Hindu Decolonization — What the Heck Is It?

When I travel I wear my saris and my churidars, with a bindi. People ask me about them. So what is the caste system really about?

For sixty years I had no answer. I was born in Bombay. I had nothing of my own to say.

This book is what I found when I went looking.

It is a history our English schools never taught us, and it is not a gentle one. Under Islamic rule and under Christian institutions, things were done to Hindus that our own textbooks leave out. I name what happened and I name who did it. I write about the Goa Inquisition, which sat for two hundred and fifty years and is absent from Indian classrooms. I write about the famines, the census that ranked us by the width of our noses, and the schools that taught us to be ashamed of our own grandparents.

I also write about my own house. The nun in school who could not manage three syllables of Sanskrit and renamed me. My uncle walking to the school gate in his dhoti, and me turning my face away.

And I write about what we did to ourselves, because that is ours to own too.

If you are Hindu and much of this is unfamiliar, that is not a failure of your attention. It is what generations of colonial and missionary erasure were built to produce.

This book is for: the Hindu student who wants to know more about what happened than her parents know. The parent who wants something they can have actually read. Anyone whose people were told their ways were superstition, and believed it.

This book is not: an interfaith bridge, a soft overview, or a book that treats every history as equally blameless.

If you want to look at how we got bonded to the West and to Western systems, and to recover pride in your heritage, I think you will find a home here.