There are two ways to think about decolonisation after the replacement of colonial architect Edward Lutyens’s bust from Rashtrapati Bhavan with that of nationalist icon C Rajagopalachari.One view is that it is merely a gesture calculated to please voters. Another holds that this is pure democracy in action. It represents a near-universal view among Indians that the European colonisation of India was not a good thing. Where there is controversy in some quarters, or at least some confusion, is in our relationship to colonial figures and to colonialism.AdvertisementIn the summer of 2020, the US saw a massive uprising against racism and colonialism, which brought down statues everywhere. With President Donald Trump’s second term, though, Christopher Columbus is spoken of respectfully again, and “settler colonialism” is rejected as a valid concept by his supporters. Yet, a good portion of college-age Americans maintain that colonialism and racism are real and must be fought in the forms in which they still most persist.In India, those who speak of decolonisation from a civilisational, indigenous, or Hindu view, and those who speak of it from a Nehruvian or Enlightenment sensibility, share some assumptions and differ on others. The RSS leadership and the BJP government’s views seem to fall somewhere in between these two. All three groups seem to view European colonialism as a reality. They differ on the question of Islamic imperialism. There are also unlikely, and some might say opportunistic, convergences between Left and Right on issues like caste; British, Brahmins, Aryans, Indo-Europeans, a whole spectrum of unsorted identity-claims remain in play as well.Another similarity is that both camps accuse the other of colonial inertia. BJP supporters accuse Nehru and Congress of presenting a snake-charmer image of India to the world. Critics of the BJP insist that Hindu nationalism rests on a colonial understanding of Hindu identity.AdvertisementWhile political expediency may be a factor in both positions, and a resigned sense of scepticism the only appropriate response in the end, there is one key qualitative difference in the way in which a discourse on decolonisation has been built in each of these “ecosystems”. A Nehruvian idea of decolonisation has dominated Indian intellectual spaces for decades. This is mocked, derided, and sometimes reasonably critiqued by those in Hindutva circles.Yet, there has been nothing close to a Hindu view of global decolonisation advanced either in India or abroad by the supposedly Hindu nationalist government of the past 12 years. Names are changed. Buildings and statues are swapped. Sometimes, even powerful words are uttered in speeches. Yet, if an intelligent Indian student had to honestly express to a group of peers abroad what decolonisation means to us today, it would not rise to the level of understanding, insight and elegance that an earlier generation of students like those we see in old viral video clips show us.This, of course, is not their fault alone but that of our overall approach to learning today, especially in the humanities and social sciences. All we do is seemingly import categories for understanding our experiences and ourselves, and then export bodies which express the same. We are stuck arguing whether it was Brahmins, the British, or the Mughals who colonised us, and whether it is the Left or the Right that is better at decolonising us, while ghastly realities of wars on nature and culture grow around us and into us.Air, water, land, labour, mind. Every one of these seems to tremble in fear before the new wave of supposed “opportunity” that is coming when the AI revolution gets here. The Guardian recently reported on how Indian women workers training AI models for content moderation were left traumatised by the violent and disturbing images they had to watch. Nightmares in real life, mirrored in the deserts of our digital lives. Is this not the colonialism of our time?you may likeGandhi’s Hind Swaraj remains a manifesto that the world can turn to for a deeper understanding of how and why things have got to where they are. In it, Gandhi warned of what would happen if we merely replaced the tiger without changing the “tiger’s rule”. Nehru did not quite understand this. Nor have Nehru’s successors.The harshest legacy of colonisation may well be our mental self-colonisation. Only a deep return to memory, intergenerational continuity, reverence for nature and culture — and the rise of a leadership respectful of intellectual investment in education and arts — can change, if at all, the way things are.The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco