Decolonization and Its Discontents

The use of decolonial language to exalt the Ram Mandir’s inauguration is in keeping with a broader rhetorical strategy of the Hindu nationalist far right, which has long sought to frame its aspirations of establishing a majoritarian Hindu ethnostate as a project aimed at freeing India—or “Bharat,” as the right wing now prefers to call it—from the vestiges of colonial rule.⁴ But whereas the mainstream understanding of India’s colonial history locates its origins in the arrival of European powers to the subcontinent, therefore identifying the moment of India’s decolonization as being the achievement of national independence in 1947, the Hindutva movement takes a considerably longer view. As Sandhya Dhingra writes in a recent article for New Lines, the Hindu far-right perceives India’s colonization as having begun not with the advent of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, but rather with “the arrival of Muslim rulers or ‘invaders’ to the subcontinent in the eighth century,” whose conquest through dynasties such as the Khiljis, the Tughlaqs, and the Mughals is understood to have marked the beginning of India’s colonization by foreign powers.⁵

It is this expansive understanding of history that a figure like Modi is referring to when, for example, he tells the U.S. Congress that India has enjoyed “75 years of freedom after [a] thousand years of foreign rule.”⁶ The proliferation of this revisionist history, particularly in the decade since the BJP’s rise to power, has had enormous consequences. Despite having roots on the subcontinent dating back centuries and despite the immeasurable impact they have had on virtually every aspect of Indian culture, India’s Muslims have been recast by the Hindutva version of history as foreign invaders in the same fashion as the country’s erstwhile British masters. Through this revisionist project, the ascendant Hindu supremacist movement has been able to reframe its subjugation and disenfranchisement of Indian Muslims as an example of decolonial justice rather than of crude ethnic chauvinism. Similarly, the language of “decolonization” has informed the Hindu far right’s vitriolic efforts to whitewash casteist violence and rollback affirmative action protections for caste-oppressed communities, premised upon the false assertion that the caste system is a “colonial construct.”⁷

It is easy to write this phenomenon off as simply another example of the far right cynically misappropriating the language of liberatory politics and twisting it to serve a fascist agenda. Indeed, this is often the way that Hindutva’s embrace of decolonial rhetoric is framed in public and scholarly commentary alike. But presenting the issue in such black-and-white terms is more than just overly simplistic, it is actively detrimental to our ability to fully understand why this particular movement is using this particular rhetoric in this particular way, and why it is even possible for such rhetoric to be mobilized in service of a reactionary far-right politics in the first place. In fact, far from a mere example of bad faith usurpation, Hindutva’s reframing of decolonization as a project of ethnoreligious supremacy rather than one of collective liberation is reflective of a far more fundamental contradiction, inherent in the very idea of decolonization itself—a contradiction of which the twentieth century’s foremost theorists of colonialism and anticolonial resistance were acutely aware.

Writing more than half a century ago, thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire warned that the project of decolonization is an inherently amorphous and adaptable one, requiring careful vigilance in order to prevent its co-option by a “national bourgeoisie” whose class interests are best served by the promotion of tribalism and ethnic division under the guise of indigenist authenticity. This point is crucial, because it means that the “Hindutva-ization” of decolonization in India is not just an isolated case, but is in fact an emblematic example of a much larger issue, the sobering implications of which reach far beyond the borders of any one country. Clearly, decolonization is a political and moral imperative that the left cannot afford to abandon—and yet, we need to reckon with the fact that its conceptual malleability means that it has always been susceptible to both liberatory and reactionary interpretations. While acknowledging this uncomfortable reality may run counter to the left’s tendency to uncritically embrace a surface-level analysis of decolonization as a universal and unqualified good, doing so is the first crucial step towards developing a robust understanding not only of how we got to this point, but also of where we go from here, and of what we must do in order to reclaim and reinvigorate a genuinely radical politics of decolonization, updated for the social and political context in which we find ourselves today.

