Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ten-year pledge to “free India from the Macaulay mindset” in a recent lecture comes wrapped in the promise of a major civilisational rebirth.
On the surface, it sounds like a noble effort to complete an incomplete freedom struggle; to shed the mental habits left behind by the colonial rule once and for all. However, once the initial excitement of the statement wears off, things start to look far more complicated.
In fact, quite ironically, the entire project seems to be based on a narrow understanding of what colonialism actually entailed, and an even narrower idea of what true decolonisation requires.
What the Prime Minister is selling as liberation may actually end up shrinking India’s intellectual space instead of truly widening it.
How the ‘Macaulay Mindset’ Oversimplifies History
Of course, Modi’s use of the term “Macaulay mindset”, we must remember, is less a coherent theory and more a political slogan, but an effective one. It bundles together diverse reforms, symbols, and messages under a single emotionally charged idea, which is why it deserves closer scrutiny.
In this narrative, Macaulay’s 1835 education policy becomes the original wound—the moment Indians supposedly lost self-belief and began seeking validation from the West. The proposed remedy is a decade of reversing that damage by promoting Indian languages, reviving traditional knowledge, and urging institutions to think “Bharatiya” rather than “Western.”
These reforms may have separate histories, but since Modi presents them as one civilisational mission, it makes sense to assess them together.
The problem, to start with, is that this narrative oversimplifies India’s complex past, reducing varied issues to a single “Macaulay mindset” and treating modern ideas as mere colonial imports. In fact, some critics have already noted that decolonisation rhetoric is fuelled by resentment, turning disagreement into evidence of a “colonised mind.”
Worse, pluralism, dissent, and complex histories are recast as foreign rather than democratic. This approach resonates with some because colonial wounds still shape many Indians’ experiences, and the desire to reclaim dignity is real. However, quite unfortunately, these emotions are being channeled into cultural pride, while leaving deeper power structures untouched.
Decolonial Thinkers, Selectively Borrowed
This pattern becomes clearer when we examine how words are borrowed from famous decolonial thinkers while overlooking their core ideas and concepts. Fanon, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha do not all think alike, but they share one core belief: decolonisation is not simply about culture or language. It is about dismantling the power structures, inequalities, and institutional habits that colonialism has left behind.
Fanon linked mental freedom to social equality. Said showed how scholarship can reproduce imperial ideas. Spivak warned that nationalist elites often silence the voices of ordinary people. Bhabha emphasised that cultures are mixed and complex, rather than pure. None of them argued for shutting out global knowledge or replacing one dominant story with another.
India’s history bears this out. Colonial education did not undo caste; it fused with existing hierarchies and often reinforced them. The British centralised bureaucracy also remained after 1947, creating a “colonial state without the colonisers,” where control and hierarchy persist to this day.
Real decolonisation, therefore, would begin by reforming these structures and by strengthening the knowledge traditions of Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan, women, and regional communities.
In fact, India already has rich, homegrown decolonising movements, including Dalit critiques of caste, Adivasi demands for autonomy, linguistic struggles, women’s movements, and regional intellectual traditions. A serious project would learn from these, not replace them with a single state-approved “Indic civilisation.”
When Decolonisation Turns Into Majoritarianism
Instead, the current approach centralises power. Curriculum changes bypass experts, inconvenient history is erased, and a simplified Hindu narrative takes its place. New security laws expand state control, continuing colonial patterns. The louder the government claims to remove colonial influence, the easier it becomes to dismiss criticism as “colonised thinking.”
This selectivity also shows up in economics and foreign policy. India’s economic direction, marked by deregulation, corporate concentration, and dependence on global finance, does not break from colonial structures of power. Internationally, India’s cautious stand on issues like Palestine weakens claims of anti-colonial solidarity.
What gets targeted instead are intellectual traditions such as secularism, critical history writing, and constitutionalism, dismissed as “Western,” even though Ambedkar, Nehru, and many others saw them as essential for building a democratic India.
Most worrying is also how religious minorities are now cast as remnants of colonial influence. Islam and Christianity are framed as “external” faiths that must fit a majoritarian idea of Indian civilisation. This thinking lets the state blend decolonisation rhetoric with Hindu majoritarianism, turning demands for equality into supposed national betrayal, exactly the distortion postcolonial thinkers warned against.
A Truly Decolonial Future Needs More Openness
Even symbolically, the goal of erasing a “Macaulay mindset” by 2035 is flawed. Firstly, India was never a pure civilisation interrupted by the West; it has always been shaped by Buddhist, Islamic, Persianate, regional, indigenous, and global currents. Hybridity emerged through unequal power, yet dismissing global knowledge as “foreign” ignores India’s own role in shaping modern science, rights, and social movements.
The tools we use today to fight caste injustice, protect freedoms, or confront climate change are global tools built through shared struggles, including India’s.
Of course, this does not mean colonial legacies should be ignored. India, quite certainly and urgently, needs to rethink Eurocentric syllabi, bureaucratic structures that treat citizens as subjects, Victorian moral codes, and development models that overlook regional histories.
However, decolonisation cannot be reduced to fighting the English language alone. It must be an effort to make knowledge and power more democratic: by funding universities, supporting research in all Indian languages, reforming institutions, and examining both colonial and civilisational claims with honesty.
Finally, a government truly committed to decolonisation would rely on transparency and wholeheartedly welcome scrutiny. It would recognise Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar, Tagore, and countless subaltern voices as co-authors of a still unfinished freedom struggle, not as obstacles.
The real challenge before the Indian democracy, therefore, is to ensure that the language of decolonisation does not become another tool for control. A genuinely decolonial future would actually widen, not narrow, the space in which Indians debate their past and decide their collective future.
(P John J Kennedy, educator and political analyst based in Bengaluru.This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)