What happens when a civilisation attempts to recover its intellectual autonomy through institutions originally designed to reorganise its knowledge, govern its people and manufacture its elites? India offers a revealing case.
India has been politically independent for nearly eight decades. Yet some of its most persistent debates continue to revolve around decolonisation—of education, law, history, language, governance, culture and knowledge.
The usual explanation is that colonialism left behind distorted histories, alien curricula and prejudiced representations of Indian civilisation. The proposed remedy therefore seems straightforward: correct the textbooks, recover forgotten thinkers, translate Sanskrit texts, introduce Indian Knowledge Systems, rename institutions, rewrite laws and place Indian figures where European ones once stood.
All of this may be necessary.
It is not sufficient.
For the deeper inheritance of colonialism lies not merely in what an institution teaches, but in what an institution is designed to do.
A university is not simply a building into which any knowledge can be inserted. A bureaucracy is not merely a collection of officials who can be given new instructions. A legal system is not merely a set of statutes whose names can be changed. Institutions possess architectures of authority, methods of classification, hierarchies of expertise, systems of reward and punishment, assumptions about knowledge and ideas about the relationship between the state and society.
That is where the Indian experiment with decolonisation becomes instructive.
We are often trying to decolonise the content while preserving the container.
And eventually, the container wins.
The colonial project was institutional before it was ideological
Colonial power did not survive for almost two centuries merely because Indians were persuaded to admire Shakespeare.
Empire was reproduced through institutions.
The colonial state surveyed land, enumerated communities, codified customs, established courts, organised police forces, standardised administration, created universities, produced examinations and trained an intermediary elite capable of operating this machinery.
Education was central to this project.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's famous Minute of 1835 proposed creating a class of intermediaries who would be, in his words, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” (Wikisource)
The significance of the statement lies less in Macaulay's personal prejudices than in the institutional strategy behind it.
Education would create a new location of authority.
Knowledge validated by the colonial university would become credentialed knowledge. Languages recognised by the state would acquire economic value. People trained in particular forms of reasoning and expression would gain access to administration, law and professional life.
The transformation therefore did not require the disappearance of Indian knowledge.
It required something subtler.
Indian knowledge could continue to exist while ceasing to determine prestige, employment, certification and institutional authority.
That distinction remains crucial today.
The university is perhaps India's clearest warning
The three presidency universities established at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857 emerged from the educational architecture developed following Wood's Despatch of 1854 and were modelled substantially on the University of London of the period. Their role was heavily affiliating and examining rather than being organised around India's older institutional forms of knowledge transmission. (Press Information Bureau)
This produced a structure whose influence long outlived the Raj.
Knowledge became increasingly organised into departments.
Learning became increasingly tied to examinations.
Authority became tied to recognised degrees.
Research came to require particular institutional credentials.
Teachers became salaried functionaries inside bureaucratically regulated systems.
Students learned increasingly in order to satisfy an examiner they might never meet.
The question after 1947 should therefore have been larger than: What should an Indian university teach?
It should also have been: What should an Indian university be?
Instead, independent India largely expanded the inherited university system. This was understandable. A new republic urgently required engineers, administrators, doctors, scientists, teachers and lawyers. Existing institutions provided infrastructure that could be rapidly scaled.
Institutional continuity was not necessarily intellectual surrender; often it was administrative necessity.
But temporary necessity hardened into permanent architecture.
And here lies the first major lesson of India's decolonisation problem:
An institution retained for convenience will eventually begin defining what is conceivable.
Today, serious attempts are being made to alter this trajectory. The National Education Policy 2020 explicitly calls for an education system “rooted in Indian ethos”, while the University Grants Commission has issued guidelines for integrating Indian Knowledge Systems into higher education. The IKS Division of the Ministry of Education describes its objective not merely as preserving traditional knowledge but as creating research and education ecosystems capable of generating new knowledge from Bhāratīya paradigms. (Education Government of India)
These developments are important.
Yet they also reveal the next difficulty.
Indian Knowledge Systems can be introduced into a university without the university itself becoming epistemically Indian.
A course on Nyāya can be taught through PowerPoint presentations, assessed through a three-hour written examination, classified inside a Western disciplinary taxonomy, written almost entirely through English-language secondary scholarship, evaluated through citation metrics and taught by academics whose professional advancement depends upon publishing in journals uninterested in Nyāya as a living intellectual system.
The content has changed.
The epistemic architecture has not.
This is additive decolonisation: add Indian content to an institution whose fundamental grammar remains untouched.
It is probably the most common form of decolonisation—and one of the least transformative.
