Description
The panel seeks to engage with the politics of decolonizing the discipline of International Relations building upon perspectives from India. Scholars within India, outside, and across the ideological spectrum have shown an interest in this endeavour. The contributions include interpreting Arthashashtra, Mahabharata and other texts in a new light, bringing Indian thinkers and placing them in the domain of IR, and introducing key concepts of Indian Knowledge System to reconfigure the discipline. The contributions have ranged from finding similarities between extant concepts and traditional Indian practices to positing the superior distinctiveness of Indian ideas. For the purpose of simplification, these works can broadly be categorized/labelled as Non-Western, Post-Western, Global, Nativistic, etc. The panel interrogates and problematizes these exercises that begin by either critiquing Eurocentrism and romanticizing Indian contributions, or presenting the Indian ideas as precursors of Western concepts. While attempting to uncover the perils of such attempts of decolonizing IR, the contributions in this panel align with the idea that Indian tradition(s) evolved while traversing through critical historical conjunctures and learning from internal contradictions.
