“Parama dayaalu

Kshamaa samudra

Bhakta vatsala

Bhakta aparaadha sahishnu

Sri Mukhya Praana Avataara bhutanaam…”

I begin by invoking in trust, surrender, and joyous delight that “kshamaa samudra” or “ocean of forgiveness” described by Sri Raaghavendra Swami. My thoughts today are shaped deeply by the practice of listening to his famous prose-composition of morning affirmation (the Praathaha Sankalpa Gadyam). I will see only Lord Vishnu’s quality of oceanic forgiveness in us as I ask for my esteemed panelists and audience’s forgiveness for my inability to join us in person today.

A slightly bigger challenge though is for us to find the quality of forgiveness, or perhaps forbearance, in confronting the big and bad and almost unforgivable ghora or paapa or horror, that has warranted the title of our panel here today: colonialism, colonization, coloniality, colonial consciousness.

We seek to de-colonize. That is for sure, our intent, our sankalpam, or desire. We have gathered to do so under the flag or label of something called “IKS” or “Indian Knowledge Systems.” Now, there are other gatherings also happening right now under various labels and flags, or Instagram edit features, of decolonization movements. We have to acknowledge that for millions of college and high-school students today, not just in India, but around the world, the image of a young woman in a hoodie stopping a police van in Mumbai will be the face of decolonization. That is the Gen Z experience or prerogative.

When older generations alive today, such as those who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s or even the 1980s, think of decolonization, the image might have been that of Gandhi, just for the sheer power of his iconography. Today, we find a slightly wider set of images of decolonization in our public discourse. In college campuses in the West, the term decolonization is synonymous for many with the actions of Hamas on October 7, 2023, in Israel. Professors invoke Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Students invoke the fear of a miserable future for them with no jobs and AI and systemic racism embodied in what they call White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Zionism, or sometimes, Hindutva.

I outline these generational nuances to make the point that for many of us, decolonization might seem synonymous with simply replacing “W. K. S.” with “I. K. S.” in India a.s.a.p. and will be well by 2047 at the latest (as a side note: let’s not forget that during the 2016 California history textbooks debate another group of scholars decreed that all we need to do for decolonization is to simply replace “India” with “South Asia” and then everyone can sing “All izz well”).

Now I understand the hopes we have for the future of IKS. I understand that whatever we are doing may seem commendable compared to the absence of real decolonization of education since 1947. But the demographic realities of generations and different generational experiences of life and suffering, whether one calls it coloniality or oppression, are not always the same. Some of us in our 50s and 60s might see decolonization as a simple scratch-and-replace process of “W” with “I” or “West” with “Indian.”  But it is not so for many in their teens and twenties today.

A friend sympathetic to the current student protests in India described their creativity as “Woodstock meets No Kings.” Other friends are disdainful of the protestors and call them “anti-nationals.” Is this difference in perception merely one of political loyalties, or generational divides, or something deeper? In the old days of classic colonialism, say, 1492 to 1947 or so, to name a colonizer was perhaps easier. One country over another country. One color of skin over another. One God over, well, many others. Now, the term “colonizer” has become both more ambiguous and a cliché. For some, in Western academia and in Indian public discourse, the “colonizer” is often described as the ”Brahmin,” or the “savarna,” or even “the Hindu” more broadly. The public deals with these new configurations in all sorts of ways. Some assertive voices will say that Hindus have never conquered or colonized or even proselytized other countries so calling them colonizers is wrong, but then go ahead and agree with their intellectual rivals on the claim or trope that the Brahmins have oppressed everybody and denied water to them for thousands of years. That is also one kind of decolonization discourse in play in India today. And of course, there is another elephant in the room which is the question of whether, say, Aurangzeb, was a colonizer. We are awash with confusion about which colonizer we should forgive in the cause of national unity, and which colonizer we should continue to press for reparations and social justice over past oppression, and which colonizer is even a colonizer!

Having confessed my wonder about some of these puzzles and questions, let me conclude with some thoughts on the title of my talk. When I say “Decolonizing IKS” I am thinking of a pun. “Decolonizing” can be an action-label for IKS, like “Mighty Morphin’” for the Power Rangers (the 1990s children’s TV show). IKS is a force for decolonizing knowledge in India, and from India. But then, we also have to admit that there is a need to decolonize “IKS” itself. Recently, I heard several talks on Sanskrit and IKS (and course AI). There is a passionate belief that Sanskrit and IKS will be of great benefit to India and the world in financial, geopolitical, technological, sociopolitical and medical terms. This is a good intention for sure. But does IKS today have a position, or set of theories, or conversations on the “benefits” of decolonization? Or a theory about what colonialism, colonization, and colonial consciousness are? I do not see this sort of a conversation yet in the IKS textbooks in the market. We have a lot of content on ancient Indian sciences, literature, and so on. But do we have an IKS textbook or curriculum or work of contemporary media or literary art that can hook a student fed up of the whole insane exam system and urban ecological nightmare of life today better than a Che Guevara T-shirt or “Azaadi” chant? Can it answer the liberal arts questions of “who am I” and “how did I get here” and “what is my purpose”?

And can it do so within the terms of something like Indian Knowledge itself? To put it in a concrete example, if Raghavendra Swami, or Madhvacharya, or Adi Shankara, saw an IKS textbook today, would they recognize any part of it within a system or tradition of learning they recognized and worked in?

This leads us to confront the most important “decolonization” question of all: is our discovery of Bharateeya knowledge really Bharateeya if it ignores the fact that the object of so much of all our ancestors’ knowledge wasn’t just Bharat or national bank-balance or bodily-health but Bhagawan?

If we casually appropriate the Gita from its place within traditional debates and reduce it to a mere metaphor for modern corporate managerial grooming, or the Mahabharatha and Ramayana to national history without centering, honoring, engaging, and indeed surrendering to that object of all their authors’ attention, from Vyasa and Valmiki to Kalidasa and Purandara Dasa, are we decolonizing, or merely recolonizing, ourselves?