Decolonial Education as Contradiction: Development, Dispossession & Contested Visions of Indigenous Futures in Western India

• In Event: Recovering the Third World Studies Project: Towards New Visions of Anti-Imperial Pedagogies & Global Solidarities

Abstract

With the rise of Narendra Modi’s fascist right-wing government (Bharatiya Janata Party), state violence against minority populations including Dalit, Muslims, and Adivasis (Indigenous ) has increased significantly (Lerche & Shah, 2018). State-sponsored development projects, including dams, mines, logging, and tourism (Ghosh, 2006) have dispossessed and displaced India’s Indigenous communities, positioning them in precarious conditions. Like other global Indigenous socio-political movements working towards self-determination and sovereignty, Adivasis engage in resistance to protect their land from encroachments and assert cultural and linguistic Indigenous knowledges and rights.

Simultaneously, youth are figured in state imaginaries as catalysts for national economic growth. Within regions of Adivasi dispossession, such as the Narmada district in the state of Gujarat, government and corporate actors claim to foster youth development through skills education. Curiously, in Adivasi regions, efforts to revitalize Indigenous knowledge have been integrated into these programs. In the Narmada district, in 2018, the Indian government completed the construction of the Statue of Unity. At a height of 597 feet, it towers as the largest statue in the world. In efforts to placate Adivasi communities, just before the unveiling of the statue, in 2017 Narendra Modi, laid the foundation stone for a state-of-the-art National Museum of Tribal Freedom Fighters to honor Adivasi freedom fighters within anti-colonial movements as part of a broader effort to “shed colonial mindsets.”

Decolonial education is strategically deployed by different actors. On one hand, state interventions draw on anti-colonial rhetoric while configuring the cultivation of youth economic capital as crucial in projects to ‘develop’ Adivasi regions, as they confiscate community land. On the other hand, Indigenous social movements center youth as political actors in struggles to preserve land, culture, and ways of being. Both approaches claim to draw on ‘decolonial’ education as a means to shape youth potential.
In this paper I argue that decolonial education is taken up by state and social movement actors to advance contradictory goals, in ways that can further sediment domination and oppression. I draw on the Third World Studies project in alignment with Indigenous scholarship to map threads of decolonial education in times of global fascism. In doing so, I maintain that attention must be given to contemporary forms of imperialism, which are tied up with global capital, state, and corporate interests, and internal hierarchies within communities (Shah, 2024).

Author

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers University