Pratap Bhanu Mehta has written a thought-provoking piece on the problems with the current talk of decolonisation (September, 1, 2023, Indian Express). His contention is that the current call for decolonization, though correct in its assessment that colonialism misrepresented Indian knowledge forms thereby almost blocking our access to it, is superficial. For the call for decolonization has neither been accompanied by any attempt to either “diagnose indic knowledge” or understand why the knowledge forms that once thrived failed with their encounter with colonial knowledge forms nor has it come up with any programme for its regeneration. Instead, the project’s main purpose is that it has a deeply exclusionary agenda where Muslims and Christians are othered not merely because they are foreign but also because they have imperial agendas of their own. The only condition under which they are acceptable is of they accord primacy to “indic,” which Mehta claims they will always fall short of. This, he seems to imply, is because “Indic” is defined by descent, origin and blood and is often understood in terms of a two huge blobs or binaries: Indic versus West. As a result, this approach fails to acknowledge that modernity is not merely an event in the West but India too had its own modernity. Secondly, its inability to engage with other traditions. Finally, though it is correct in pointing out the misrepresentations of Indian knowledge forms, it is deeply wary and uncomfortable with an account of its own home-grown forms of oppression. Even when it acknowledges caste and gender oppression, it sanitizes it by removing all discomfort for the privileged castes. And hence his contention that it mischaracterizes modernity by conflating it with colonialism rather than seeing it as “an impulse to subject the collective rules we live under to practices of justification.” He therefore asks: “What should be the terms on which citizens relate to each other? Can the answer be “whatever is indic”?
While Mehta’s piece does capture many of the problems with the current call for decolonization, he also seems to miss the need to conceptualize the forms of knowledge that came in with colonialism. His problem is the intellectual closure caused by the use of the binary “West” versus “Indic.” However, it must be noted that the distinction between the West and the Orient was made by the West and it is because they saw something distinct about the land they set their foot on. It was their attempt to scientifically grasp something distinct they saw and marking out these distinctions is a way of understanding the new encounter. After all, nobody would say that to divide the states of matter into liquid and solid states are over-determined binaries. The second problem with his characterization is his claim that the Indian knowledge forms died due to internal organization and had nothing to do with colonialism/modernity. Without having a grasp of what makes Western knowledge forms unique or without any attempt to understand if there is anything inherently destructive about the mode of knowledge that is object-oriented and where actions necessarily have to derive from true beliefs to be ‘rational’ and what the impact of such an attitude is on a practice-based culture, one cannot come to the conclusion that it was the internal organization of Indian traditions that resulted in their down fall. Thirdly, his claim that the adherents of decolonization are deeply uncomfortable with homegrown forms of oppression. Different kinds of oppression have been present in different parts of the world and in fact, the West has had a fair share of it in the form of slavery, racial discrimination, World wars etc…and India is no exception. We do not reject the liberal mode of political thought and organizing societies just because it came from regions where there has been slavery, racial pogroms and world wars. In a similar fashion, one can be open to fleshing out alternative modes of governance and political thought in our parts of the world too before dismissing them as oppressive and parochial.
We can divide Mehta’s response to the call for decolonization into two strands: One is a question about the neglect and misrepresentation of Indian knowledge forms and the other is questions about political governance and just social organizations. While Mehta agrees with the first, his dissent is primarily over the second. However, he assumes that the liberal political theory is the only just political order and hence his definition of modernity as justification of collective rules we live by. He assumes that whatever order that existed in India before its destruction was not just and has already marked it as unethical (probably because of ‘the caste system’), even before that alternative is made available to us.
Indeed, there is no doubt that today we occupy a liberal order and any attempt to think of alternatives cannot deny the existence of this order. However, the mistake is to think there are no other orders or perspectives present not just in our past but also in our present and there is no need to engage with them. The very fact that there is so much disgruntlement and disagreement about the liberal order (and various concepts associated with it) and that there are civilizations such as India which have survived for more than two millennia is an indication that other orders must have existed. Mehta’s problem is that rather than see the liberal order as one among many which must be engaged with in our contemporary times, he sees the liberal order as the only larger order which is capable of organizing a society on just terms (this despite the fact that many see it as unjust). Of course, the question “what is the alternative to the liberal cosmopolitanism” is bound to come up. However, fleshing this out must first be more of a knowledge endeavour rather than a political endeavour. One such alternative that was fleshed out was by Ashis Nandy who called it an Asian Cosmopolitanism where he makes it clear that there did/does exist social modes of relating to other human beings and cultures. Nandy sees this form of cosmopolitanism as operative in the Kochi, which has close to 15 diverse communities (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jews etc) but has not witnessed any major religious strife in its 600 years of recorded history. To accommodate enormous differences and peculiarities in practices of different communities, everyday mechanisms of coping with such differences have evolved resulting in a unique form of cosmopolitanism where radical differences could be accommodated without pressurizing members of one community to be like the other, based on some notion of universal brotherhood. Nandy calls it a “unheroic form of tolerance,” a form of cosmopolitanism that allows interaction for various purposes without forcing one to declare brotherly love or adopt the other community’s practices. Lives across communities are intertwined in some ways and relatively autonomous in certain others. While the nature of this cosmopolitanism might need to be fleshed out further, nevertheless it is indicative enough to suggest that alternatives exist which allow diverse communities to co-operate and co-exist, while respecting each other’s differences.
Mehta is right in warning us about forms of decolonization which makes Muslim and Christians targets of its aim. After all, Indian pluralism has been a subject of study for the rest of the world and it has a history of assimilating many cultures. And any proponents of decolonization that alienates other communities are well-advised to look into this aspect of our culture. And this aspect of India’s history (which is present to us as a fact is present to us), makes it clear that what is Intellectual tradition is not merely that which is derived from descent and origin, how much ever a certain strand of decolonization claims so. Our history makes this evident. Yet, the assumption made is only the West has cosmopolitan thinking and only in the West do we have attempts to go beyond the limits of nation-bound thinking and “parochial tradition” and think of interconnectedness of different individuals belonging to different cultures, languages, traditions etc. Hence, had Mehta begun where he had ended and instead asked “are there alternative forms of cosmopolitanisms” and social relations that exist in other parts of the world and refrained from dismissing this alternative even before this alternative is fleshed out, perhaps the debate would have moved forward.
None of this is to deny the dangers of parochial forms of Indic assertions or assertions which targets any community.
(Written on 13 Sept, 2023)