Meera Nanda, Postcolonial Theory, and Hindutva Fascism

Postcolonial theory emerged as a response to the epistemic and cultural dominance of colonialism. Thinkers such as Edward Said (2016), Gayatri Spivak (2023), and Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992) challenged the assumption that European categories of knowledge were universal. In Science and Technology Studies (STS), scholars like Bruno Latour, Sandra Harding, and Shiv Visvanathan explored how scientific knowledge is situated, constructed, and shaped by power. Postcolonialism generally involves reclaiming the history, agency, and culture of colonised and subordinated peoples under European imperial domination, along with their resistance. Postcolonial studies examine how colonialism has shaped material culture, analysing both historical and contemporary influences. Against this backdrop, Meera Nanda has long critiqued the ways postcolonial suspicion of ‘Western science’ converges with the Hindu Right. In Prophets Facing Backwards (2003), she warned that this suspicion dovetailed with Hindutva’s promotion of “Vedic science.” In her latest book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism (2025), she sharpens the critique: while postcolonialism and Hindutva emerged from different political genealogies, they converge in their skepticism of Enlightenment rationalism and their desire to revive indigenous cultural authority. By treating scientific rationality itself as a colonial imposition, postcolonialism sets the stage for Hindutva to claim that ‘true decolonization’ requires rejecting modern science in favor of mythic Vedic knowledge. As Nanda puts it, “postcolonial theory has now become a veritable arm of Hindu nationalism” (Nanda, 2025).

Nanda frames postcolonial thought in India as a dangerous anti-modernist impulse. She dismisses “the idea that our salvation lay in rediscovering the ways of the non-modern subaltern” as “a sick joke coming, as it did, from international superstars occupying endowed chairs in elite American and Indian universities and enjoying the best that the modern world had to offer” (Nanda 2025, p. ix). For her, India is experiencing “its Weimar moment when ideologues from both the Left and the Right, espousing the same anti-modernist, indigenist ideas made fashionable by postcolonial theory, are endangering the already fragile secular democratic order” (Nanda 2025, p. x). She 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’” (Nanda 2025, p. 1). In her view, “far from an avant-garde progressive movement, postcolonialism in India bears a strong family resemblance, in context and content, with ‘conservative revolutions’ of the kind that brought down the Weimar Republic and prepared the grounds for the Nazi takeover” (Nanda 2025, p. 1).

Hindutva ideologues, from Swami Vivekananda to current Hindu political leaders, have long argued that the Vedas contain not only religious truths but also the highest scientific knowledge. Ayurveda is marketed as “ancient medical science,” yogic clairvoyance as “all-seeing science,” and mythological episodes as evidence of aeronautics, stem-cell research, and nuclear power in antiquity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian state openly promoted Ayurvedic concoctions as cures, and the National Education Policy 2020 integrated “Indian Knowledge Systems” into the curriculum. As Nanda documents in A Field Guide to Post-Truth India (2021), this blending of science and religion undermines rational medicine, legitimizes pseudoscience, and reshapes education into a vehicle of cultural nationalism. Hindutva is not resisting colonial epistemologies but appropriating the decolonial rhetoric of postcolonial theory: the argument that Enlightenment rationality was a colonial tool dovetails with Hindutva's claim that indigenous Vedic knowledge must now take its place.

However, Nanda overlooks the colonial and Brahminical entanglements of “secular modernity” itself. For nearly five decades, she argues, left-leaning intellectuals have “been waging a war against the ideal of secular modernity that India set upon at the time of Independence” because they reject its “universally valid” claims (Nanda 2025, p. 1). Her critique collapses into an essentialized and uncritical defense of Enlightenment universalism because it fails to interrogate the shared epistemic ground on which both postcolonial theory in India and Hindutva ideology stand. What Nanda misses is the common thread binding these otherwise antagonistic projects: a Brahmanical episteme and a Brahmanical imagination of the Indian nation.