Before we can begin to critically examine “decolonization” as a concept, however, we need to first be clear about what, exactly, we are referring to when we use the word. The concept of decolonization, wrote Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel in their 2017 book Decolonization: A Short History, originated in the twentieth century as a term used primarily by European empires—namely Britain and France, “the last remaining colonial powers of any consequence”—to denote a policy of administration in the face of “unfolding historical dynamics,” as nationalist movements and anticolonial liberation struggles swept across the colonized nations of the Asian and African continents. As these empires’ influence began to wane and nationalist sentiment in the colonies grew more robust, colonial administrators began to shift their priorities toward facilitating an orderly and drawn-out transfer of political control to native ruling elites in the hopes of cultivating close relationships with their soon-to-be-former colonies. In other words, “decolonization” in this imperial formulation was conceived of not as a liberatory process, but as a necessary prelude to neocolonialism. “With this in mind,” Jansen and Osterhammel concluded, “decolonization was understood as a strategy and political goal of Europeans, a goal to be reached with skill and determination.”⁸

Of course, contrary to what twentieth-century colonial administrators had hoped for, the transition from colony to (nominal) postcolony was anything but orderly. Across the colonized world, from the Partition of India to the Algerian War of Independence, the end of colonial rule took place in an orgiastic explosion of violence, leaving in its wake a trail of national flags that dripped with blood even as they were being hoisted for the first time. Still, the term “decolonization” retained its currency, particularly for scholarly observers, as a descriptor for the phenomenon of former colonies attaining independence. The imperial historian Raymond F. Betts notes that the proceedings of a 1965 Yale conference on decolonization began with the assertion that “decolonization is one of the great themes of our age,” while “in the 1970s, more than two dozen studies in English carried the word ‘decolonization’ in their title.”⁹

The idea of decolonization was also, of course, widely invoked by those doing the actual decolonizing—in particular, anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries such as Fanon, the Martinican-born psychologist and writer who served as the most prominent ideologue and spokesperson of the Algerian liberation struggle. In his magnum opus, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon famously described decolonization as “the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces” of colonizer and colonized—a fundamentally violent process, “[reeking] of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives,” whose transformative assertion of agency on the part of the colonized culminates in “the creation of new men.”¹⁰ Decolonization, as conceptualized by Fanon and his contemporaries in the global struggle against empire, was more than just a passive historical process; it was itself a conscious and active project of revolt, aimed at nothing less than remaking the world anew.

In each of these cases, the term “decolonization” is used in one way or another to denote a concretely defined political phenomenon; namely, the end of colonial rule and the achievement of formal independence by former colonies. Whether used descriptively or prescriptively, “decolonization” in this context is a concept that is decidedly grounded in the actual political, economic, and social circumstances of the decolonizing country. (I say “decolonizing country” because this concept of decolonization is invariably framed more or less exclusively in terms of nation-states and national sovereignty.) However, looking at the way decolonization is commonly invoked today, one is likely to notice that at some point in the last half-century or so, the concept’s purview seems to have expanded. From a more limited focus on material questions of political and economic sovereignty, decolonization has come to encompass a far wider range of subjects, as evidenced by the proliferation in many Western activist circles of calls to “decolonize” everything from medicine to education to interpersonal relationships.¹¹

In many ways, this tendency toward expansion and abstraction reflects the wide-ranging political and rhetorical influence of decolonial theory, a school of thought that emerged in the 1990s from the work of Latin American scholars such as Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano. As a framework, decolonial theory (or “decoloniality,” as it is often known) emphasizes the cultural and epistemological dimensions of colonial domination, highlighting how, as Quijano has put it, “European or Western culture imposed its paradigmatic image and its principal cognitive elements as the norm of orientation on all cultural development” in the colonized world—a project of “Eurocentrification” that, decolonial theorists argue, continues to shape colonized societies long after formal political independence is achieved.¹²

