India’s recent abstention from a UN General Assembly resolution calling for the end of Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories exemplifies how the discourse of decolonisation, when divorced from material political and economic liberation, can become reduced to little more than a tool to beat down diversity domestically, and impose fresh cultural hegemonies.
While this abstention was not entirely surprising – in 2022, India also abstained from UNGA resolution 77/247 which originally referred the matter to the ICJ– these two votes taken together do represent a fairly significant walking back of India’s supposed commitment to decolonisation in Palestine. Understanding this shift requires us to go beyond analysing foreign policy exigencies and into the way in which decolonisation has evolved in India.
Cultural decolonisation and the national movement
Decolonisation scholars generally agree that decolonisation begins with culture. The need to wrest back from the coloniser the power to define ones own culture and to write ones own history usually precedes demands for political independence. As much of this conversation happens in response to the narratives of the coloniser, the boundaries of this conversation are often still set by the coloniser’s framework. For example, French political thinker Franz Fanon points to the emergence of “African culture” as a pan continental assertion (in the place of specific national cultures) simply because the colonisers narratives of barbarity and backwardness were often applied to the entire continent without differentiation.
Early Indian nationalists were similarly constrained by the narratives of the coloniser. Political scientist Partha Chatterjee points out how they sought to create a national identity that was both modern and not western. This meant asserting their essential difference from the coloniser in the cultural domain but choosing to replicate the colonisers institutions and values in the material domain of laws, economics and the structure of the state, lest they be considered incapable of such modernity. Rabindranath Tagore, and later, Mahatma Gandhi, are exceptions to this, but as their material ideas were mostly pushed back into the cultural space by other nationalists before independence, this didn’t impact the structure of the post colonial state. Further, the early nationalists, even if writing of specific regions within India (like Bengal), began to claim a cultural essence for the entire territory under British rule.
Defining what was Indian (as opposed to colonial or foreign) was often a reflection of the religion, region, caste and class of the early nationalists. For some, the civilisation being claimed was a Hindu one, with Islam and Christianity as foreign influences. For others, the idea of Hinduism was expanded to include all faiths originating in the subcontinent (including faiths that arose in opposition to the rigid caste system that defined Hinduism) and for yet another set, all faiths (including Islam and Christianity), by virtue of coexisting in the subcontinent, formed a sort of syncretic Indian culture. What each of these, often vastly different imaginations, shared, however, was a need for narrative control – to create a dominant nationalist idea of India that could be placed against the coloniser’s idea of India.
This early cultural decolonisation often involved the suppression of marginalised voices. On the question of caste, this suppression was especially harsh. British imperialists tended to argue that as caste was the fundamental principle of social organisation, Hindu society was essentially incompatible with modern democratic governance. For progressive upper-caste nationalists, the counter lay in religious reform, which would end the more brutal manifestations of caste, such as the practice of untouchability, but preserve the basic structure of it. The voices of Dalit scholars who disagreed with this approach, and whose writings and personal experiences on the inherent difficulties in reforming the caste system were closer to the imperialist position, were silenced using the entire moral force of the nationalist movement. The best example of this is the 1932 Poona Pact where Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was forced to give up on the idea of separate electorates for the depressed classes, in the interests of a more united anti-colonial struggle. It wasn’t lost on anyone that Gandhi’s negotiation strategy, which included an indefinite fast, which seriously tied Ambedkar’s hands in negotiations, was an extension of the same strategy he used against the British.
On the question of language, the work of substituting English with Hindi as a rashtrabhasha initially appealed to wide section of the country, including some non-Hindi speakers, as a form of cultural resistance to the British. But as political independence approached, and Hindi knowledge began to have material impacts such as gatekeeping access to education and government jobs, resistance grew. The erasure of Urdu in the education model proposed by Indian nationalists became a rallying point for the Muslim League in the Central Provinces, while in the Madras Presidency, the compulsory introduction of Hindi in schools led to the anti Hindi agitations of 1937-1940.
Decolonisation after independence
The project of creating a homogenous national culture did not end with the attainment of political independence. Instead, it intensified, with the stated goal now being the maintenance of this hard won political independence. Plurality, beyond what was centrally sanctioned, was often portrayed as a threat to “unity” and by implication, the nation’s sovereignty.
Freed of linkages to material political decolonisation, the discourse devolved into a series of battlegrounds for the imposition of fresh hegemonies by the central government in the name of anti-western thinking as well as resistance to these hegemonies from various regions and groups. Regional assertions against excessive centralisation were often organised around local languages and cultures being erased. To the extent however that the dominant idea of nationalism allowed for some multilayered identity, these assertions could be contained within or absorbed back into the nationalist fold with specific concessions.
With the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, and its highly exclusionary understanding of nationhood, the primary focus of decolonisation has shifted to discrediting any intellectual resistance to the idea of a Hindu majoritarian state. For example, the idea of secularism and the constitution of India with its fundamental guarantee of equality have both been expressly critiqued as colonial constructs. Decolonisation has also been used to sweep away concerns with excessive police powers under newly enacted criminal laws.
Prominent Kannada writer Devanura Mahadeva, analysing the writings of the early Hindu nationalists, points out how Hindu nationalism, despite holding on to the caste system, “tames” all other faiths born in India, even faiths that expressly reject the Hindu caste system – Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and the Lingayat movement for example – by appropriating and subsuming their culture into a broader Hindu construct. Islam and Christianity, with their own distinct civilisational origins which cannot be subsumed in this manner, are therefore attacked as foreign to the subcontinent. Once this is done, any majoritarian project including the demolition of mosques to build temples, stripping Indian Muslims of citizenship, attacking Christian priests for conversion, or the erasure of Mughal history from school textbooks can claim legitimacy under the broad umbrella of decolonisation.
This framing of Indian Muslims as the “colonisers” also means that the Indian understanding of decolonisation at the international stage no longer resonates with the experiences of a vast majority of the Arab states that gained independence around the same time as India, and in partnership with whom India’s early efforts at supporting decolonisation around the world were built. It has also meant a pulling back from the post-colonial Muslim majority countries of the subcontinent and the global south in general.
As a result, decolonisation discourse in Indian foreign policy is now, ironically, primarily used to craft an aggressive narrative of power and stake claim to a place at the table with the former colonisers.
What next?
Any attempt to redirect the discourse of decolonisation back to actual decolonisation will require us to reexamine how we see ourselves. Fanon often derides attempts by colonised bourgeois intellectuals to create glorious pasts to challenge colonialism. It is not enough to delve into the past to find concrete examples to counter colonialism’s distortions. For Fanon, national cultures are shaped by struggles in step with the people. While some might read this to be limited to the struggle for political liberation, it is possible for us to go further. We must acknowledge that any shared culture we may seek is formed and shaped not in the distant past but every day in the struggles of the people who live in this country; in every act of oppression and resistance, in every call for justice and equality and in every act of community and solidarity.
When we are able to see our cultural identity as something we shape by our struggles today, and will continue to shape tomorrow, and not something bestowed upon us solely by the past, we will perhaps be ready to revisit decolonisation. And when we revisit it, I hope that we will find that our primary duty in this respect is not to ourselves and our navel gazing search for identity but to the peoples around the world still living under the very material evil of colonisation.
Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.
Missing Link is her new column on the social aspects of the events that move India.
