so that they could be compared. Although there would be variation within each society, their empirical mean could then be located along such a distribution, with the average of English society being much closer to the normative ideal than those of its colonies. This distance to the normative ideal is not only a conceptual one but also a temporal one. As England moves closer to the normative ideal, its colonies (or former colonies) would move forward too. They would merely take longer to reach.
This normalizing of societies treats any talk of cultural difference as suspect, relegating it to essentialism or cultural relativism that is volatile and thus prone to arbitrary and usually malevolent governance. The normalizing tendency is observed at its clearest during moments of internal cultural revolution in non-Western societies, as has been seen right through the present turmoil in the ‘Middle East’. What is forgotten is that the identification of the normal or the standard is equally arbitrary and has had a record of injustice.
The imperial ‘not yet’
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) points out that ‘[h]istoricism – and even the modern, European idea of history – one might say, came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of saying “not yet” to somebody else’ (p. 8). The demarcation of ‘a conceptual field that could in principle integrate into a single theoretical domain all questions of governance in every society that exists in the world’ (Chatterjee, 2011: 8) goes hand in hand with the congealing of a single meta-narrative of the historical evolution and development of societies. While different flavours and different details are introduced to the ‘histories’ of non-Western societies – and the 19th century saw an unsurprising boom in such histories – ‘all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called “the history of Europe”’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 27). This master narrative, or the blueprint of history, as it were, bears the same relationship to history that the statistical norm Chatterjee speaks of displays to political theory. It becomes the empirical manifestation of the normative ideal. Thus, to understand one’s past is to become the subject of history, and yet the only sovereign subject of history is Europe. This article will not delve into the matter of how the normalization of history affects the myriad other ways in which people imagine or relate to their past and present, but will rather draw attention to the emplotment of non-Western societies along the trajectory of ‘world history’.
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) illustrates the continual presence of Europe in knowledge production by and about non-Western societies by pointing to the fact that while ‘third world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate’ (p. 28). As scholars of non-Western cultures, we accept this asymmetry in everyday academic routines of curriculum meetings in which we need to address quips about Asian studies curricula not being ‘global’ enough (no matter if there are courses on the World Wars or on Philosophy without any serious mention of Asia). We need to take particular care not to title our books, essays or courses ‘Love and Friendship’ or ‘Religion and State’ without adding ‘… in Asia’ or ‘… in Botswana’, for it is assumed that not just politics and history but any abstraction can only truly be European, or first European.
Along with this asymmetry, historicism also brings into focus a discourse of lack. This lack, which is often articulated in quotidian understandings as an ‘essential’ deficiency in cultures and societies, has found its place in modern liberal discourse as the ‘not yet’. Chakrabarty explains this ‘not yet’ as the waiting room of history in which the colonials were asked to wait till they had achieved the political maturity that was deemed a necessary condition for entry into the world of self-governance. Reading the historicist essays of John Stuart Mill, he writes, We were all headed for the same destination … but some people were to arrive earlier than others. That was what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized to wait … This waiting was the realization of the ‘not yet’ of historicism. (Chakrabarty, 2000: 8)
Rejection of colonialism or coloniality inherited?
The political system is still in the making. (Iqbal Narain, 1970, ‘Democratic Politics and Political Development in India’) We have not yet arrived at a stage where we may call ourselves a democratic nation in any real sense … (Dipankar Gupta, 2000, Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds)
According to Chakrabarty, the imperial ‘not yet’ that was employed to deny the demands of self-rule by the colonials was met with a persistent insistence of the ‘now’ by the nationalists in the early 20th century. By demanding (and eventually gaining) independence, the national elites rejected the colonial claim that they had as yet not arrived at the appropriate stage of history to claim self-governance. Rather, they felt that ‘India was in fact ready, that it had paid its debt on behalf of a “backward” past through two centuries of tutelage’ (Mehta, 2007: 25).
Consider, however, the speech made by the first Prime Minister of independent India at the moment of independence at the midnight hour of 15 August 1947: Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, although celebrating political independence from colonial rule, reads more like a tale of caution. The speech is full of phrases such as ‘[f]reedom and power bring responsibility’, ‘[t]hat future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving’, ‘[b]ut freedom brings responsibilities and burdens’. Furthermore, it avers that India and its people have much to do before they can ‘redeem their pledge’. What is the pledge that India has made? Nehru tells us that by declaring itself free from colonial powers, India has redeemed a portion of it. But he mentions this pledge again later in his speech: The past clings on to us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. … We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance and we have to live up to that high standard.
And indeed destiny has intended India to be a self-representational democracy and its members to be citizens of a nation. There is something curious about this: why is the pledge to become citizens not entirely redeemed at the moment of independence? If, as postcolonial scholars and theorists of India have pointed out, the national movement, especially the elites, refuted the colonial assertion of ‘not yet’, supplanting it with an emphatic ‘now’, is not the gaining of independence the realization of the ‘now’? Instead, we find Nehru sliding the becoming of a nation of democratic citizens to the future. What might the complete fulfilment of this pledge entail? Nehru explains, Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.