Umesh Bagade (2015) explains how Ambedkar defined Brahminical epistemology as a structured mode of knowledge production serving caste domination. Ambedkar argued, “Brahmins, as learned men, are class-conscious; they are not intellectuals who are emancipated from class conditioning. They are severely limited by the anxiety to preserve their interests. Their scholarship defends Brahminical privilege rather than pursuing truth. The Brahmin scholar is ‘perfectly satisfied with his own knowledge’ and ‘perfectly convinced of the accuracy of his opinions.’ Doubt, the precondition of inquiry, is structurally unavailable because questioning scripture would threaten his own social position. The Brahmin scholar’s search is not for accomplishing historical truth but is intended to maintain the sanctity of the Sanskrit scriptures. He defends the scriptures with the view of defending Brahminic privileges.’ Brahmins engage in ‘fixing dates and tracing genealogies’, antiquarian, technical questions that avoid substantive inquiry into exploitation, domination, and the legitimacy of caste hierarchy. In colonial and nationalist historiography, ‘classical Sanskrit texts were considered authoritative sources... The testimony of the Brahmin informer was assigned importance.’ The method itself preserved Brahminical prerogative.” For Ambedkar, Brahminical epistemology treats religious sanction as “the highest sanction because religion was social and religion was sacred.” (Bagade, 2015) Caste’s economic function cannot be understood apart from its religious justification. Brahminical epistemology naturalizes graded inequality, making caste appear eternal, inevitable, and divinely ordained rather than a historically constituted system of exploitation.

While Nanda correctly identifies the dangers of cultural relativism and indigenism, her analysis remains confined to a binary between Enlightenment rationality and anti-modern traditionalism, thereby obscuring the deeper caste foundations that structure both. She conflates postcolonial theory and Hindutva without asking whose knowledge systems, social locations, and historical struggles are absent from both. The most radical critiques of Brahminism, emerging from the lived struggles and epistemic traditions of Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims, remain largely outside her analytic frame. These non-Brahmanical critique traditions have long challenged not only religious orthodoxy but also the caste-structured claims to reason, universality, and national belonging. Neither camp, postcolonial left nor Hindu right, has mounted a sustained anti-caste critique. The Postcolonial Left, often reproducing caste-class privilege, deploys a copy-paste Marxism that flattens caste-patriarchal structures, while the Hindu Right openly revalorizes those same hierarchies as civilizational pride. In both cases, caste is treated as secondary or erased altogether.

Umesh Bagade’s (2023) critique of Subaltern Studies demonstrates how this Brahminical episteme operates within postcolonial thought. He shows that the path not taken by Subaltern Studies, the path of anti-caste scholarship rooted in the traditions of Phule, Ambedkar, and Periyar, is now being forged by scholars who refuse to separate anti-colonial critique from anti-caste struggle. This path requires approaching caste not as a cultural residue or source of solidarity but as a system of exploitation and governance that structures Indian society from its foundations. Bagade identifies how the poststructuralist turn enabled this evasion: “a proclivity toward postmodernism started growing. The interpretation of the subaltern consciousness and resistance became restricted to the theoretical tools of poststructuralism, such as knowledge/power, discourse, subject, and difference.” The consequence was systematic: “The concrete concepts/frameworks, such as class, caste, and tribe, were ignored and instead, the social conditions denoting territoriality, community, and subject were used to analyze the subaltern masses” (Bagade, 2023). This shift was not accidental but the “natural course” of a project that had from its inception defined subalterns through opposition to elites rather than through their position within structures of exploitation. By abandoning the analysis of political economy, Subaltern Studies rendered itself incapable of grasping caste as a material institution. The symmetry is revealing: both orthodox Marxists, who reduced caste to the superstructure, and poststructuralists, who reduced it to consciousness, evaded the actual work of analyzing how caste functions as a system of extraction, appropriation, and surplus distribution. The poststructuralist turn was not a radicalization but a retreat, from systemic critique, from the analysis of exploitation, from the project of emancipation. It offered a form of critique that could challenge Western colonialism while leaving Brahminical structures of power untouched. This is the deepest sense in which poststructuralist Subaltern Studies enacted a form of “Brahminical decolonization”: a critique that claimed to speak for the subaltern while systematically excluding the movements and intellectuals who most directly challenged caste hierarchy.

Nanda’s framing essentializes rationality and universality as inherently Western, positioning Enlightenment reason as the sole safeguard of secular democracy. In the late eighteenth century, the circulation of Enlightenment ideals across European colonies presented science and reason as universal projects of human progress. But in practice, Enlightenment modernity was inseparable from slavery and extraction. While Europe celebrated the Enlightenment as an era of liberty and reason, its material foundations in the colonies were secured through resource extraction, landscape devastation, and the uncompensated labor of millions. Far from an external aberration, slavery and extraction were the very basis of Enlightenment modernity (Bosma, 2023).

