Paper short abstract:

The traditional curriculum in English Literature in post-colonial India relied heavily on Eurocentric approaches. Through a critical review of literature, drawing on Talbot’s approach (2023), this paper argues how these problems complicate decolonisation. Decolonizing the English Literature curriculum may realise its full potential by transcending the boundaries of essentialism, nation and group.

Paper long abstract:

The traditional curriculum in English Literature in post-colonial India relied heavily on Eurocentric approaches. In historicizing the discipline, it was only in the late twentieth century that calls to decentre the Anglocentric' canon’ of a liberal humanist education was felt across the landscape of English Literary Studies across India with the canon wars. In a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual post-colonial India, fraught with socio-political, cultural and religious hierarchies, the task of negotiating with the yoke of coloniality must be combined with the human capabilities approach to address complex issues of social justice in the country.

It is only in recent times that curriculum and pedagogy (a specific subset of the decolonisation project in academia) have been taken up in conversations around decolonisation in higher education, hitherto reserved only to the level of research methods and disciplinary theories (Sanchez 2018, as cited in Shahjahan, 2022). As movements across the globe to ‘de’ colonise educational institutions in erstwhile colonies began in the recent decade (primarily as student movements in the Global North and South), it became urgent to examine the very nature of the knowledge that is produced and perpetuated through the curriculum in higher education.

In former white settler colonies, the task of academic decolonisation has run its trajectory in contrast to the way it has shaped up in India. Even though there have been subsequent revisions in the curriculum of English Literary Studies across India to address its erstwhile Anglocentric character in the post-colonial context, the politics of inclusion and exclusion in curriculum design and implementation in the present context are being carried out in a context rife with ideological battles around the concept of decolonisation. In such a complex scenario, the purpose of decolonising the curriculum risks being counterproductive to its tangible aim of achieving educational justice. Hence, it may be helpful to investigate curriculum decolonisation through the human capabilities approach. This may offer a fresh insight into realising the aims of decolonising the English Literature curriculum in post-colonial India.

This paper draws on Talbot (2023), who argues for multiple intellectual commitments within decolonisation and the potential of curriculum decolonisation to foreground ‘openness and criticality’ for transformative change in education. This paper argues that the same can be realised by being mindful of an overfocus on inclusion approaches. Categorised under decolonisation are various positionalities of knowledge within the curriculum, which are problematic when viewed from the lens of the capabilities approach. Focusing on the reification of knowledge, which Talbot (2023) defines as the knowledge which becomes ‘the concrete possession of groups’, and “essentialism (in which certain cultures or groups are constructed as sharing some common, binding attribute)” (Talbot, 2023). Spivak’s (1983) concept of strategic essentialism is useful here to understand how curricular decolonisation can be rendered uncritical in the post-colonial Indian context.

Through a critical review of literature, drawing on Talbot’s approach (2023), this paper argues how these problems complicate decolonizing the curriculum complemented with the aims of the capability approach in India. Decolonizing the English Literature curriculum may realise its full potential only when we can transcend the boundaries of essentialism, nation and group.