Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism

Preface to the Book

I am one of India’s midnight children.

The new nation’s “tryst with destiny” was in its seventh year when I was born. India and I have practically grown up together. Even though I have (mostly) lived away from her for nearly four decades now, the story of my life remains intertwined with the story of India.

As a child, Nehru was “Chacha Nehru” to me, the nation’s uncle whose birthday was celebrated as Children’s Day. As a naive young girl, I took at face value the promise of the new India where there would be no limits of gender, caste, and creed on what was possible, and where there would be prosperity and progress for all. My training in biology set me free of the god-drenched and demon-haunted world that was part of my religious upbringing. The still popular idea of cultivating a “scientific temper” inspired me to get involved in science education movements, and later, work for a national newspaper as a science writer.

Having come of age in Nehru’s India, I could never make peace with the assault on the ideals of secular humanism and modernity associated with Nehru’s name that began in the mid-1980s and snowballed into postcolonial theory by the close of the century. The idea you had the mindset of White Sahibs if you refused to bow to the traditions of your forefathers was downright insulting to those of us who had to claw our way out of the traditional order of things. The idea that there was “Eurocentrism” lurking in every nook and cranny of modern sciences was an affront to our ability to think rationally and turned us into brainwashed dupes of the West. The idea that our salvation lay in rediscovering the ways of the non-modern subaltern felt like a sick joke coming, as it did, from international superstars occupying endowed chairs in elite American and Indian universities and enjoying the best that the modern world had to offer.

What was worse was to see such nativism packaged into a radical leftist theory that purported to set us free from the legacy of colonialism and give voice to the marginalized. The rise and rise of postcolonial theory in Euro-American and Indian universities was nothing less than a scandal to those among us from the “Global South” who never gave up on the much-maligned “Enlightenment project.” That a theory so dismissive of objective knowledge and the internationalism of science could find such enthusiastic reception in the groves of academia was a harbinger of the post-truth culture that has descended upon the United States and India alike.

Postcolonial theory is past its prime now. All that it had to say has already been said; the pioneers are writing retrospective essays instead of saying anything new and thought-provoking. Shoring up the crumbling foundations of postcolonial theory after the withering critiques from Marxists and others who have questioned the singular focus on colonialism in the age of global supply chains seems to be the major preoccupation of postcolonial studies these days. That the end might be neigh has become a topic of many roundtables and debates.

Now that the curtain is falling, it is the right time to take stock of the whole enterprise of postcolonial studies. This book is an attempt at just such a stock-taking from an Indian perspective.

When I began working on this book, I had a very simple question in mind. Given the starring role of Indian and Indian-origin intellectuals in postcolonial studies, I wanted to know the following: What has been the impact of postcolonial theory on India? To what uses its insights have been put to work, and by whom?

I will admit right away that this was not an entirely innocent question. Like other India watchers, I worried that the postcolonial delegitimation of secular modernity was converging with the Hindu nationalist celebrations of Hindu exceptionalism. But unless it can be properly substantiated, a worry is largely a gut feeling. Superficial name-dropping or mere appropriation of post-ist jargon by the intellectual warriors of the Right is not sufficient evidence of convergence either. One can only claim ideological convergence if one can point to a shared set of substantive arguments regarding modernity and traditions, science and religion, and the role of colonialism in Indian modernity.

This led me to explore the family resemblances between the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric epistemologies and two instances of “conservative revolutions” against the Enlightenment. Intellectuals who called themselves “conservative revolutionaries” first appeared in the Weimar Republic and hastened its takeover by the Nazis. The second conservative revolution was none other than Indian nationalism and its contemporary Hindutva offshoots. (I count the mainstream of Indian nationalism, and not just the radical Hindu outfits that currently rule the country, as a conservative revolution for how it defined the spiritual soul of India in contradistinction with the materialism and rationalism of the “soulless” West.)

A word about why I would turn to what happened in Germany between the two world wars to understand what is happening in India today. Weimar’s conservative revolution is the best-known example of anti-Enlightenment and nativist ideology bringing down a fledgling democracy. India, I believe, is having its Weimar moment when ideologues from both the Left and the Right, espousing the same anti-modernist, indigenist ideas made fashionable by postcolonial theory, are endangering the already fragile secular democratic order of the country.

Once I widened my focal area, a Venn diagram began to take shape. I began to see clear overlaps between the paradigmatic conservative revolution of the Weimar, Indian/Hindu nationalism, and postcolonial theory. What united the three was the defense of the native against the alien, the spiritual against the secular, and the premodern communitarianism against modern individualism. All three were instances of reactionary modernity that accepted (either reluctantly as inevitable, or exuberantly as a means of enhancing national power) the technological fruit of the modern age but sought to keep the cultural consequences of modernity at bay by stigmatizing them as alien intrusions.

It became clear to me that the postcolonial suspicion of the metanarratives of modernity and its celebration of difference had nothing radical or liberatory about it. It was, in fact, one more return of the Counter-Enlightenment, which is as old as the Enlightenment itself.

History repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce. This book is about the return of the Counter-Enlightenment as an academic fad that has the potential to turn into a real tragedy.

Meera Nanda: Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism - The Wages of Unreason, Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series, English Edition, S.IX-X, Taylor & Francis.