India’s Conservative Revolution

A STRANGE THING HAPPENED at a conference on “Decolonization of Indian Mind” organised by a Hindu nationalist outfit in 2017 and attended by the bigwigs of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the politburo of the Hindu Right. One of the speakers, Rakesh Sinha, a member of the RSS who would soon become a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament, gave a presentation that would fit right into a seminar on postcolonial and decolonial theory in any Indian or American university.

Speaking in chaste Hindi, Sinha took his rapt audience through the depravity of colonialism, its lingering after-effects and the need to replace the stories the West tells about history, reason and progress with Indian metanarratives. The purpose of decolonisation, he said, was “the colonisation of the West by a Hindu metanarrative—not to enslave it, but to save it from itself.” This “long journey” to the conquest of the West has to begin at home, because only after we get rid of the Western mindset in our own colleges and universities can we aim at installing “Vedas and Upanishads as core courses in Harvard University,” he said. Sinha’s missionary ambition is an echo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oft-repeated promise to make India the Vishwaguru, the guru to the world.

What, then, would bring about this decolonisation at home and abroad? The first step is to put Europe in its place and reject the pretension of universality of its ideas. At this point, Sinha drew on the Palestinian-American academic and writer Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and the broader postcolonial “breakthrough” it inspired. He cited Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, an acclaimed classic of postcolonial theory, praising Chakrabarty’s courage in declaring Europe a “mere province” rather than the whole universe. To Sinha, this made Chakrabarty a true nationalist: “what was the task of rashtrawadis”—nationalists—“that task has been carried out by Dipesh Chakrabarty.” He then exhorted his audience to learn from postcolonialists and subalternists despite their supposed Marxist sympathies: “just like Lord Rama sought wisdom from the demon-king Ravana.”