Again, there is a certain strangeness to these familiar national goals. Here, they are primarily conditions, the fulfilment of which will push India into liberal modernity and self-governance. Drawing on Uday Mehta’s (2007) insight that the Indian nation had conceived of itself, at the very moment of its foundation, as a ‘project and a promissory note’ (p. 17), we could read Nehru’s speech as a reminder of this not yet arrived state of the nation. His anxiety and apprehension, detectable throughout the speech, could be explained by the precarious nature of the declaration that India was an independent nation when it was not yet so. Mehta (2007) argues that ‘the nationalist response to the historically anchored waiting room model was to agree with the idea and the logic of argument but to disagree with particulars of its application’ (p. 25). That is to say, the nationalists did not really challenge or reject the colonial ‘not yet’, at least not in principle. Instead, they claimed their freedom as a compensation for the years of tyranny and domination during colonization.
It is possible to problematize this understanding. What was it that the nationalists were really in agreement about with the colonial rulers? Having understood the genealogy of historicism and its politics in relation to the Empire, we may disentangle two aspects of the argument outlined above: a desire for the tangible or material consequences of liberal modernity and agreement with the basic historicist premise upon which the categories of liberal modernity were constituted. Again, looking at Nehru’s speech, we may notice that it is the first aspect – an aspiration to the tangible consequences of liberal modernity – that he emphasizes. These consequences are thus placed alongside each other, and so ending ignorance finds a place between fighting poverty and fighting disease, and building institutions is given a similar weightage to ensuring justice. This jumble of goals that are envisioned as necessary for the fulfilment of the pledge to become a modern society only have in common the fact that they are all products and markers of liberal modernity. But do we find an agreement with the basic premise of historicism? Or even an intelligibility of it? The categories of nation, democracy, equality, history and so on are undoubtedly recognized as positive – to possess them is to be given entry to modernity. Aspiration to these ideals, however, does not necessarily entail an appreciation of the waiting room narrative (Ashar, 2009).
Changing the terms 7
Revisiting the national movement and the anti-imperial struggles, one may thus see the demand for self-rule more as an incomprehension of the imperial not yet than a rejection of it. However, no matter whether this demand was made in full cognizance of its genealogy or as an act of subversive mimicry, the categories of modernity, rooted in historicism and political normativity, produce a discourse of lack, inadequacy, immaturity and not yet – not just when applied by the colonizers but also when they are employed by the colonized.
To conclude, this article offers a folk story told in several traditions across South Asia. A young woman, the daughter-in-law of the household, turns away a sadhu, an ascetic who comes knocking at the door for alms. On his way out, he meets the young woman’s mother-in-law. ‘Mai, may god keep you well, your daughter-in-law has just turned me away, saying there is nothing in your house for me’. The outraged mother-in-law shouts, ‘How dare she! How could she say something like this?’ She then stomps towards the house. The old sadhu follows her expectantly. As she marches into the house, he hears her bellowing at the daughter-in-law, pointing out that she is the mistress of the house and that she alone has the authority to decide matters of the household. Having made this clear to her daughter-in-law, she returns to the sadhu and says to him, ‘Well now I, the true mistress of this house, am telling you that we have nothing here for you and you may leave’.
Colonial rule may have been replaced by political sovereignty; but it leaves behind, albeit in a different form, some of the narratives that accompany coloniality. This enduring coloniality may reside within and proliferate through its categories. We find its continual hum in the tirade against ‘corruption’, in the laments that Indians lack a ‘civic sense’, in the despair that our education system is flawed.
The decolonial project, having found expression in nationalist movements, in political and epistemic resistance, and in reform and revival, nevertheless continues to be undertaken in the language of coloniality. This language – one in which we continue to attempt to make sense of ourselves and fight our silent battle against coloniality – is a problematic one. It not only facilitates a regeneration of the discourses of coloniality but also is otiose and obscures all that resides outside of the imperial worldview. We have attempted to smelt and creatively mould this language to radical ends. Perhaps we have to incinerate it altogether and allow a new lexicon to emerge from its ashes.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article was first developed as part of a workshop on decolonization organized by Walter Mignolo. I am grateful for his insightful and critical comments. I also thank all the workshop participants for their questions and discussions, many of which have helped further develop ideas present in the article. I would like to thank Fabio Lanza, Daniel Vukovich and Vivien Lee in particular. Assa Doron, Ariel Heryanto and Brij Lal provided helpful comments on drafts of this article. Thanks are due to Hongling Liang, who has thought through, questioned and argued about many ideas and concepts that have shaped this project.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.