When knowledge must first become a “subject”
Colonial knowledge systems possessed an enormous classificatory appetite.
To govern India, the state needed India to become legible.
Communities had to become categories.
Land had to become survey numbers.
Customs had to become codes.
Traditions had to become religions.
Knowledge traditions had to become disciplines.
Social identities had to become census entries.
The colonial census is particularly revealing. Modern scholarship shows how enumeration attempted to fit plural and locally variable identities into comparatively stable administrative categories. This did not mean that caste, community or hierarchy had been invented from nothing by colonial officials. Rather, scholars such as Nicholas Dirks have argued that colonial administration helped transform caste into a more encompassing and systematically classified description of Indian society. (OUP Academic)
The larger lesson extends far beyond caste.
Classification is not innocent.
The moment a civilisation accepts another civilisation's taxonomy as the universal map of knowledge, it may already have surrendered part of the intellectual argument.
Consider how easily Indian intellectual traditions are forced into modern departments.
Is Ayurveda medicine?
Is Yoga physical education, psychology, philosophy or spirituality?
Is Arthaśāstra political science, economics, strategic studies or jurisprudence?
Are the Itihāsas literature, mythology, history, ethics or political thought?
Is Vāstu architecture?
Is Nāṭya aesthetics?
Is Dharma religion, ethics or law?
Every answer reveals the problem.
Many Indian systems organised knowledge across relationships that modern disciplinary boundaries separate.
Yet instead of allowing those knowledge systems to interrogate the categories of the modern university, we frequently cut them into pieces so that they fit existing departments.
The institution does not encounter another epistemology.
It domesticates it.
Decolonisation then becomes an administrative exercise in finding the correct departmental shelf on which civilisation may be stored.
Translating vocabulary is easier than translating authority
A particularly seductive form of decolonisation is lexical.
Replace knowledge with jñāna.
Replace ethics with dharma.
Replace well-being with ānanda.
Replace teacher with guru.
Replace governance with rājadharma.
The resulting document looks transformed.
Yet Sanskrit terminology does not automatically produce an Indian intellectual framework.
A concept carries with it a network of assumptions, debates, practices, texts and modes of reasoning. Removing the word from that ecosystem and attaching it to an existing modern category may do little more than provide Indic decoration.
The danger is creating institutions that are Indian in terminology but colonial in cognition.
Decolonisation cannot therefore mean translating English categories into Sanskrit.
It must sometimes involve allowing Indian categories to reorganise the question itself.
That is considerably more difficult.
It requires scholars who can move between textual traditions and contemporary disciplines; institutions willing to tolerate methodological plurality; researchers capable of working seriously in Indian languages; and evaluative systems that do not require every intellectual contribution to imitate the conventions of an American or European department before it can be recognised as knowledge.
The UGC's own recent IKS guidelines acknowledge aspects of this difficulty. One document observes that even institutions teaching traditional fields can remain dependent upon Western epistemologies and methodologies, and argues that programmes in areas such as Nyāya and Gaṇita need to be rooted more substantially in the perspective of IKS itself. (UGC)
This is the beginning of a much deeper conversation.
The bureaucratic paradox
Education is not the only arena in which independent India inherited colonial institutional DNA.
The modern administrative state exhibits striking continuities as well.
Scholarship on India's Ministry of Home Affairs, for example, has noted that despite the dramatic transfer of political authority in 1947, important organisational structures, processes and institutional memories displayed significant continuity with the colonial administration. (OUP Academic)
Again, continuity itself should not be caricatured.
India inherited Partition, refugee movements, territorial integration, poverty, food insecurity and enormous administrative challenges. Dismantling the entire state apparatus in 1947 would hardly have constituted responsible decolonisation.
The problem arises when structures designed to govern subjects are assumed to be equally suitable for serving citizens.
Colonial bureaucracy was fundamentally extractive and supervisory. Information travelled upward. Orders travelled downward. District administration placed extraordinary authority in relatively few officials. Distance between ruler and ruled was a feature rather than a defect.
Democracy changed the source of political sovereignty.
It did not automatically change the everyday culture of administration.
Independent India therefore presents a recurring paradox: electoral democracy operating through bureaucratic structures containing deep memories of hierarchical governance.
Changing who occupies an office does not necessarily change what the office teaches its occupant to become.
This may be India's second great institutional lesson:
Personnel can be decolonised faster than power can.
Law: changing the text and changing the relationship
The legal system provides another illuminating example.