At the heart of the decolonial framework is the idea of “coloniality,” a critique of modernity that emphasizes the constitutive role of colonialism in shaping it (to this end, decolonial theorists often write “modernity” and “coloniality” as one term: modernity/coloniality). Coloniality, in this framework, is buttressed by the “colonial matrix of power,” which encompasses “four interrelated domains: control of the economy, of authority, of gender and sexuality, and of knowledge and subjectivity.”¹³ Importantly, what sets this theoretical framework apart from the political and economic project of decolonization described by, for example, Fanon is its expansion into the realms of culture and knowledge. As Mignolo and his coauthor Catherine Walsh write, the “horizon” of decoloniality is not limited to “the political independence of nation-states” or “the confrontation with capitalism and the West,” but rather with “the habits that modernity/coloniality implanted in all of us; with how modernity/coloniality has worked and continues to work to negate, disavow, distort and deny knowledges, subjectivities, world senses, and life visions.”¹⁴ The project of decoloniality thus emphasizes the need to “delink” from these Eurocentric systems of knowledge and power—a task whose goal is “no longer to ‘take hold of the state’ but to engage in epistemic and subjective reconstitution,” thus marking an explicit turn away from the concrete political-economic grounding of twentieth-century struggles for national liberation.¹⁵

Though decolonial theory originated in the academy, its influence has extended far beyond the campus gates. Echoes of it can be observed in the version of decolonization that has become popular among the contemporary Western left, especially among the American left, and particularly since the Black Lives Matter uprisings of summer 2020, when calls to “decolonize everything” began to proliferate alongside broader condemnations of white supremacy. Among the most visible targets of these calls were intellectual and cultural institutions—universities, museums, archives, and the like—which came under pressure to “decolonize” through gestures such as land acknowledgments, renaming buildings, repatriating looted artifacts, and reworking curricula to more adequately “center” Black and Indigenous voices.

This trend could be observed on both sides of the Atlantic, as calls to “decolonize” forced European institutions to reckon with their complicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, North American institutions to reckon with their complicity in settler-colonial violence against the continent’s Indigenous peoples, and institutions on both sides of the pond to reckon with their complicity in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By focusing its critique on the institutions that function as pillars of Western knowledge production, the version of decolonization that gained a foothold on the contemporary left in 2020 constitutes in many ways an indictment of Western epistemology itself. Here, the influence of decolonial theory is not difficult to discern. Implicit in this critique of dominant forms of knowledge production is a call to uplift in their place the Indigenous ways of knowing and being that have been suppressed by the same processes of colonial violence and dispossession in which these institutions were (and are) complicit.

Decolonial theory’s real-world influence, however, is not limited to the left. On the contrary, the version of decolonization espoused by the Hindutva movement also reflects this school of thought, in many ways even more explicitly than its left-wing counterpart. In their calls for a return to an imagined “golden age” of Hindu civilizational glory, Hindutva leaders frequently invoke the language of overcoming a “colonized mindset” and reviving so-called “Indic consciousness”—the array of “indigenous” (read: dominant-caste Hindu) philosophies, cosmologies, and epistemologies that its proponents claim have been suppressed by centuries of Islamic and British colonization alike. In its most exaggerated form, this epistemic atavism can be observed in the viral memes, so popular in right-wing WhatsApp circles, claiming that ancient Indians invented everything from aircraft to nuclear weapons to the Internet.¹⁶

Clearly, it would be a gross overstatement to claim that decolonial theory is somehow responsible for the rise of Hindutva, or that Western scholars and activists who embrace this theoretical framework are contributing in any meaningful way to the legitimation of far-right chauvinism. Yet, the embrace of decolonial thinking by the Hindu nationalist movement indicates that, at least in its crudest form, the logic of decoloniality—a logic that blurs the already murky lines between “foreign,” “Western,” “modern,” and “colonial”—can easily be invoked by right-wing actors to justify a politics of ethnonationalist chauvinism in which certain groups are deemed to be authentically indigenous decolonial subjects whose cultural revival and empowerment requires the violent marginalization of other communities.

