Why I Stopped Decolonizing
Uncomfortable truths about Dalits, the British, and Hindu nationalism
When I first mentioned colonialism to my relatives, they didn’t react as I’d hoped. Wielding my trusty academic doctrine of “decolonization,” I assumed they would welcome my disdain for the British. At the very least, I thought, we might bond over this new history of struggle I’d come to learn about. We didn’t.
Instead, they reflected fondly on India’s colonial past. Praising railway development and access to education, they seemed to primarily remember the British Raj (rule) as a time of freedom for their people—India’s Untouchables. In other words, a reality appearing plainly to me as exploitation was experienced by some of its most vulnerable subjects as emancipation. How could this be?
In postcolonial discourse today, 15th to 19th-century European colonialism is thought of as a kind of “original sin.” It represents a time period of genocide, enslavement, exploitation, and extreme racism—really, one of the clearest examples of evil we can reference with certainty. It’s a root cause of countless downstream problems. Western colonialism has shaped our planetary existence so profoundly that we continue to wrestle with its psychological, cultural, economic, and global effects centuries later. To redress this, many people seek alternatives to a world forged by empire. That’s what’s called decolonization.
Decolonization generally refers to political independence by a formerly colonized state, either through nonviolent or violent means. But it’s also an umbrella term for cultural reclamation, redressing economic injustice, dismantling institutionalized oppression, and re-centering the colonized and indigenous in our decision-making. In American cultural speak, to “decolonize” something means to reject colonial artifacts or reimagine them using non-colonial sources—from Excel sheets to entire epistemologies.
Decolonization is perhaps most passionately practiced by communities that have suffered colonialism, so it behooved me to encounter my family’s ambivalence—including those literally born under British rule. How could a historically oppressed community develop a sharply different relationship with something so unambiguously bad?
The answer: when we map a conventional American understanding of colonialism onto the rest of the world, we miss important differences that yield an alternative story. For Dalits, the story is that colonialism—however egregious—was itself a respite from a yet crueler system of oppression and exploitation: Brahmanism.
Dalits and Their Colonizers
On the very first day of 1818, a British colonial army of 800 Mahar (Dalit) soldiers fought and triumphed over a Peshwa (Brahmin) army of 2,000 in the Battle of Koreagon. The battle played a pivotal role in giving Britain decisive and expansive rule over most of India. Dalit jurist B.R. Ambedkar records this bluntly in The Untouchables and Pax Brittanica: “It was the Untouchables who fought on the side of the British and helped them to conquer India… Treason or no treason, this act of the Untouchables was quite natural. History abounds with illustrations showing how one section of people in a Country have shown sympathy with an invader, in the hope that the newcomer will release them from the oppressions of their countrymen.”
In the way that some Black Americans fought with the British against their American oppressors, or that South Sudanese Nilotic peoples allied with the British against their northern Arab enslavers, or the Karen—a historically marginalized Burmese ethnic minority—fought with the British against the dominant Bamar majority, the Dalits’ choice was predictable. Perhaps this was always part of the British recruitment strategy, but the oppressed were not unwilling agents.
Though Dalits helped Britain win—and retain—its domination of India, the British Raj later banned them from being recruited to their army, apparently realizing that they didn’t belong to the “warrior” caste of Indians. This is just one example of Britain’s bizarre relationship with the Hindu caste order. They simultaneously overlooked it, institutionalized it, and utilized it toward their own ends. Conversely, the caste-oppressed had an equally strange relationship with their British overlords—in a way, leveraging them for their own interests.
In Dalit Studies, scholar Ramnarayan Rawat writes, “Dalit history demonstrates that the colonial legal regime provided Dalits with mechanisms to claim political and constitutional rights previously denied to them. The colonial state’s legal apparatus, consisting of judicial courts and the police system, allowed Dalit activists and groups to demand access to public spaces and gain employment in new professions, such as the army and state bureaucracy.” Being able to independently engage with a separate system of powers, Dalits finally had room to breathe beyond Brahmanical (Hindu) social, political, and legal systems. The British curbed the totalizing power that upper-caste landlords and priests once held. In 1859, for example, when a Dalit boy was refused admission to a government school in Mysore, the British ruled that public schools ought to be open for all, regardless of caste.
The British Raj also coincided with the arrival of Western Christian missionaries. Unlike colonists, missionaries were not motivated by greed but compassion. They promoted literacy and social reform, campaigning against Sati (widow-burning) and certain forms of caste-based violence. They built schools, orphanages, and hospitals—the very institutions that gave my grandparents the gift of literacy. As colonists and missionaries are often conflated, it’s plausible that Dalits are actually celebrating the legacy of Christian missionaries when they reflect on British rule.
