The Recolonization of the Indian Mind

Abstract

One of the most pernicious consequences of colonialism was what K. C. Bhattacharya described as the ‘enslavement of minds’. It produced a feeling of inferiority, an erasure of memory and cultures, an alien conceptual vocabulary and a hegemonic perspective from which to view the world. This article describes these consequences in some detail to demonstrate the huge conceptual challenges that a decolonisation of the mind has to confront as it attempts to move the society, and public discourse, towards a truly emancipatory future. In addition to these conceptual challenges the article also describes the worrisome new recolonisation of the Indian mind that is taking place by the knowledge producing agencies that are outside the university and that are driven by the interests of global capital in its unrelenting desire for domination. These knowledge agencies produce a discourse that is embedded in interest and, in a grave departure, is delinked from the pursuit of truth.