Decolonising knowledge: re-reading Indian history and texts beyond colonial-era categories and biases.

Okay so here is something that genuinely kept me up at 2am last week. I was reading a paper by a European Indologist from the 1880s who was describing the Vedic social system, and the entire framing was basically: “these poor people didn’t have real philosophy, just ritual superstition.” And it hit me. This is where a lot of what I was taught in school quietly borrowed from. Not directly. But the lens. The lens was there.

This is what decolonising knowledge actually means. Not burning history books. Not pretending the British never came. It means sitting with a text, any text, and asking: who framed this, for what audience, and what were they trying to prove?

"The problem was never that the British documented India. The problem was that documentation became definition."

When the East India Company needed to govern a subcontinent it did not understand, it hired people to translate and categorise Indian law, religion, and society. This sounds reasonable. The results were not. William Jones, Max Mueller, and their circle did genuinely remarkable philological work. They also made choices. They decided Sanskrit was a language of priests, not thought. They decided Hinduism was a religion in the Protestant sense, with one holy book, one set of beliefs, one orthodoxy. They decided caste was the organising logic of all Hindu life.

None of these things were entirely false. All of them were enormously reductive. And then those reductions got exported back into Indian education, Indian law, and eventually Indian self-understanding. When Indians started writing about themselves in the 19th century, many of them were unconsciously using colonial categories to describe pre-colonial realities. This is the trap that Romila Thapar, whatever her political biases, actually identifies correctly: historiography is never neutral.

The issue is not just what they got wrong. The issue is the scale of epistemic confidence with which they got it wrong. Mueller was writing about the “true meaning” of the Rigveda without having visited India once. Jones declared Sanskrit grammar superior to Greek and Latin in the same breath that he decided Vedic religion was primitive animism. The Orientalist project was simultaneously admiring and condescending, and that combination was very effective at disabling indigenous intellectual self-confidence.

Here is the most consequential error the colonial framing produced. It forced Hinduism into a comparative religion framework that was built entirely around Christian assumptions. There must be a founder. There must be a creed. There must be orthodoxy and heresy. There must be a Church structure. There must be a holy book that is scripture in the biblical sense.

So suddenly the Vedas became “the Hindu Bible,” Brahmin priests became “the Hindu clergy,” and village goddesses and local traditions became “folk religion” as opposed to “real” Hinduism. This split is completely artificial. The Puranic traditions, the Shaiva Agamas, the Vaishnava Sampradayas, the Shakta tantric lineages, the Smarta synthesis, none of these fit a single hierarchical structure because there was never one to begin with. That was not a deficiency. That was the point.

When you understand this, a lot of modern Hindu identity debates look different. The endless argument about whether Hinduism is monotheistic or polytheistic? Colonial question. The anxiety about whether our traditions are “scientific”? Colonial anxiety. The impulse to present Yoga as purely spiritual and not physical, or purely physical and not spiritual, depending on what Western audience you are performing for? Colonial performance.

"Asking whether Hinduism is polytheistic is like asking whether a river is wet. The question reveals more about the asker than the river."

Here is the 2026 update on this conversation that I do not see discussed enough. Academic Indology is still overwhelmingly based in Western institutions. The chairs, the journals, the citation networks. This is not a conspiracy. It is just how academic capital works. But it has real consequences for which questions get asked and which get funding.

The Aryan Migration Theory debate is a good example. Genetics is genuinely shifting the conversation and the last five years of ancient DNA work from sites like Rakhigarhi has complicated the simple “Aryans came from the steppe” story considerably. But the interesting thing is how resistant certain institutional camps are to updating their models. Partly because the models are genuinely complex and the genetics is not conclusive either way. But partly because careers were built on particular frameworks.

Meanwhile, Indian researchers working on archaeoastronomy, on Saraswati river basin dating, on epigraphy from South Indian temple traditions, often struggle to get published in high-impact Western journals because their methodologies challenge foundational assumptions of the field. This is not unique to Indology. It happens in African history, in Mesoamerican archaeology, across the board wherever the geographic centre of the subject does not match the institutional centre of the discipline.

The decolonisation project here is not about kicking out Western scholars. It is about building enough intellectual infrastructure within India that the questions being asked are not entirely determined by which funding bodies exist and which journals are gate-kept. IITGN has been doing interesting work. Some of the work coming out of IIT Kharagpur on Vedic Mathematics as actual mathematics rather than nationalist nostalgia is genuinely surprising. This matters.

Practically speaking, here is what this looks like. When you pick up the Arthashastra, read it first as a text produced by a specific political context, not as evidence for whether Indians were “advanced.” When you read about the Mughal court, try to find sources that are not either Akbar-hagiography or Aurangzeb-villainy. Both extremes are usually serving a contemporary political argument rather than a historical one.

When you engage with Dharmashastra texts that make you uncomfortable, and some of them will, do not do either of the colonial things: do not pretend they say something they do not, and do not read them as if they were constitutional documents with binding force on all Hindus throughout time. They were texts produced by specific communities, in specific contexts, for specific purposes. So was Leviticus. So was the Corpus Juris Civilis. Context is not excuse-making. Context is history.

Read the critics too. Ambedkar’s “Riddles in Hinduism” is uncomfortable in exactly the ways it is supposed to be. So is Periyar. So is Phule. These are internal voices, not external attackers. A tradition that cannot metabolise internal critique is not strong. It is fragile. Hindu civilisation has survived four thousand years of intense intellectual pressure. It can survive Phule.

"Civilisational confidence is not the same as civilisational defensiveness. One reads everything. The other refuses to."

We are not carrying the specific post-Partition, Cold War era anxieties that made the previous generation either defensively nationalist or aggressively Westernised. We can be rooted and curious at the same time. We can love Carnatic music and also listen to Hindustani and also have opinions about post-structuralism. These are not contradictions.

The internet has also, genuinely, democratised access to primary sources in ways that matter. The GRETIL database has Sanskrit texts online. The Digital Library of India has manuscripts. Twitter, for all its chaos, has Indologists and historians having public arguments that used to happen only in conference rooms. You can read the actual debates now.

What this moment asks of us is intellectual seriousness without intellectual anxiety. Read widely. Sit with discomfort. Do not outsource your conclusions about your own tradition to either Penguin Books or to WhatsApp forwards. Both are epistemically lazy. Your inheritance is not a museum exhibit to be either protected behind glass or torn down by someone else’s agenda. It is a living thing that has always been argued over, always been revised, always been in conversation with the world.

The Upanishads end with “iti.” Here, the matter stands. Not resolved. Standing. That is a different relationship with conclusion than we usually expect. Maybe that is where we should start.

Hinduism looks at the infinite and refuses to blink. It does not simplify the divine to make it approachable. It says: here are a thousand forms, pick the one that speaks to you, knowing they are all the same thing and none of them are the whole thing.