Decolonisation In India: Departure From Subjugation Of Western Thought
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Abstract
When I initially came up with the idea of writing this research paper on how decolonisation in India has taken place, what practices it has implemented, and whether the postcolonial identity has affected foreign policy decisions, I hypothesized that decolonisation practices had slowed or stopped after the initial wave of independence had swept away. This hypothesis stemmed from my personal perspective on my country, which seemed deeply engrossed in Western thoughts and ideas. The former-colonial caste, legal and political systems, its language, clothing style, social activities, popularised sports, and western medicine are truisms of the skin India still has to shed.
Introduction
After gaining independence on August 15, 1947, India became a global supporter of decolonisation efforts and national independence movements across Asia and Africa. India was the co-sponsor of the landmark 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, which proclaimed the need to unconditionally end colonialism in all its forms and manifestations (UNGA, Ambassador Syed Akbarrudin, 2017). The Initiative of Five (India, Egypt, Indonesia, Ghana and the former Yugoslavia) were the founders of the Non-Alignment Movement, a foreign policy tool to promote ‘self-determination, national independence, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, opposition to apartheid’ and has served as a ‘key factor in the decolonization process, which led later to the attainment of freedom and independence by many countries and peoples and to the founding of tens of new sovereign States’ (Ministry of External Affairs, 2012). India’s own decolonisation continued with the military annexation of the Portuguese-controlled territory of Goa in 1961. By the 1980s, most countries had formally gained their independence, reducing the urgency of decolonisation movements. India’s own external advocacy towards decolonisation lost momentum due to a combination of domestic priorities, global shifts, and strategic realignments; India engaged in bilateral and multilateral agreements on trade and security with former colonial powers like France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Domestic Policies and Decolonisation Moments
This slow decolonisation process can also be linked to the malfunctioning of India's central government. The post-independence political party, the Indian National Congress (Congress or INC), founded in 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume (a British official within the Indian civil service) and Indian nationalist leader Dadabhai Naoroji as a response to British colonisation, remained in power until the 2014 election victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi. The INC, with members like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, dubbed Mahatma Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister, led social, political, and lifestyle mannerisms in a post-independent India in a manner familiar to the former colonial rulers (Sanya Dhingra, 2023). The continuation of colonial systems in independent India led to bureaucratic inefficiencies (legal, political, and educational), hindered the transformation of the government that reflected local, indigenous values, and brought with it economic frustrations caused by corruption (Kenny, 2015). Corruption, in the context of Indian politics and state planning, is a nexus caused by big businesses and the government. To develop the domestic economy, the Industrial’s Act (1952) required big businesses to acquire permits and licenses directly from the central government, which was a strict, lengthy, and bureaucratic process leading to bribery and favour exchanges for expedited approvals, cross-cutting evaluations, and monopolization stifling competition. The institution of licenses and permits was responsible for creating corruption on a massive scale (Xu, 2014; British Standard, 2023; Misra, 2023). In 2014, India ranked 85th out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (Transparency International, 2014). After a major political scandal in 2012 dubbed ‘Coalgate’ (1), which implicated former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the country had lost faith in the government and was looking for change. Hence, corruption remained the most critical issue in the 2014 elections; Modi’s political party, the BJP, was the front runner and anticipated leader in these elections.
In an effort towards decolonisation, Modi overhauled colonial legal frameworks — the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), and the Indian Evidence Act — to move away from British systems. The government also inaugurated the National War Memorial (2019) in Delhi, in addition to the India Gate (colonial war memorial), as a symbolic gesture towards nationalism. However, this also marked the start of his stringent right-wing Hindu policies from the Modi government. Furthermore, and also following this move, the government installed a giant statue of Indian freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose under the grand canopy of India Gate, which had housed King George V’s statue until the mid-1960s (Dhingra, 2023). This nationalistic move was made to invigorate the generation who still shared memories of a colonial past but for the youth it was a symbolistic exchange that did not reflect real change for their future.
