Commoners Speak Now

Before social media, a relatively small number of people spoke in the name of commoners, often usurping their voices and even their sense of being. Post-colonialism examined how international power cliques, through their intellectual and institutional machinery, claimed to speak on behalf of the world's marginalised while simultaneously casting them in their own image. Yet many of the protagonists of post-colonial discourse were themselves carving out niches within Western academia, speaking in the name of the very people from whom they had become socially and materially distant.

The phenomenon is not confined to international politics or academia. It operated at every level of society, descending through institutions, communities, and even families. Someone would speak for another, define another, and gradually appropriate another's being. The power to represent often became the power to replace.

The social media landscape has opened the means of public expression to ordinary people. Millions now speak for themselves rather than through designated intermediaries. It is perhaps not surprising that, as direct voices proliferate, the lords of abstraction redouble their efforts at distraction.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Postcolonialism Unfolding

The school of postcolonialism sought to expose both the soft and hard infrastructures of imperialist designs that operated at the expense of the decolonised. However, their abstruse works failed to gain traction even in academic circles, let alone among the broader literati. People often speak of the lingering, debilitating effects of colonialism on their faculties and agency, but they have struggled to arrive at a workable idea to overcome the problem. More often than not, they ended up reinforcing precisely what they sought to eliminate, simply because they did not know how to dismantle it. Yet, of late, new technologies and new-age entrepreneurs are achieving exactly that—without any such explicit intention.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Anticolonialism and Postcolonialism

First, let me define these two terms for the sake of clarity. I would welcome being corrected if they are off the mark.

Anticolonialism was an ideological project and action plan for exposing colonial designs, legitimacy, and hegemony; and seeking national liberation from colonial rule.

Postcolonialism is a philosophical enterprise and programme for national reconstruction after the colonial devastation for redeeming dignity in people's living conditions and an egalitarian world order. Postcolonial theoreticians have uncovered the continued sway of colonial epistemology and institutions denying autonomy and agency to the decolonised world. 

 
The postcolonialism programme is proving to be trickier. Earlier they relied on Bolshevism, but being a deceptive doctrine of liberation it failed all its adherents and even its homeland. Postcolonialism needs new consciousness and fresh imagination. We need the significance of self-educated people in numbers.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Religionism as Intellectualism

Religionism overweighed postcolonial intellectualism and drove them to the absurd extreme to deploy secularism to cater to the religions. And, as such, academia and professional intellectuals in the main remained hostile to the spirit, forms, and practices of dharma, i.e, the mindful viewing of being. In place of knowing and practising dharma, they paid obeisance to creeds and dogmas. They mistook doctrines as principles, indoctrination as education, diktats as laws, and as such diminished life in a way that such vital contradistinctions as between sanity and insanity turned indistinguishable. Their constructions, mental and material, collapsed within decades under their own weight of incongruities, and now we sit on the heaps of debris everywhere. They are still well-ensconced and mock the people in distress. They continue to play their loud orchestra in order to drown the voices of logic and rationality.

Niraj Kumar Jha