CHALLENGING DECOLONISATION AND POSTCOLONIALISM IN INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA DIRECTIONS FOR CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY (original) (raw)

Postcolonial studies is an established discipline, providing critiques of obscured and erased native knowledge. Decolonisation, a term that is increasingly being used, is associated with both activism and epistemic justice. Both of these positions promise the restoration of thought and identity lost under colonisation. With the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism in India, the call to ‘decolonise’ often comes with violence in the form of erasing religion, languages, cultures and even people. These claims have not gone unchallenged, as a form of cultural violence from dominant groups in Indian society. In trying to address trauma inflicted by colonialism, ethnonationalist ideas of restoring authentic culture have been reified. This paper challenges and examines interrogates the cultural loss and trauma that has been implied in the work of postcolonial theory and the hegemonies implied in that restoration. This paper will take Dalit and minority perspectives on how postcolonial authors in the region have been addressing erasures in their work. The surprising overlap between constuand right-wing ideology in writing about the ‘imagined nation’ needs to be examined and interrogated. Dalit scholars point to their subjugation through apparently liberatory practices which compartmentalise Indian culture and seek to restore pre-colonial hegemonies. From a critical psychology perspective, it becomes important to examine the power structures underlying postcolonialist scholarly assumptions. An important question to ask is whose indigenous worldview is being restored, and who will be excluded, from this process of decolonisation.