The Indian Penal Code of 1860 survived independence for more than seventy-five years before being replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which came into force on 1 July 2024. (BPRD)
Other nineteenth-century institutional inheritances have proved similarly durable. The Police Act of 1861 continues to appear in India Code and remains relevant in jurisdictions where it has not been displaced by newer state legislation; the Ministry of Home Affairs itself continues to host both the 1861 Act and the Model Police Act proposed in 2006. (India Code)
Replacing colonial statutes is therefore meaningful.
But the larger question is whether decolonising law means replacing nineteenth-century terminology or transforming the relationship between citizen, police, court and state.
A police station may operate under a postcolonial statute while retaining a colonial psychology of public order.
A court may cite Indian jurisprudential traditions while remaining inaccessible to ordinary citizens because of language, cost and procedure.
A new legal vocabulary can coexist with old assumptions about authority.
This distinction between legal decolonisation and institutional decolonisation is vital.
The former changes rules.
The latter changes relationships.
The examination may be more powerful than the textbook
Perhaps nowhere is institutional power more underestimated than in assessment.
Governments may revise curricula.
Universities may introduce Indian texts.
Schools may celebrate heritage weeks.
Teachers may attend IKS workshops.
But students quickly discover what every educational system truly values by asking a simpler question:
What will be on the exam?
Assessment determines attention.
Credentials determine aspiration.
Recruitment determines prestige.
Funding determines research.
Promotion determines academic behaviour.
A curriculum can declare that local knowledge matters, but if career advancement depends almost entirely on English-language credentials and publications, the institutional message is clear.
A policy can praise interdisciplinary knowledge, but if universities remain organised into rigid departments and promotions are evaluated within disciplinary silos, interdisciplinarity becomes ceremonial.
A university can establish an Indian Knowledge Systems centre, but if that centre exists at the periphery while the rest of the institution continues unchanged, IKS becomes a specialised enclosure rather than a substrate for intellectual renewal.
This is why decolonisation frequently stalls.
It targets syllabi, while leaving incentives untouched.
Institutions obey incentives more reliably than declarations.
The colonial institution can even colonise its critics
There is a deeper irony.
Anti-colonial scholarship itself can become dependent upon colonial structures of validation.
One may write passionately about recovering Indian knowledge but consider the work successful only after publication in a Western-indexed journal.
One may advocate Indian-language scholarship but conduct every serious academic conference in English.
One may criticise Eurocentric categories while seeking legitimacy primarily from universities whose prestige derives from precisely those categories.
One may establish centres for civilisational study but organise their functioning through the same bureaucratic mechanisms, disciplinary silos and credential hierarchies one intends to question.
None of these contradictions can be solved by purity tests. International scholarship is indispensable. English is an extraordinarily useful global language. Modern science is not “Western property”. Peer review, evidence, transparent methods and critical scrutiny should not be abandoned because they developed within particular institutional histories.
Decolonisation is not intellectual autarky.
Nor is it a programme for reversing history.
The question is not whether something came from Europe.
The question is whether India possesses enough intellectual sovereignty to decide, consciously, what to retain, what to modify, what to reject and what to create anew.
That is a very different project.
The 101 lesson: content does not defeat architecture
India's experience can therefore be reduced to a set of recurring institutional failures.
We mistake representation for reconstruction. We assume that including Indian authors means the knowledge system has changed. We confuse terminology with epistemology. We rename institutions without redesigning their incentives. We translate texts but do not rebuild communities capable of interpreting them. We preserve manuscripts but disconnect knowledge from practice. We establish specialised centres while leaving mainstream disciplines untouched. We praise Indian languages while reserving the highest intellectual prestige for English. We invite traditional practitioners into universities but allow the university alone to decide whether those practitioners count as experts. We change curriculum while retaining examinations that reward reproduction rather than inquiry. And, perhaps most importantly, we ask colonial institutions to certify whether our attempts at decolonisation are sufficiently legitimate.
The result is a peculiar inversion.
Instead of Indian knowledge transforming the university, the university transforms Indian knowledge into something administratively recognisable to itself.
Instead of Indian categories expanding contemporary research, they are reduced to elective modules.
Instead of intellectual traditions producing new theories, methods, technologies and institutions, they become objects of heritage preservation.
Civilisation becomes content.
The institution remains sovereign.
What would institutional decolonisation actually look like?
The alternative is not to burn down universities, abolish bureaucracy or discard modern science.
It is to move from recovery to regeneration.
A genuinely decolonial university would not merely offer courses about Indian Knowledge Systems. It would allow Indian intellectual traditions to participate in defining research questions, categories, pedagogies and methodologies.
It would build serious pathways for scholarship in Indian languages—not merely translations of English scholarship into Indian languages, but original knowledge production within them.