However, a program’s impact and intent are quite different things. In an interview, scholar Chinnaiah Jangan said, “Dalit emancipation comes as an unintended consequence of colonialism… Colonialism is not driven by any emancipatory agendas. Colonialism is driven by profit. Colonialism is driven by power.”
Ambedkar himself clarified, “Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.” If Dalits experienced colonists as emancipators, it wasn’t because of British goodwill—it was in contrast to the abject misery and oppression they suffered prior, at the hands of the Indian Brahmanical elite. Once they got their heads around caste, the British didn’t destroy it—they thoroughly manipulated it toward their own exploitative ends.
With their 1871 caste census, the British calcified caste into legal and political classifications that persist to this day—like designations of Dalits as “Scheduled Castes” and Adivasis as “Scheduled Tribes.” They consulted Brahmins in shaping colonial policies, ranked government jobs by caste, and reintroduced a feudal zamindari system, which concentrated land ownership in the hands of upper-caste landlords. In classic “divide-and-conquer” style, they enflamed caste distinctions to quash any potential coalition-building.
Historian Ananya Chakravarti writes: “The horrific immiseration of the Indian countryside by British colonialism—which wiped out rural wealth, laid waste to millions of lives in famine after famine, and destroyed artisanal economies that had driven global trade for centuries—affected the lower castes in particular. Simultaneously, British education created both the upper-caste elites who became their successors, and nurtured lower-caste thinkers like Mahatma Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who articulated devastating critiques of varna ideology. Colonialism, like all forms of rule, had complex effects on caste.”
The Myth of Pre-Colonial Utopia
When ideas like decolonization go mainstream, they naturally mold to our primal, binary, and often falsely dichotomous heuristics. The assumption is: colonial, bad; pre-colonial, good. It’s fair to interpret colonialism as bad, but to romanticize the pre-colonial world as a utopian past is dishonest. The purveyors of post-colonial discourse appeal to this idyllic portrayal of lost history, but the subjects of pre-colonial oppression possess a longer ethical memory.
As early as 1500 BCE, when iron was first smelted and alphabets first inscribed, caste began its assault on the Indian subcontinent. The Rigveda, a collection of Indo-Aryan hymns, imagines humanity created in the caste-ordered body of a cosmic being: Brahmins emerging from the head, Kshatriyas from the arms, Vaishyas from the thighs, and Shudras from the feet. The Brahmanical legal text Manusmriti followed in 200 BCE, institutionalizing caste discrimination and violence, untouchability, and all manner of caste-specific duties and obligations. Brahmanism (proto-Hinduism) proliferated doctrines of purity and pollution and spun mythologies of Aryan gods (upper-castes) warring against dark-skinned demons (lower-castes and indigenous people).
That didn’t end in antiquity. Today, genetic studies reveal that caste distinctions have persisted for over two thousand years, evidenced through endogamy (intra-group marriage). Across India’s changing empires, caste remained the defining social arrangement. By the medieval era, the Hindu caste order had become entrenched into land ownership, forms of employment, and social norms. Empires like the Gupta (319-550 CE) and Chola (848-1279 CE) promoted and reinforced caste. Even the Muslim Sultanates (1206-1526 CE) and Mughals (1526-1857 CE) did little to alleviate the caste problem, developing their own, parallel social hierarchies.
For Dalits, premodern existence meant untouchability—being regarded as subhuman, excluded from public space, enslaved in exploitative and menial labor, and subjected to gratuitous violence. That is the status quo that British colonists stepped foot into. The time horizon of Dalit consciousness doesn’t just count the last two hundred years; it considers the last three thousand.
It's worth noting that some anti-caste thinkers have taken the decolonization paradigm to imply de-Brahmanization. This, I can appreciate. Brahmanism has been considered by many as the original colonizing force, erasing and appropriating indigenous traditions and oppressing the original peoples of India.
But just as cruelty is native to India, so is profound courage, resistance, and revolution. In the 6th century, the Buddha challenged Brahmanical orthodoxy and led millions to follow in his footsteps. The Bhakti movement of the medieval period convened poets and saints like Kabir and Ravidas to openly critique caste and social injustice. In the 19th century, social reformer Jyotirao Phule fused Bhakti philosophy with a global critique of oppression, drawing solidarity with enslaved African Americans.
Referencing these, philosopher Meena Dhanda observes that “equality stirred the minds of Indians well before the colonial encounter.” She critiques what she calls “misplaced nativism” for “underestimating the cultural resources of the Indic civilization—whilst spawning inequality it also produced elements of an antidote.” The broad brush of the postcolonial binary neglects to acknowledge this profound complexity of both the pre-colonial and colonial periods.
