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| Muslim celebrations of Ramadan |
Writing this blog post on this first day of March 2025, I feel joyful about the openings for renewal and hope this time brings.
This year, the colorful Hindu festival of Holi crisscrosses Muslim celebrations of Ramadan.
Anticolonial syncretism
Growing up in Bengal in the 1980s, in the cosmopolitan town of Kharagpur, in a family that traversed interfaith spaces in our everyday lives and relationships, both these festivals reflected invitations to love across difference, to connect, and to explore possibilities of mutuality.
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| Hindu celebrations of Holi |
This anchor to mutuality formed the heart of a decolonizing politics in the South Asian subcontinent, actively creating a register that resisted the colonizing whiteness of divide and rule strategies.
Against these violent strategies of manipulation created by the British through the careful study of colonized societies, anticolonial resistance sutured spaces of dialogue and building bridges.
These bridges, across diverse faith traditions and religio-cultural practices, united resistance struggles, forming the basis for creating anchors that challenged colonial processes of extraction and exploitation.
Connecting and uniting across differences while celebrating the plural bases for these differences formed the heart of the Indian anticolonial struggle.
Sikhs, Jains, Christians, Muslims and Hindus coming together to resist British extraction, exploitation and violence mobilized one of the most powerful exemplars of global anticolonialism. This unity, rooted in pluralism and respect, mobilized the South Asian imaginary on the global stage.
South Asia offered and continues to offer us a uniquely South Asian anticolonial pedagogy, one that turns to ongoing dialogues between pluralism and syncretism as the basis for mutuality.
Forgetting our anticolonial histories
Post independence and in the backdrop of Cold War politics, the ideological machineries of neocolonialism and imperialism worked actively to erase these accounts of mutuality and syncretism that form the fabrics of South Asia, often placing South Asian nations in conflict with each other. The violence that is witnessed across diverse contexts of South Asia is a direct outcome of colonial politics, further catalyzed by neocolonialism.
Imperial structures of aid and development were designed to further propagate strife, designed to serve the interests of the military industrial complex and to open up nations of the Global South to the US-based global free market.
Postcolonial elite participation
Postcolonial elites gained tremendously from these imperial interests, participating actively in the reproduction of narratives of othering. Signing onto the imperial war machinery translated into personal profits for postcolonial elites.
The violent history of partition, itself a product of colonial machinations and violence, marked the sub-continent with violence, further perpetuated through regional politics, framing South Asia as a zone of conflict.
Forgetting the underlying ideological architecture of colonial processes, surrounded by the ecosystem of Cold War othering, South Asian communities have often immersed in easy narratives/binaries that reproduce the construction of the other. Consider the ways in which the India-Pakistan conflict holds up the military-intelligence-industrial ecosystem, simultaneously feeding the interests of imperial expansion in the region.
The active work of forgetting our connections, our mutuality, and our ability to forge bridges has been critical to the propagation of an imperial politics that geo-strategically and materially benefits from the violence.
Mutuality: The ways we connect
Ramadan and Holi in 2025 are invitations to new imaginations.
In a global landscape mired with the rise of technologized violence, consolidation of oligarchic power, and authoritarian repression, the call to mutuality in this season offers us the basis for imagining other worlds. These other worlds promise hopes for ways of being beyond the conflict and violence that forms the military-police-imperial infrastructure of neocolonialism.
Recognizing that the communicative processes of othering that underlie ideologies of hate calls for critical reflection that unpacks the workings of power in the continual production of the other, and in active refusal to feed the political economy of violence.
Mutuality, a philosophical orientation that invites us to consider reflectively the ways in which we connect, offers profound openings for transformations, personally, relationally, in our communities, in our societies, in the region, and globally. South Asia's history of syncretism as anticolonial practice offers a decolonizing register for how we imagine and materialize global geopolitics.
Through the possibilities of mutuality, South Asia has an opportunity to continue its anticolonial legacy, offering a decolonizing register on the global stage that undoes the colonial processes that produce violence by refusing these processes of neocolonial/imperial divide and rule. Exploring connections through critical self-reflection forms a powerful anchor for how we build a future together.
Mutuality as refusal to participate in the communicative infrastructure of colonial violence, in a global landscape torn apart by ongoing reproductions of neocolonialism, invites us to consider the transformative possibilities opened up by authentic dialogue.
Dialogue that upholds our differences, respects our sovereignty, and explores ways in which we live together by embracing our differences promises to unfold new horizons beyond the colonial/imperial.