There is, of course, an important distinction to be drawn between the disparate invocations of decoloniality by Hindu extremists and North American leftists—namely, that in North America, Indigenous thought and traditions have been violently suppressed by settler-colonialism, whereas in India, Hindus have long been and remain a substantial majority who occupy a clear position of cultural hegemony. Still, this reality has not prevented Hindu nationalists from embracing the decolonial framework in order to construct and weaponize a pernicious narrative of Hindu victimhood. In 2021, for example, the right-wing lawyer and Hindutva ideologue J. Sai Deepak published a book titled India, That Is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution. The purpose of the book, Deepak wrote, is to “[explore] the influence of European colonial consciousness/coloniality, in particular its religious and racial roots, on Bharat as the successor State to the Indic civilisation.” Throughout the book, Deepak explicitly embraces the theoretical framework of decoloniality to legitimate Hindutva’s revisionist history and virulent anti-Muslim bigotry, invoking the trope of “Middle Eastern settler colonialism” and claiming that “Muslim invaders” arrived in India not only to “sing their hymn of hate and go back burning a few temples on the way,” but also to “plant the seed of Islam” whose “growth is so thick in Northern India that the remnants of Hindu and Buddhist culture are [now] just shrubs.”¹⁷

In a scathing review of Deepak’s work, the South Africa-based historian Anandaroop Sen writes that “decoloniality in this book is a tactic of majoritarian ethnic violent politics to appear as a specific victim of the colonial past.”¹⁸ That Deepak’s argument seeks to instrumentalize decoloniality in service of an essentially neofascist agenda certainly seems obvious, and yet, upon its release, the book received a ringing endorsement from one of decolonial theory’s leading lights. In an episode that can only be described as decolonial self-parody, the book’s dust jacket featured a glowing review from none other than Mignolo himself, who praised Deepak for “[building] a strong decolonial argument disengaging from modern Western orthodoxy of the either/or, and [proposing] instead the decolonial logic of neither/nor.”¹⁹ Unsurprisingly, after facing significant backlash from activists and academics, Mignolo ultimately retracted his endorsement of Deepak’s book.

This episode on its own is hardly sufficient evidence of a direct connection between decolonial theory and Hindutva fascism. Yet, as highlighted previously, decolonial logics of “delinking” from Western epistemology and empowering an “indigenous Indic consciousness” that has supposedly been suppressed by centuries of European and Islamic colonization are ubiquitous in the rhetoric and activities of the contemporary Hindutva movement. Deepak himself has become something of an intellectual celebrity among Hindutva supporters—he currently reaches an audience of more than 720,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter) and clips of his speeches and interviews regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. When Deepak was invited to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, in March 2024 by the Berkeley chapter of Hindu YUVA (standing for “Youth, Unity, Virtues and Action”), the student arm of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (itself the U.S. wing of the India-based Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh paramilitary organization), he was introduced with a land acknowledgment and an Indigenous prayer by a Native American activist.²⁰

Perhaps, then, the Mignolo-Deepak debacle was not just a mere misunderstanding, but rather reflective of a much larger and deeper problem with the inherent breadth and malleability of the decolonial framework. Sen’s review of India, That Is Bharat concludes with a “looming question”: “are these mutations,” he wonders, “the Indian Right’s twist on the liberatory politics of the decolonial, or are they part of the very internal architecture of this intellectual movement?”²¹ This musing is echoed more concretely by the postcolonial scholar Priyamvada Gopal, who argued in an interview with Jamhoor that perhaps there is “something in the idea of the decolonial—to pull out another body of knowledge, to turn to the pre-colonial, to pull out something that isn’t Western and replace the Western by it—that is a ready-made recipe for what happened [between Mignolo and Deepak], which is the failure to question what these so-called non-Western epistemologies are and what their content is.”²²

Gopal’s point here is crucial. It is an easy project, and certainly an attractive one, to wax poetic about the need to “delink” or “decolonize” by eschewing the trappings of Western modernity in favor of indigenous ways of thinking and being. Doing so, however, raises the difficult (and all too often unanswered) question of precisely which ways of thinking and being are considered to be sufficiently “indigenous,” and therefore to be the “true” subjects of decolonization. For those of us who are active in the Western academic and activist circles that have so enthusiastically embraced this expansive understanding of decolonial politics, it is incumbent on us to face this difficulty head-on, articulating an alternative analysis of decolonization that explicitly rejects far-right chauvinism and grounds itself in material political and economic conditions—something that mainstream academic frameworks of decoloniality have not consistently done.

