Description
This paper contributes to the emerging field of decolonial International Relations (IR) by foregrounding Indian intellectual resources that unsettle the discipline’s Eurocentric assumptions. Building on postcolonial theory’s critique of epistemic domination—especially its insights on representation, universalism, and power—this study re-reads IR through the categories developed by Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore. From Aurobindo, it draws the ideas of nation-soul, spiritual nationalism, and a federative “ideal of human unity,” articulating a pathway from cultural self-renewal (swaraj in ideas) to a plural world order not reducible to balance-of-power logics. From Tagore, it engages the critique of the modern nation-state as a “machine,” the ethic of world humanism (viśva-mānav), and the pedagogical experiment of Visva-Bharati as an institutional imagination for cosmopolitan belonging. Methodologically, the paper combines conceptual history and hermeneutic reconstruction to extract IR-relevant norms—dharma (ethical restraint), reciprocity (hospitality across borders), and loka-saṅgraha (sustaining the commonweal). It advances three claims: (1) an epistemic move that provincializes Westphalian categories by introducing Indian frames (swaraj, dharma) as first-order analytical tools; (2) a normative move that reorients security toward non-domination and relational dignity; and (3) an institutional move that sketches a pluriversal, layered internationalism reconciling Aurobindo’s civilizational selfhood with Tagore’s cosmopolitan critique. The result is a decolonial grammar for IR that neither romanticizes indigeneity nor subsumes difference into abstract universalism, but proposes a rigorous, dialogical basis for theory and practice from India.
