This interview is based on Shray Mehta’s article ‘Decolonizing the Hindu Mind’: Authoritarian Populism and the Political Life of Decolonial Theory in India
Mehta, S (2025), “’Decolonizing the Hindu Mind’: Authoritarian Populism and the Political Life of Decolonial Theory in India”, Sociology, 59(6), 1036-1053, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385251331393
This interview was conducted by Bec Devitt
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In “Decolonizing the Hindu Mind,” you argue that decolonial language is being repurposed within authoritarian populism in India. What first prompted you to notice this shift?
This is an excellent question to ask, specially to an ethnographer, because the first principle of ethnography is that you do not find what you go to the field looking for and you have to then analyse and understand what you actually see. My discovery of Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (DeHM) as a popular argument in the public space was ethnographically driven.
My research is on oppositional social movements and party politics in India, and I have spent 16 months in the field between 2019 and 2023 for ethnographic work on the RSS. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS is the far-right nationalist movement in India, that promotes Hindutva (the notion of Hindu superiority and purity) and whose political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I study the everyday lives of activists and intellectuals. In my interviews with intellectuals of the RSS, I realised that there was a direct uptake of the ideas of decoloniality. This was new because in post-colonial contexts it is very common to see anti-colonial ideas.
As sociologists we are very quick to reach for categories like moral panic to explain away these emergent ideas. However, I decided to stick with the problem and started mapping where the so-called ‘decolonial ideas’ were popular and being used. This is particularly significant in the context of India where, being a post-colonial nation, anti-colonial thinking is a part of public discourse. I quickly realised that not only was DeHM as an idea popular in non-fiction writings of the time, they were also in political meetings and rallies of the BJP, the speeches of the prime minister and in the justifications of state actions. This alerted me to explore how this very specific sociological theory has become a go to theoretical tool for the far right in India. This is the question that I seek to answer in the paper.
One of the turning points for me was that Walter Mignolo the sociologist had blurb-ed the book of a Hindutva intellectual. While this blurb was later redacted, this incident to my mind was demonstrative of how close the two intellectual ideas, the far right in India, and decoloniality had become. I then went back to the party literature of the BJP and the RSS to explore the history of where this emerged and I could see a very clear trajectory. The idea is very recent and emerged in conversation with the debates on globalization during the 1990s. This idea is now being repurposed in all aspects of the state formation and its expression: architecturally, legislatively and socially. The use of decolonial theory by the Indian state to challenge the status quo should alert sociologists to the unintended fallouts of sociological thinking. It should also then allow for possible resources which need to be developed to counter this.
How does Hindu nationalist rhetoric use the language of injury, humiliation, or historical grievance in ways that resemble anti-colonial critique?
While it resembles anti-colonial critique, I should at the onset clarify that it is not an anti-colonial idea. To be anti-colonial, a theory has to recognize and solve the dialectic of both the local and the global forces that attempt to colonize a people and a nation. Hindutva thinking in its current form is the cultural invention of a neoliberal top-down social revolution which is very comfortable with big capital and global colonial alignments both in the past and the present. Which begs the question, if these intellectual formations are not anti-colonial, then what is the colonialism that they are fighting against?
To my mind they are contesting, and I think their intellectuals would agree, not classic economic colonialism but coloniality. They define colonialism as coloniality ie the intellectual and cultural violence that comes with colonialism. This expanded understanding of colonialism allows them to re-read the history of India in a revisionist fashion, allowing them to redefine Islam in India as colonialism. They label British colonialism as Christian colonialism and so on and so forth. Thus, the target is to recreate revisionist ideas that re-read the history of the Indian subcontinent in a theological fashion ignoring the economic history and political economy of colonialism.
So, you are right to say that Hindu nationalist rhetoric ‘resembles’ anti-colonial critique. Once you rework the history of the Indian subcontinent as one oppressed by Islamic and Christian invasions it takes you away from the political economy of colonialism. They refashion history in colonial and Orientalist readings and make everything seem civilizational. What this does, very successfully, is that it puts them in conversation with the ideas of ‘Clash of Civilizations’. So, there is an imagined clash of civilization in their mind between these supposed civilizations in India. The language of injury, humiliation and historical grievances gets refracted through this lens. To do a comparison, this is very different from the Chinese understanding of their past as the century of humiliation. The purpurates become Muslims and Christians and the victims are thought to be Hindus. This brings us to the constant refrain of ‘Hindu Khatarey mein Hai’ ie ‘Hindus are under threat’ which is an uptake of the demographic replacement theory from the west. It is a form of uptake of the ideas of coloniality. It opens up the definition of colonialism to mean not just economic but intellectual and cultural colonialism.
Is it possible to reclaim decolonial theory from authoritarian populism in India, or has the terrain fundamentally shifted?
The terrain has fundamentally shifted and requires a moment of pause for intellectuals. There is a need to reevaluate what happens to ideas when they travel and become a productive force for regimes.
There are elements of decoloniality which cannot and should not be recovered. One of them is the idea of the ‘native’. There are two reasons for this. First, as I argue in the paper, following from the work of the sociologist Vineeta Sinha, the idea of the native has a very contentious history. The idea emerged in anthropological and travel literature of the 1800s and is full of colonial connotations. It is a category which is overdetermined and is not always, if ever, a progressive idea. There have been debates within these disciplines about the power dynamics that exists with the labelling, and indeed the claiming, of native status. However, and more significantly perhaps, the idea of the native has now become fundamental to far-right narratives globally. We see this in the UK, Europe and an emergent idea in the US where the imagined white natives are being pitted against migrants. The idea of the native and native knowledge which can be excavated by decoloniality has to be abandoned as it cannot be recovered.
Having said that it is important to grow decoloniality further as a method. It is not enough to import radical ideas and thinkers from the periphery and supplant them into the academy of the centre. I propose the idea of ‘thinking within and without’ disciplines in the paper.
So what should you do when ideas like DeHM become hegemonic? You should look for others, and more radical and anti-colonial thinkers, who might have used the same ideas. In the case of India, there are at least two such thinkers that I discovered and recorded in the paper to demonstrate decoloniality as a method. This is done in order to understand what Syed Farid Alatas calls ‘wills to power’ of intellectual ideas.
So, what should academics do when critical theories are mobilized in ways that contradict their original ethical or political commitments? Abandon them! Or at least abandon them in the form they exist. They, and we, need to interrogate why and how our ideas became tools for such politics. Theories are only as good as their real politic outcome. Every theory is a formation of its time and scientific thinking requires that we reassess our assumptions once we have new data. Now that the far right is firmly ascendent, we have data. No theory or critique is final. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, critique is never final. Intellectuals stand on the shoulders of giants and should look far and wide for new critical ideas and rearticulate them for progressive causes.
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Shray Mehta is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow researching the history of socialist ideas in Hinduism. His PhD (awarded 2025) in Sociology from NUS, Singapore is an ethnographic study of democratic politics in India and the India diaspora.
Bec Devitt is a Graduate Researcher at Deakin University. Her research focuses on Hindutva far-right discourse In India and digital authoritarianism with a focus on discourse historical analysis and participatory disinformation. Bec was a Digital Sherlock Fellow with the Digital Forensic Lab at the Atlantic Council and has previously worked as a speechwriter at the Parliament of Victoria and in political campaigning in the United States.
Shray and Bec are members of the RPRN
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