After all, there is no such thing as a truly homogeneous society—least of all colonized and formerly colonized societies, where borders and administrative divisions were in many cases drawn by colonial powers without any regard for the local populations encompassed by them. Virtually every nation-state in the world is made up of a diverse array of clans, tribes, religious communities, and ethnic groups, each with its own unique group identity, history, and culture. A decolonial project that does not account for this diversity and instead relies on vague and ill-defined concepts of “authentic” indigeneity can, in the wrong hands, quickly devolve into a narrow politics of majoritarian nativism, one in which minorities and other subaltern groups are themselves regarded as colonial outsiders, rather than as subjects of decolonization in their own right.

India is not the only case of decolonizing logics being invoked by ultranationalists to justify the violent exclusion of minorities in formerly colonized countries, and while the version of decolonization invoked by Hindutva extremists reflects the clear influence of the decolonial framework, a glance at the postcolonial historical record quickly reveals that this phenomenon long predates the popularization of ideas developed by the likes of Quijano and Mignolo.

For an example of decolonization being instrumentalized to serve exclusionary ends, we can turn to Uganda, where in August 1972, then-president Idi Amin ordered the sudden expulsion of the country’s sizable South Asian minority. This expulsion was the product of deep-seated resentments and political dynamics that had been brewing for decades. During the era of British rule in East Africa, colonial administrators brought thousands of people from British India to Uganda to serve as laborers and mid-level administrators (a policy replicated in other British colonies, from Kenya to South Africa). Known simply as “Asians,” these migrants occupied a middle position between colonial elites and native Ugandans in the colony’s social, political, and economic hierarchy and received generally preferential treatment from the colonial administration relative to “natives.” In the years following Uganda’s independence in 1962, Ugandan Asians came to dominate the country’s commercial life, leading to widespread resentment and a series of policies enacted by both Amin and his predecessor, Milton Obote, targeting the Asian minority in various ways, ultimately culminating in their 1972 expulsion.

Importantly, the expulsion of Ugandan Asians was justified by a nativist logic that sought to paint the country’s Asian minority not as fellow countrymen who had shared the Ugandan people’s experience of colonial subjugation, but rather as parasitic relics of the colonial past. Amin repeatedly referred to Ugandan Asians in his speeches as “bloodsuckers,” and declared that his “deliberate policy” in expelling them was to “transfer the economic control of Uganda into the hands of Ugandans, for the first time in our country’s history.”²³ The expulsion was carried out as part of a broader project of so-called Africanization. This was a policy of affirmative action which, as Mahmood Mamdani (himself a Ugandan Indian who was expelled by Amin in 1972) has pointed out, benefited only a “privileged minority” of African Ugandans despite being nominally intended to provide redress to those who had experienced the brunt of colonial oppression. This policy was invoked by Amin’s government “as an antidote to popular pressures for democratization.”²⁴ Like the Tutsi in Rwanda, Ugandan Asians constituted a “subject race” who had received relatively preferential treatment under colonial rule in comparison to the ostensibly “native” population. This meant that in the aftermath of independence, their continued presence in the country was viewed by majoritarian nativists as an unwanted holdover of alien domination, and whose removal would be a necessary condition for the process of decolonization to be complete.