It would recognise multiple forms of expertise: textual scholarship, scientific research, craft knowledge, oral traditions, artistic practice, community memory and lived disciplinary lineages—while subjecting all of them to appropriate standards of rigour.
It would experiment with pedagogies beyond the lecture-examination cycle.
It would reconnect knowledge with observation, apprenticeship, debate, practice and application.
It would create new disciplines where necessary rather than forcing every inherited knowledge system into nineteenth-century departmental boundaries.
Most importantly, it would ask Indian Knowledge Systems to solve contemporary problems.
The goal cannot be merely to prove that an Indian scholar discovered something centuries before Europe did.
That produces civilisational reassurance, not civilisational renewal.
The more ambitious question is:
What can Indian knowledge traditions help humanity discover next?
That is the difference between archaeology and research.
Between preservation and transmission.
Between identity and capability.
Between remembering a knowledge civilisation and becoming one again.
Encouragingly, India's emerging policy language increasingly recognises this distinction. The IKS Division now describes its goal as moving beyond merely acknowledging historical knowledge towards generating new research, innovation and contemporary applications from Bhāratīya paradigms.
The success of that project will depend upon whether institutions themselves are eventually willing to change.
Decolonisation cannot be outsourced
There is perhaps a final irony in the Indian debate.
We frequently ask institutions created to standardise knowledge to produce epistemic diversity.
We ask bureaucracies created to centralise authority to revive decentralised traditions.
We ask credential systems to recognise knowledge that historically existed outside credentials.
We ask English-dominant universities to revive Indian-language intellectual cultures.
We ask academic departments constructed around modern disciplinary boundaries to recover knowledge traditions whose architecture crossed those boundaries.
Then we are surprised when the result is superficial.
Institutions are not infinitely flexible containers.
Their structures generate outcomes.
This does not make transformation impossible. Institutions can evolve dramatically. Indeed, Indian history itself provides ample evidence of traditions absorbing, debating and transforming ideas arriving from elsewhere.
But absorption is different from submission.
A civilisation capable of intellectual confidence does not reject something merely because it is foreign.
Neither does it accept something merely because it is modern.
It interrogates.
It tests.
It adapts.
And where necessary, it builds.
That last verb may be the most important.
For too much of Indian decolonisation has concerned itself with removing colonial influence and too little with building postcolonial institutions.
What would a university designed from first principles for twenty-first-century India look like?
What would research institutions organised around Indian civilisational categories but open to global science look like?
What would a genuinely multilingual knowledge economy look like?
What would teacher education look like if teachers were understood not simply as curriculum-delivery personnel but as participants in a living intellectual tradition?
What forms of peer review, apprenticeship, scholarly debate, textual study and empirical validation might emerge if India treated its intellectual inheritance as a resource for institutional innovation rather than merely curricular representation?
These are harder questions than whether another ancient text should be placed on a reading list.
They are also considerably more consequential.
From postcolonial administration to civilisational agency
India's great decolonial failure has not been that it retained everything inherited from Britain.
That would be historically inaccurate and intellectually unfair.
Independent India transformed itself in extraordinary ways, built democratic institutions at enormous scale, expanded education, developed major scientific capacities and continuously modified its inherited structures. Colonial legacies themselves are not destiny; recent economic research, for example, shows that postcolonial policy has been capable of reducing or eliminating some long-term disadvantages associated with colonial institutions even while other effects have remained more persistent.
The failure is subtler.
It is the tendency to imagine that sovereignty over an institution automatically produces sovereignty through that institution.
It does not.
A flag can change while a bureaucracy retains its habits.
A curriculum can change while an examination retains its logic.
A law can change while the citizen-state relationship remains hierarchical.
A syllabus can include Indian knowledge while the rules deciding what counts as knowledge remain untouched.
Political decolonisation asks:
Who rules?
Cultural decolonisation asks:
Whose story is told?
Epistemic decolonisation asks:
Who determines what counts as knowledge?
Institutional decolonisation must go one step further:
What structures allow a civilisation to continuously generate, test, transmit and renew knowledge on its own terms while remaining open to the world?
Until that question is addressed, India risks endlessly attempting to decolonise colonial institutions by feeding them Indian content.
The vocabulary will change.
The ceremonies will change.
The reading lists will change.
The institutional grammar will remain.
And grammar, eventually, determines what can be said.
The real measure of Indian decolonisation will therefore not be how much of the colonial past India manages to erase.
It will be whether India can once again acquire the confidence and capability to create institutions that future generations will inherit from us.