Government Policies, Failures and Foreign Policy
While decolonisation movements and processes slowed between the 1980s and 2010s, they were reinvigorated by the nationalist right-wing Modi government and its efforts to renovate institutions, laws, symbols, and narratives, especially as part of a broader ideological project to assert indigenous identity, culture, and nationalism (Dhingra, 2023). This effort is also contested in foreign policy. The current government has come under fire time and again by its citizens, for promoting Hindu nationalism under the guise of a decolonisation movement while oppressing minorities (Peterson & Rahman, 2025). In 1992, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao introduced India’s Look East Policy, a policy to fix the country’s negligence of ‘regional actors with whom it shared deep cultural and historical ties’, first Southeast Asia, then East Asia and Oceania (Rajendram, 2014). The thought and efforts to move away from Western countries and former colonisers at the international level were a key step towards decolonisation and a pivotal policy to steer away from Western thought and culture, emphasizing regional integration. India has always employed its soft power through culture, food, Bollywood, and using the Indian diaspora as voluntary brand ambassadors abroad to keep like-minded and strategic partners close. An example I saw myself was the hosting of an Indian Food Festival, with the Indian Flag projected on the Cinquantenaire Arch in Brussels, Belgium, on Indian Independence Day, 15 August, which not only gathered Indians abroad but also the local community.
The post-colonial identity of India was finally starting to emerge on the global stage through engagement with Western and non-Western countries in trade, security, education, and cultural exchanges. The country was breaking free from the frustrations that bound it by failed governments. Still, did it push towards ‘a global stage’ support, or demote decolonisation movements in India, especially among the youth? An understanding of decolonisation is that post-independence, the country has been profoundly future-oriented. While we strive for self-determination, home rule, and agency, the prehistories of our people were never taken into account. The leaders wanted a new independent India, but rather than ‘navigating the complexities of reconciling different sovereignties, jurisdictions, and zones of governance into a singular nation-state’, it sought to create an India which could compete with their western colonisers, reinforcing the colonial mindset of ruling and governance (Raghavan et. al 2022). This idea of creating a new India completely disregarded the existing cultures, minorities, local practices, and languages. This latest India, a post-colonial nation-state that had internalised the colonial culture, culminating in a manufactured replica of the colonial powers rather than welcoming and celebrating existing cultures and practices (Joshi 2023).
It is important to remember that colonisation is not only the appropriation of a place and its people but also the appropriation of those people’s thoughts, culture, economy, society, mindset, and perspective, which inherently creates a disproportionate power relationship. A relationship in which the coloniser inherently holds a higher hierarchy than the colonised. This implicit rhetoric internalised by the colonised either pushes them to “collude with the aestheticized structures that enforce apartness or to contest it” (Young 2003). Post-Independence India is only 78 years old, a young country compared to the empires that colonised it, the preservation of colonial activities like cake cutting on birthdays, wearing western clothing daily, having English-medium schools (where English is the primary language), the exodus of millions of Indian students to western universities every year, and the court dress code reflect continued colonial frameworks.
For youth, decolonising the mind begins with decolonising the educational system away from Eurocentric education and Western epistemologies and rewriting the narratives.
Reconstructing history and civics education: introducing modules on epistemic colonialism, caste hierarchies, and the role of Indigenous knowledge systems in science, medicine, and ecology. This will help express historically marginalized perspectives, demonstrate the systemic de-evaluation and erasure of non-Western epistemologies, and deconstruct dominant colonial narratives.
Decolonising cultural expression by restoring pride in local languages, arts, and oral histories through youth leadership by creating a "Youth Decolonial Fund" at the Ministry of Culture for student-led digital archives, podcasts, and performances in regional languages and dialects.
Equipping youth with tools to critique Western-dominant media narratives, colorism, classism, and caste-based stereotypes, promoting conscious consumerism, and encouraging youth to challenge and resist internalized colonialism in media.
Since decolonisation is not a linear process or a clean break through independence, the current youth of India has the power to determine their relationship with decolonisation movements and processes. Hence, the knowledge systems in India must reflect the values, language, societal needs, cultural traits, intellect, and practices of the local and indigenous people, which in turn affect the decisions on domestic and foreign policies and how the country aligns itself. As a young Indian person who grew up learning more about Lord Mountbatten and less about Bhagat Singh in class, I believe education is the most direct path towards decolonisation of the mind.
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(1) Coalgate, a political scandal that involved the irregular and non-transparent allocation of coal blocks by the ruling government to private and public entities without due process that led to an estimated loss of billions of rupees to the Government of India’s taxpayers and the national treasury managed by the Ministry of Finance.