Throughout the twentieth century and well into our own, this phenomenon of “subject races” facing violent exclusion during the process and aftermath of decolonization has played out time and time again across the formerly colonized world, from the massacre of Arabs during the Zanzibar Revolution to the decades-long persecution and genocide of Sri Lankan Tamils to the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. While the case of Hindutva exemplifies the ways in which decolonial logic can easily lend itself to a politics of exclusionary nativism, the abundance of examples such as these—many of which long predate decolonial theory’s emergence as a discrete school of thought—means that there is clearly more to the story than a mere conceptual problem with any one academic or theoretical framework.

In fact, what this checkered history reveals is a fundamental contradiction underlying the project of decolonization itself: namely, the contradiction between the clear need to shake off the vestiges of colonial domination on the one hand, and the ways in which this project can be opportunistically weaponized to promote a politics of tribalist division and majoritarian nativism on the other. The twentieth century’s foremost theorists of decolonization and anticolonial resistance were very much aware of this contradiction and emphatically warned against the dangers of allowing decolonization to be weaponized in this way. Clearly, the instrumentalization of decolonization by bad actors is by no means a reason to abandon it all together—but if we want to reclaim decolonization as a liberatory project rather than a reactionary one, it is imperative that we take these warnings seriously.

“National consciousness,” Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “is nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe.” The process of decolonization, according to Fanon, offers the “national bourgeoisie” of a newly independent country the perfect opportunity to cloak its own class interests in the language of nationalism, encouraging petty chauvinism and promoting policies of “Africanization,” which, despite their promises of Indigenous empowerment, in practice serve only to funnel wealth and power into the hands of a privileged native elite, all while drawing attention away from the fact that this elite has in effect taken the place of the country’s former colonizers. Despite the shared experience of colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance prior to independence, minorities are vilified as traitorous foreigners and unwanted aliens, and their presence in the country is framed as a threat to the interests of the “real” members of the national community. “Consequently,” Fanon warned, “wherever the petty-mindedness of the national bourgeoisie and the haziness of its ideological positions have been incapable of enlightening the people as a whole…there is a return to tribalism, and we watch with a raging heart as ethnic tensions triumph.”²⁵

Unsurprisingly, Fanon’s excoriation of the national bourgeoisie for its promotion of chauvinism in the guise of nationalist pride is accompanied by a warning that this retreat into nativism must be resisted at all costs if the project of decolonization is to be successful. “If we really want to safeguard our countries from regression, paralysis, or collapse,” he explained, “we must rapidly switch from a national consciousness to a social and political consciousness.” This process entails not only the embrace of a humanist ethos that eschews tribalist divisions, but also the development of a concrete political and economic program that addresses the material conditions of the decolonizing society and provides for the radical redistribution of wealth and social power. Similarly, Fanon warned against any culturalist politics of authenticity that relies on a calcified conception of national culture and calls for a return to an idealized precolonial past. “It is not enough,” he wrote, “to reunite with the people in a past where they no longer exist.” Instead, “we must work and struggle in step with the people so as to shape the future and prepare the ground where vigorous shoots are already sprouting.”²⁶

In other words, while there is undoubtedly a cultural element to Fanon’s conception of decolonization, what this really entails is the formation of a new national culture, forged in the fires of anticolonial resistance and grounded in an ethos of revolutionary humanism—not an atavistic withdrawal from modernity in pursuit of some imagined, bygone golden age. Echoes of this can be found in the thought of one of Fanon’s greatest influences, Césaire, the Martinican poet and theorist. In his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, for example, Césaire lamented the “societies destroyed by imperialism” while categorically rejecting any idea of a return to the precolonial past. “I search in vain,” Césaire wrote, “for the place…where I ever preached a return of any kind; where I ever claimed that there could be a return.”²⁷

As the historian Robin D. G. Kelley points out in the introduction to the Monthly Review Press edition of Discourse on Colonialism, “both Fanon and Césaire warn the colored world not to follow Europe’s footsteps, and not to go back to the ancient way, but to carve out a new direction altogether.”²⁸ For both figures—and for Fanon in particular—decolonization is at once a necessary process and a fraught one, requiring care and vigilance to prevent it from devolving into a vehicle for stagnant nostalgia and a battlefield for tribalist hatreds. The writings of both thinkers reveal the sobering prescience with which they recognized the dangers and contradictions of uncritically glorifying the precolonial past and embracing a national consciousness that relies on narrow, essentialized conceptions of who is “truly” indigenous to the decolonizing country.

