The ‘post’ that never was: Moggallan Bharti, ‘Understanding the Postcolonial: Native versus Settlers and Brahmin versus Dalit’, in Sejuti Das Gupta, Shouvik Chakraborty, Taposik Banerjee (eds), Contradictions of Democracy, Development and Inequality, Routledge, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The ‘post’ that never was: Moggallan Bharti, ‘Understanding the Postcolonial: Native versus Settlers and Brahmin versus Dalit’, in Sejuti Das Gupta, Shouvik Chakraborty, Taposik Banerjee (eds), Contradictions of Democracy, Development and Inequality, Routledge, 2025

17Jul25

Abstract: This chapter reviews postcolonial theory from the standpoint of the politics of social justice of two marginalised groups from different geographical settings, namely dalits in India and the indigenous people of Andean Latin America. It is argued that postcolonialism and the Subaltern Studies School—while developing a critique of colonialism and claiming to initiate a reading of history from below—overlooked this referred perspective of history of the below. For instance, dalits in India do not share the critique of postcolonial scholarships and have advanced their own nuanced understanding of colonial history. This chapter foregrounds the grip of caste in understanding colonial history—something which remains absent in postcolonial scholarship—and offers a renewed understanding of the political world view of the marginalised that has remained unattended in the vast literature of decolonisation studies.

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