The concept of decoloniality has gained great currency these days. It evokes response that seeks to undo the burdens and the ills of colonization which are persisting in our times. But of late there is a sense of unease with the term decoloniality and thinkers are looking beyond it.
In India, decoloniality appears to be appropriated by the right wing. Decoloniality takes upon itself the task of undoing effects of the history of colonization while at the same ends up constructing a sense of victimhood. It also treats colonization as monolith and homogenizes the West although it tends to provincialize it. Thus, it seems to trap us into a sense of victimhood and blame. Hence, we may have to agree that an essentialist positivism is afflicting decolonial project.
Thus, while decolonial thinking attempts to shift locus of power, it ends up by creating a new cat out of the old victim rat. The imperialism of the colonizer is then directed on a section of people who are construed as heirs of the colonizers even when they may not have anything to do with the colonizer of the past. This means power/ knowledge relations are only exchanged while coloniality is reproduced and made to operate with local power masters or intra-elites.
This means the newly decolonized knowledge acquires a social life of its own and is ‘reimperialized’ , recentered and put into operation by the local elites. Hence, uncomfortable questions do raise their head: has the decolonial project failed us? It is certainly true that decolonization remains unfinished.
Our issues are complex and we cannot address them with the colonial/ decolonial binary. But this binary continues to animate other binaries like nationalists and anti-nationalists etc. The West as pathological is then replaced by intra-communities that are deemed as pathological and are demonized and rendered disposable. Hence, we have to move beyond this colonial/ decolonial binary and address the complexity of power relations that afflict societies today.
While it is tempting to think through the lens of Hegelian wound which compels us to think of time before the wound as golden, we may have to abandoned this metanarrative that sees pre-colonial era was the best. This romanticization of the precolonial era leads us to construe decolonization as an effort to recover that romanticized era. Hence, our politics, therefore, becomes an effort to give a future to that past. This clearly manifests that decoloniality ends us becoming imperial.
Maybe we have to follow Rousseau who taught that man is born free but finds himself in chains. He did romanticized the state of nature and saw civilization as corruption yet was convinced that we cannot return back to the state of nature. Thus, even though we may view with the taint of Hegelian wound that precolonial period was best, we have to agree that it is not possible to go back to the precolonial past. In fact, colonization has not just marked our colonial past, it has marked our precolonial past too and hence, even if we think that we have recovered the precolonial past through decoloniality, it is never really so. It will only reproduce imperialism and coloniality of a new elite.
We do have to overcome our tendency to look for the roots of all our problems in the colonial past. When we look at the roots of our present problems in the colonial past, we end up looking for their solutions in the precolonial times. This paradigm becomes a cover for corruption and crimes of the intra-elite. Indeed , this approach side tracks the question of responsibility. We do not take any responsibility for our problems today and conveniently blame it on the past. This blame on the wrongs of past also takes away the responsibility of the power elite that rule us today.
This does not mean the moment of decoloniality has waned. Decoloniality is still relevant but is not the final solution for ailments. This is why we have the challenge to decolonize our compelling thinking that looks for the causes of our present problems in the colonial past. I have no intention to write an obituary of decoloniality. It has its critical muscle but my issue with it is that it tends to get trapped in the past. It demonizes the colonial past and celebrates the precolonial past.
Hence, we have the challenge to stay in the present and critically study our problems. One will find that the complexity of our problems cannot be addressed with decolonial approach alone. Perhaps, Habermasian communicative competence based engagement in the public sphere that is concerned with the transformation of the future may be our best bet to deal with the problems that afflict us in the present. We have to decolonize or deimperialize decoloniality.