Who Profits from “Decolonization?”
My intention here is not to argue in defense of colonialism but to highlight that colonized peoples have varied experiences. And that, in fact, ideas like decolonization can be manipulated by bad actors. Economist Thomas Sowell rightly identified that we don’t give academic “ideas” their requisite scrutiny, despite the significance of their downstream consequences.
Though colonization is bad, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all forms of decolonization are good. Among the most viral takes following Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel was this one: “what did y'all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” The implication being, whatever the act—in this case, the butchery of innocent families—the fact of it being done in service to “decolonization” made it worthwhile. That logic is the product of unchecked ideology—not truth.
Ramnarayan Rawat argues that the Hindu-dominated telling of Indian history posits its primary moral struggle as being between colonialism and nationalism. Beyond being inaccurate, he says, “this framework has helped the Hindu nationalist elite to appropriate both history and power in modern India.” By foregrounding this particular struggle, Hindu nationalists collapse Indian history into a simplistic fairytale and position themselves as “freedom fighters” or “indigenous,” like the many other colonized people around the world. They perpetuate this myth at the expense of truth and Dalit suffering. Some take it a step further—they claim, explicitly or implicitly, that caste is a British invention.
Ananya Chakravarti writes, “I was shocked at the longevity of this particular idea, that caste as we know it is an artefact of British colonialism. For any historian of pre-colonial India, the idea is absurd.” I’d add that any common-sense reading of the facts, by anyone, reveals plainly that caste predates colonialism.
Chakrvarti argues that this thesis allows upper-caste intellectuals to maintain privilege in both Indian and U.S. educational systems, which uplift works of “postcolonial studies” that critique white elites. Doing so allows them to absolve themselves of their own complicity in caste apartheid. “No wonder that Hindutvadis in both countries are now quoting their works to claim that caste was never a Hindu phenomenon,” she writes. “As Dalits are lynched across India and upper-caste South Asian-Americans lobby to erase the history of their lower-caste compatriots from US textbooks, to traffic in this self-serving theory is unconscionable.”
For Dalits, British rule was not simply a matter of conquest, but of contrast. It was neither emancipation nor subjugation, but interruption. That paradox doesn’t redeem colonialism, but it does complicate the idea of decolonization. In everyday use, decolonization can be selective, self-serving, and even appropriated in service of nationalist revisionism. If we are to take history seriously, we must be willing to hold its contradictions. And as I learned with my relatives, history doesn’t always behave how we want it to.
This was an interesting read - I agree with almost all of it. However, I find the comparison to Palestine to be an unfair comparison. While on paper the word "decolonization" encompasses both, the act of fighting against an active colonizer, fighting for your liberation, is not the same as grappling with the societal change that a colonist imparted upon a colony in a post-colonial society. For all of the bad and good the British did, Indians were right to fight against the British for control over their own land, as is the same with Palestinians fighting against the Israeli occupation. Regarding whether we keep or revert colonial changes - from physical infrastructure to cultural beliefs - in a post colonial society is where we find the nuance of decolonization not always being "good".
I was born in Bangladesh, a country with a complex history of political and economic struggles. Throughout our history, we have sought better governance and economic prosperity, often aligning ourselves with identity groups in the hope of achieving these goals.
Initially, Bangladeshis opposed British rule due to the devastating famine caused by their policies, believing that we would fare better under Muslim rule. However, our economy was once again devastated, culminating in the famine of 1970 under Pakistani governance. Following the Liberation War, we hoped for improvement under Bengali rule, only to face another famine in 1973.
Recently, Bangladesh experienced a popular revolution, with demands for greater youth representation in politics. However, given our history, it is difficult not to be skeptical about the potential outcomes of this new political regime. Blind adherence to identity groups has proven to be an ineffective approach to politics, as it overlooks the fundamental issues of governance and institutional design.
The success of the American experiment can be attributed, in part, to the fact that the American elite still identified as Englishmen. This perspective prevented them from blaming their problems on racial or religious differences, forcing them to engage in serious considerations about the nature of power. As a result, they instituted numerous checks and balances to prevent the abuse of power.
In South Asia and much of the decolonized world, we have repeatedly made the mistake of believing that we would be better off under the rule of someone from our own racial or religious background. This approach has led to a cycle of disillusionment and economic struggle, as it fails to address the underlying institutional issues that plague our societies.
However, there is a growing realization in Bangladesh that simply having a ruler from our own identity group is not enough. We must focus on institutional design and implement meaningful reforms to achieve lasting progress. The extent to which these reforms will be successfully implemented remains to be seen, but it is a crucial step in the right direction.