Similarly, the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean theorist and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral argued in his seminal 1974 essay, “National Liberation and Culture,” that as harmful as “the denigration of the cultural values of the African peoples based on racialist prejudices” has been, it would be just as harmful for the national liberation struggle to engage in “blind acceptance of cultural values without considering the negative, reactionary or retrogressive [aspects] it has or can have.”²⁹ Though Cabral famously described cultural revival and resistance as a “return to the source,” he nevertheless makes clear in this essay that the national liberation struggle in its efforts to promote and nurture indigenous culture cannot afford “confusion between that which is the expression of an objective and material historical reality and that which seems to be a figment of the mind.”³⁰

Those of us concerned with questions of empire and decolonization in the present day would do well to heed these warnings. Decolonization, as Fanon pointed out in The Wretched of the Earth, is not a one-off event that can be “accomplished by the wave of a magic wand,” but rather a “historical process”—one that remains, as yet, incomplete.³¹ Clearly, the constitutive role that colonialism has played (and continues to play) in shaping nearly every aspect of our world means there is still an urgent need for a radical and substantive politics of decolonization, whether in settler-colonial societies such as the United States and Canada, where the violent dispossession and displacement of Indigenous communities is an ongoing process; in former imperial powers such as Britain and France, whose wealth was built with the plundered riches of the colonized world; or in the countless formerly colonized countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America whose inhabitants still have yet to be truly liberated from the yoke of neocolonial exploitation.

Yet, the achievement of “flag independence” by most of Europe’s colonies has meant that the horizons of “decolonization” as a political demand have broadened considerably in the aftermath of the national liberation struggles that swept the colonized world in the mid- to late twentieth century. The problem, however, is that to the extent that “decolonization” still exists as a term in the lexicon of the contemporary left, these horizons seem to have broadened in the wrong direction altogether. Rather than shifting gears to focus on the concrete political and economic dimensions of neocolonialism (broadly defined) that continue to plague us today, the mainstream Western left has instead embraced a politics of decolonization inflected with the language of decoloniality, which defines itself in increasingly amorphous and abstract terms, to the point that the very term “decolonization,” as it is commonly invoked in left discourse, has itself seemingly come to denote everything but actually overthrowing the material structures of present-day colonial violence and exploitation.

This approach is dangerous for two reasons. First, it draws attention away from the urgent project of resisting these structures in all their various concrete manifestations, wrongly acting as though the material dimensions of colonialism simply melted away when the era of formal colonial rule came to an end. Second, and perhaps more importantly, dealing in such abstractions carries a heightened risk—as the example of Hindutva makes clear—of exacerbating the very contradictions that Fanon and his contemporaries warned us about, thereby providing cover for the emergence of a violent, tribalist ethnonationalism that cloaks itself in the rhetoric of indigeneity and decolonial justice.

The contemporary anti-imperialist left has an urgent collective responsibility to resist this emergence wherever it occurs and to do whatever we can to reclaim decolonization from the clutches of the nativist far right. What we need, therefore, is a return to a materially grounded understanding of empire and resistance, one which treats colonialism first and foremost as a question of political and economic exploitation, and decolonization as a question of undoing dispossession and redistributing wealth and power in concrete, material terms. The cultural and epistemological aspects of decolonization can and should play a role in this project—but, simply put, there are far too many more pressing concerns for them to take center stage. Any version of decolonization that inverts this formula, placing a greater importance on the abstract than the material, is a “decolonization” that has lost its way.

