Decolonising Indian Mind and Rajiv Malhotra’s ‘Predatory-Digested Cultures’ Paradigm

Abstract

While the ostensible political colonization by the West mostly ended in the world long back, the subterranean cultural colonization of the ‘third world’ continues unabated, helped by the material success of the West and the inferiority complex present in the native intellectual class. In India, the impetus to shed the colonial baggage through re-writing of history and recovering ancient knowledge, which the postcolonial approach encouraged once, has become a bone of contention between the ruling and the opposing parties, but that is the tip of the iceberg if one considers the various forms of attack on Indian knowledge frameworks and ethos, and on the cultural unity of India. Rajiv Malhotra, a renowned Indologist and public intellectual, in his writings, draws attention to the colonial time plunder and re-branding of Indian knowledge systems according to what he terms as ‘predatory/digested cultures’ paradigm and details the subtle strategies being adopted even now by the West. My paper examines Malhotra’s findings on the basis of ground reality obtaining in India presently, interpolating it to the cultural (read political) theories through which the West intends homogenizing and hegemonizing the rest of the world and which needs to be challenged to thwart the repetition of colonial powerplay.