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Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason
This book tells the story of two strange bedfellows, the Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right.
It argues that the Postcolonial Left’s relentless attacks on the “epistemic violence” of Western norms of rationality and modernity are providing the conceptual vocabulary for the Hindu Right’s project of “decolonizing the Hindu mind.” The postcolonial project of “provincializing Europe” is widely shared by the Hindu Right, and harks back to the Hindu revivalist movements of the nineteenth century. This book argues that postcolonial thought in India bears a strong family resemblance, in context and content, with the “conservative revolution” that brought down the Weimar Repbulic in Germany before the Nazi takeover.
Both an intellectual history of India through the last half-century and a critical engagement with postcolonial theory, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asia and the humanities and social sciences at large.
It argues that the Postcolonial Left’s relentless attacks on the “epistemic violence” of Western norms of rationality and modernity are providing the conceptual vocabulary for the Hindu Right’s project of “decolonizing the Hindu mind.” The postcolonial project of “provincializing Europe” is widely shared by the Hindu Right, and harks back to the Hindu revivalist movements of the nineteenth century. This book argues that postcolonial thought in India bears a strong family resemblance, in context and content, with the “conservative revolution” that brought down the Weimar Repbulic in Germany before the Nazi takeover.
Both an intellectual history of India through the last half-century and a critical engagement with postcolonial theory, this book will be of interest to scholars of South Asia and the humanities and social sciences at large.
- GenresHistory
258 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 6, 2025
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October 13, 2025
As a historian of Science, I'm sympathetic to many of Meera Nanda's positions in this book - I agree that it is misguided to suggest that Science is essentially Western and therefore inauthentic for Indians, I find the Hindu Right's appropriation of postcolonial critique worrying, and I think that secularism is all-things-considered, a good thing.
The problem, however, is that Nanda doesn't really defend her position as much as repeatedly assert it - she seems to have internalised the simplistic developmentalist story of the 60s (p. ix) which took as its baseline that a scientific transformation was vital, universally-valid, and inevitable in all aspects - civilisational, political, cultural, educational, and economic. Stuck in that time, she seems unable to take seriously any of the newer inquiries on the Left or Right as genuine, but repeatedly dismisses them or sticks to identifying certain formal features that she finds objectionable (the features are: "defense of the native against the alien, the spiritual against the secular, and the premodern communitarianism against modern individualism," x-xi).
This matters because there is a simple explanation for why the postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right share some formal features - it's because they're both engaged in thinking about the colonial legacy, which often was imposed with force. What should we take as our intellectual centre? What role should science play in public policy? What kind of laws should govern us and who should decide? These are big, knotty philosophical questions, particularly given the complexities of the colonial legacy. Nanda, however, thinks
In the place of the complex and often violent history of colonialism, Nanda seems to want to shield science entirely and suggest that its adoption was and is simply the result of autonomous rational choices (81, 233). This is a really ridiculous boundary for anyone who's worked on and thought about colonial history.
But what's perhaps even worse - given that Nanda is supposedly a historian of science - is how she uses a highly outdated understanding of science and development to buttress her case. It's highly telling that she draws on the schematic work of Weber, Gellner, and Popper to make her case instead of the extraordinary and large corpus of historical and sociological work on the sciences of the past few decades. She has to do this - her argument requires the idea that there's a single, unmodifiable assemblage of changes bundled under "modernity" which is inevitable and inevitably tied to science, secularism, and disenchantment (42-50). At an empirical level, this has been challenged in a number of directions - including by pointing to how the West was never really systematically modernised in this sense. But her argument only works by bypassing this and misrepresenting this rich body of empirical work as somehow cancelling the Enlightenment project (85).
Finally, it's also particularly striking how she understands that "all modernisms are attempts to come to grips with the conditions of capitalist modernity" (44) and yet endorses this modernisation without any serious reservation, despite the ongoing environmental catastrophe. Is it any surprise that people want alternatives? While Nanda briefly admits that such modernity is "not an unmixed blessing" (45), she thinks it is inevitable - and has to take it to be inevitable because she uses it as her baseline for critiquing apparently everyone else.
There are big and pressing issues here, but Nanda isn't interested in engaging with them as much as repeatedly insisting that people are dangerously wasting time thinking at all. Many of her ultimate positions are in need of public champions, but they await a better defense, hopefully one with more curiosity and courage.
The problem, however, is that Nanda doesn't really defend her position as much as repeatedly assert it - she seems to have internalised the simplistic developmentalist story of the 60s (p. ix) which took as its baseline that a scientific transformation was vital, universally-valid, and inevitable in all aspects - civilisational, political, cultural, educational, and economic. Stuck in that time, she seems unable to take seriously any of the newer inquiries on the Left or Right as genuine, but repeatedly dismisses them or sticks to identifying certain formal features that she finds objectionable (the features are: "defense of the native against the alien, the spiritual against the secular, and the premodern communitarianism against modern individualism," x-xi).
This matters because there is a simple explanation for why the postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right share some formal features - it's because they're both engaged in thinking about the colonial legacy, which often was imposed with force. What should we take as our intellectual centre? What role should science play in public policy? What kind of laws should govern us and who should decide? These are big, knotty philosophical questions, particularly given the complexities of the colonial legacy. Nanda, however, thinks
...it is entirely illegitimate to condemn colonialism from an epistemological standpoint. Whatever the crimes of colonialism - and the list is long - introducing modern science and technologies into the colonies is not one of them. To denigrate modern scientific modes of knowing as "epistemic violence" rules out the possibility of a culture-transcending method of acquiring knowledge that is fully intelligible across cultures (234)
In the place of the complex and often violent history of colonialism, Nanda seems to want to shield science entirely and suggest that its adoption was and is simply the result of autonomous rational choices (81, 233). This is a really ridiculous boundary for anyone who's worked on and thought about colonial history.
But what's perhaps even worse - given that Nanda is supposedly a historian of science - is how she uses a highly outdated understanding of science and development to buttress her case. It's highly telling that she draws on the schematic work of Weber, Gellner, and Popper to make her case instead of the extraordinary and large corpus of historical and sociological work on the sciences of the past few decades. She has to do this - her argument requires the idea that there's a single, unmodifiable assemblage of changes bundled under "modernity" which is inevitable and inevitably tied to science, secularism, and disenchantment (42-50). At an empirical level, this has been challenged in a number of directions - including by pointing to how the West was never really systematically modernised in this sense. But her argument only works by bypassing this and misrepresenting this rich body of empirical work as somehow cancelling the Enlightenment project (85).
Finally, it's also particularly striking how she understands that "all modernisms are attempts to come to grips with the conditions of capitalist modernity" (44) and yet endorses this modernisation without any serious reservation, despite the ongoing environmental catastrophe. Is it any surprise that people want alternatives? While Nanda briefly admits that such modernity is "not an unmixed blessing" (45), she thinks it is inevitable - and has to take it to be inevitable because she uses it as her baseline for critiquing apparently everyone else.
There are big and pressing issues here, but Nanda isn't interested in engaging with them as much as repeatedly insisting that people are dangerously wasting time thinking at all. Many of her ultimate positions are in need of public champions, but they await a better defense, hopefully one with more curiosity and courage.
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