Notes

1. ↩ Narendra Modi, “‘Ram Is Not a Dispute, Ram Is a Solution’: Full Text of PM Modi’s Speech at Ayodhya Consecration,” The Print, January 23, 2024.
2. ↩ “‘Tryst with Ayodhya: Decolonisation of India’ by Balbir Punj Set to Unravel Historical Threads on January 13,” Organiser, January 11, 2024, organiser.org.
3. ↩ “‘Ram Mandir, Symbol of Decolonisation…’: Rajnath Singh at ‘Tryst with Ayodhya’ book launch,” YouTube video, 4:28, Economic Times, January 13, 2024, economictimes.indiatimes.com.
4. ↩ “India or Bharat: What’s behind the Dispute over the Country’s Name?,” Al Jazeera, September 6, 2023.
5. ↩ Sanya Dhingra, “How Hindu Nationalists Redefined Decolonization in India,” New Lines, August 14, 2023.
6. ↩ “India Got Freedom after 1,000 Years of Foreign Rule, Narendra Modi Tells US Congress,” Scroll, June 23, 2023, scroll.in.
7. ↩ Shalini Sharma, “India: How Some Hindu Nationalists Are Rewriting Caste History in the Name of Decolonisation,” The Conversation, May 9, 2019.
8. ↩ Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 4.
9. ↩ Raymond F. Betts, “Decolonization: A Brief History of the Word,” in Beyond Empire and Nation, eds. Els Bogaerts and Remco Raben (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 27.
10. ↩ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 2–3.
11. ↩ Musarrat Maisha Reza, “Decolonising Medicine, Part One: Taking the First Steps,” Times Higher Education, April 13, 2022; Steven Mintz, “Decolonizing the Academy,” Inside Higher Ed, June 21, 2021; Annie Liu, “ Say Yes to Decolonial Love: 5 Ways to Resist Oppression in Your Relationships,” Everyday Feminism, December 9, 2014.
12. ↩ Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (March 2007): 170–71
13. ↩ Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 8.
14. ↩ Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 4.
15. ↩ Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 120.
16. ↩ Rama Lakshmi, “Indians Invented Planes 7,000 Years Ago—and Other Startling Claims at the Science Congress,” Washington Post, December 1, 2021; “Ancient India Had Aeroplanes, Nuclear Weapons, Says Chief of India’s Premier History Body,” India Today, November 21, 2014; Alexis C. Madrigal, “An Indian Politician Claimed Ancient Hindus Invented the Internet,” The Atlantic, April 24, 2018.
17. ↩ J. Sai Deepak, India, That Is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution (Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2021).
18. ↩ Anandaroop Sen, “J Sai Deepak’s India That Is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution,” Social Dynamics 49, no. 2 (May 2023): 379.
19. ↩ As scholar Dibyesh Anand wrote on X in August 2021: “A doyen of ‘decoloniality’ Mignolo endorses a book that is outright Hindu supremacist. The other endorsers including the well-established Islamophobes like Elst.”
20. ↩ “Factsheet: Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh (HSS),” Bridge Initiative, January 4, 2024, bridge.georgetown.edu. Hindu YUVA posted on X at the time: “The ‘Bharatam’ event at UC Berkeley began with a Native American prayer led by Kanyon Sayers of the Indian Canyon Nation.”
21. ↩ Sen, “J Sai Deepak’s India That Is Bharat,” 382.
22. ↩ Priyamvada Gopal interviewed by Shozab Raza and Hadia Akhtar Khan, “Empire and Its Enemies: A Conversation with Priyamvada Gopal,” Jamhoor, August 8, 2022.
23. ↩ Idi Amin quoted in Jan Jelmert Jørgensen, Uganda: A Modern History (London: Helm, 1981).
24. ↩ Mahmood Mamdani, “The Ugandan Asian Expulsion: Twenty Years After,” Journal of Refugee Studies 6, no. 3 (1993): 269–70.
25. ↩ Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 105.
26. ↩ Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 163, 168.
27. ↩ Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 44–45.
28. ↩ Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 27.
29. ↩ Amílcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” Transition, no. 45 (1974): 16.
30. ↩ Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture.”
31. ↩ Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2.