The Challenges of Curriculum Decolonisation within the Postcolonial Indian Context: A Case Study
- Mousumi Mukherjee, PhD, Associate Professor & Deputy Director, IIHED, O.P. Jindal Global University; Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne
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Even in the postcolonial contexts of the Global South, Universities as sites of knowledge production and dissemination, have reinforced only colonial knowledge systems which involved a systemic exclusion of alternative epistemologies of categories like indigenous people, gender, race, and sexuality. This is probably because decolonization has not been an easy process. This paper highlights the challenges of curriculum decolonization within the postcolonial Indian context with the English literature curriculum as a case. Citing the recent controversial removal of renowned Bengali author and activist, Mahasweta Devi and two Dalit authors’ texts from the undergraduate English syllabus at Delhi University, this paper discusses how the internal ethnic, caste, class, religious, and gender-based divisions determine the voices that get incorporated within the “decolonized” curriculum versus the voices, that get excluded within the postcolonial Indian society. Thereby, this paper problematizes the act of curriculum decolonization within the internally diverse and hierarchical postcolonial context of India.
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Dr. Mousumi Mukherjee is an Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building at O.P. Jindal Global University. She is a distinguished Fulbright alumna with more than two decades of teaching and research experience in India, United States and Australia. She is Vice-President of Research and Partnerships Development of the STAR Scholars Network, a Research Standing Committee Member of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies, and has worked as a consultant for the World Bank (New Delhi), UNESCO–IIEP (Paris), Higher Education Strategy Associates (Toronto) and the Australia-India Institute (Melbourne).
