Decolonisation or Market Expansion?

How India’s Education Policy Turns Rhetoric into Paradox

Introduction

Initially, decolonisation referred to the political process through which former colonies achieved independence and sovereignty, liberating themselves from direct colonial rule. Over time, however, the concept has expanded beyond its political dimensions to encompass the recognition of colonialism as an epistemically violent project whose legacies continue to structure global knowledge systems.
This article examines decolonial theory and its significance in disrupting and decentering Eurocentric epistemologies. Yet, within the Indian subcontinent, curriculum, textbooks, and pedagogical practices remain deeply entrenched in colonial knowledge systems despite recent policy shifts, rendering decolonisation an empty signifier. Increasingly, its language is being redeployed in ways that serve contradictory goals simultaneously invoking epistemic autonomy and facilitating global neoliberal expansion.

De-centering Europe: Linking Modernity and the Colonial Project

What do we mean when we speak of decolonisation? How is the term mobilised as a noun, a verb, or an adjective and what distinct implications arise in each usage? What does it mean to decolonise something, and what transformations does this verb presuppose?

Contemporary debates reveal pervasive ambiguities. Are we calling for reform within existing institutions, or for their complete reimagining? How do present-day movements for decolonisation emerging largely from academic, museum, and artistic spaces relate to the national liberation struggles of the twentieth century?

Universities have become central to these discussions, with scholars and student activists debating what a decolonised education system might look like. Multiple approaches converge on shared principles: examining colonialism, empire, and racism both empirically and discursively, while proposing alternative modes of knowledge and pedagogy.

Decolonisation and Racial Justice in Global Academia

In English departments across the United States, curricular debates have long been entangled with race and racism, shaped by slavery, segregation, civil rights, and contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter. Calls to “decolonise” education thus entail not only distancing from the legacies of white supremacy and Eurocentrism but also developing new vocabularies for social equity.

Katherine McKittrick observes that “disciplines stack and bifurcate seemingly disconnected categories and geographies.” Disciplines do more than organise knowledge, they fracture it, reproducing the exclusions and boundaries of empire. Her notion of “Black methodologies” reframes research as an act of relation and liberation, where playlists, footnotes, and affect become counter-archives.

Sylvia Wynter likewise challenges Eurocentric humanism by showing how the modern definition of “Man” as the universal subject was built upon colonial hierarchies. For Wynter, decolonial thought must dismantle this category and reimagine education as a space of plural epistemes.Much has been written about how Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge neglected colonial histories. Walter Mignolo’s concept of epistemic delinking offers a corrective a refusal of Western universalism through the reclamation of subjugated knowledges. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, however, warn that “decolonisation is not a metaphor.” Detached from material and political struggle, it risks becoming a fashionable signifier emptied of substance. This warning resonates deeply in South Asia, where caste hierarchies long predate colonial rule. Any serious decolonial project must therefore interrogate not only Western epistemic dominance but also the persistence of indigenous social and epistemic hierarchies.

The Indian Knowledge System: Between Postcolonial and Decolonial Thought

In India, postcolonialism emerged through history departments and the Subaltern Studies collective led by Ranajit Guha, while Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? foregrounded gendered silences in colonial and nationalist narratives. Decolonial theory, by contrast, has largely entered Indian universities through literature departments as an imported framework. While scholars like Neetu Khanna have localised decolonial thinking by foregrounding affect and embodiment, institutional deployments of “Indian Knowledge Systems” (IKS) increasingly emphasize revival rather than critique valorising heritage without addressing the exclusionary hierarchies within it.

Decolonial Rhetoric and the Myth of a Unified Past

Nineteenth-century social reform movements in India simultaneously introduced modernity and reinforced Brahmanical hierarchies. The rhetoric of a timeless Hindu past allowed elites to claim civilisational prestige while denying caste and gender inequality. Aditya Nigam has shown how colonial Orientalism and Brahmanical revivalism together produced a nationalist imagination rooted in Vedic exceptionalism. While Dalit and caste studies have exposed these genealogies, their insights often remain marginal within academic syllabi. Unless caste becomes central to our understanding of Indian modernity, decolonisation risks serving as a euphemism for elite consolidation rather than epistemic transformation.

The National Education Policy and the Paradox of Decolonisation

In post-Independence India, the rise of neoliberal reforms and right-wing populism has converged in a new rhetoric of “decolonising education.” The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 explicitly positions itself as a decolonial reform. Its official vision states:
“The main objective of drawing from our past and integrating the Indian Knowledge Systems is to ensure that our ancient systems of knowledge, represented by unbroken traditions of knowledge transmission and providing a unique perspective (Bhāratiya Drishti), are used to solve the current and emerging challenges of India and the world.”

At first glance, this seems to assert epistemic sovereignty. Yet, as reported by the New Indian Express on September 29, 2025, the British Council simultaneously praised the NEP for having “changed the education sector and opened doors for international universities.” In that interview, British Council Director Alison Barrett celebrated how the policy fosters “new opportunities for trade between the UK and India,” enabling transnational partnerships and the entry of foreign universities into India’s higher education landscape.

This juxtaposition exposes a deep paradox: while the NEP speaks the language of decolonisation and self-reliance, it simultaneously invites foreign capital and academic franchises to operate within India. The tension between epistemic autonomy and global market alignment raises pressing questions. Will these foreign institutions also be subject to the same decolonial imperatives demanded of Indian universities? If not, what does “decolonisation” mean when the nation’s educational future is increasingly tied to Western accreditation and capital flows?
Such contradictions reveal how decolonial rhetoric may be unevenly applied serving as cultural policy for the working-class and caste-marginalised populations confined to public universities, while elite students and upper-caste families gain access to prestigious Western degrees through transnational partnerships. In this framework, “decolonisation” becomes a dual discourse: indigenisation for the masses, globalisation for the privileged.

Conclusion

The promise of decolonial thinking lies in its ability to unsettle Eurocentric epistemologies, recover subjugated knowledges, and democratise education. Yet, as the Indian case illustrates, the rhetoric of decolonisation can coexist comfortably with neoliberal market expansion. When “decolonising” becomes a policy slogan rather than a structural commitment, it risks collapsing into contradiction asserting sovereignty while embracing foreign capital, celebrating indigeneity while reinscribing hierarchy. A truly decolonial praxis must therefore address the intersections of class, caste, and capital, refusing both the nostalgia of a pure past and the seduction of global prestige. Without such vigilance, India’s educational reforms may not mark a break from colonial epistemology but its mutation an ideological realignment that converts decolonisation from a project of liberation into a strategy of market adaptation.