When Nanda warns that “the nostalgic indigenism of postcolonial theorists is feeding the flames of Hindu exceptionalism and supremacy that could spell disaster for India’s religious minorities” (Nanda 2025, p. 6), she frames the Enlightenment as the only possible salvation. Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002) powerfully demonstrates that Enlightenment reason cannot be treated as a secure refuge, since it is implicated in domination as much as emancipation. But their critique remains historically and geographically limited, framed almost entirely through the experience of European fascism, leaving colonial violence analytically secondary rather than constitutive. Fascism appears as a catastrophic deviation within European modernity rather than as one of its logical outcomes. Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (2023) pushes this critique further. Césaire insists that fascism is the culmination of European modernity, colonial violence turned inward. Europe did not abandon humanist values in the 1930s; it merely applied to white European populations the techniques of domination it had long perfected in the colonies. Slavery, racial terror, forced labour, and genocide were not contradictions of Enlightenment humanism but its conditions of possibility. At the very moment France proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity^[1], it was consolidating colonial rule across the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, enslaving and racializing millions. Enlightenment universality was never intended to include the colonized.

Frantz Fanon makes this contradiction explicit: Enlightenment humanism, even while proclaiming a universal rational subject, actively produces hierarchies within humanity itself. Colonialism does not merely deny freedom; it manufactures non-humanity. The colonized subject is constructed as irrational, excessive, emotional, and bodily, the negation of the Enlightenment “human.” Césaire and Fanon reveal that the very category of “the human” is produced through exclusion. To be fully human meant being European, white, and male, while colonized peoples were positioned outside humanity not as subjects awaiting inclusion but as the material and epistemic foundation upon which Enlightenment universalism was built. Any appeal to universal reason that fails to confront this history risks reproducing the very hierarchies it claims to transcend.

Fanon (2008) helps us see a different path: the task is not to abandon rationality or universality but to reclaim and reforge them, not as abstract categories owned by ‘the West,’ but as embodied reason grounded in histories of struggle, oppression, and liberation. Universality need not be Western; it can be wrested from Eurocentric monopolies and rooted in emancipatory projects of the oppressed. This is precisely what Nanda misses when she writes that “our critics insist that Kant's directive of escaping the tutelage of all external authorities by daring to think for oneself... will not work for us in India in the manner it worked for Europe in the Age of Enlightenment” (Nanda 2025, p. 1). We must acknowledge that the South Asian subaltern, the oppressed subject, is simultaneously Ambedkar’s caste-oppressed, Fanon’s race-oppressed, and Said’s Orient subject. The point is to provincialize universality’s historical form and reconstitute it on the basis of embodied struggles in the Indian subcontinent, struggles that are simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-Brahmanical.

“A truly decolonial critique in India cannot simply be anti-Western, nor can it be a defense of the Enlightenment as such. It must be anti-caste, anti-colonial, and anti-racist.”

A truly decolonial critique in India cannot simply be anti-Western, nor can it be a defense of the Enlightenment as such. It must be anti-caste, anti-colonial, and anti-racist, reclaiming rationality and universality as resources for liberation rather than surrendering them to either Eurocentric universalism or Hindu nationalist exceptionalism. To invoke Enlightenment rationality without confronting its colonial and caste-inflected deployments is to mistake abstraction for critique. What is required is not a return to Enlightenment purity but a radical reconstitution of universality itself, grounded in anti-caste, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial struggles. Fascism in India cannot be resisted by choosing between critiquing caste or critiquing imperialism, a choice that Nanda implicitly demands. Hindutva fascism thrives precisely because casteist and imperialist structures remain analytically and politically separated. A critique that defends Enlightenment universalism while bracketing its colonial and caste entanglements ends up reinforcing the elite power, even as it claims to oppose authoritarianism. What is required is an anti-Brahmanical and anti-imperial reworking of reason and universality itself, one that draws from anti-caste, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperial struggles to produce a genuinely emancipatory critique. Without dismantling both caste hierarchy and imperial rationality together, resistance to fascism risks becoming another project of bourgeois moral rescue rather than a material challenge to exploitation and subordination.