The Department of History at the University of Hyderabad organised a Distinguished Lecture, titled as ‘Thinking from Where We Are’, by Prof. Dilip M. Menon. Prof. Menon teaches History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; he is also the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the same University.
The lecture begun with Prof. Dilip emphasising the need to think beyond the West that structures our mind and our world. Our historiographies resort to a periodization in history that centralises colonialism and confine us to think through the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial temporal frames. For constructing a non-west without imbibing the western manufactures it is essential to think beyond the conceptual and theoretical vocabularies emanated from the West. Through this, he foregrounded the need to understand decoloniality by giving the example of the South African university students from the post-apartheid era who led a movement and created a churn in 2015-2016 to change the syllabi. At the same time, Prof. Menon cautioned not to fall for the usage of decoloniality that perpetuates ‘nativist’ notion of India that was violent and inegalitarian – most often drawn from the constructions supplied by the West. He also proposed a decoloniality that looks for new beginnings rather than tracing something from a pristine past and origins that characterised the nationalist writings. By giving the example of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism and his discovery of Buddhism, he pushed for the idea of perpetual new beginnings by not being outside the tradition but looking beside it. Recovering concepts and categories from non-western cultures and its historical and everyday lives is essential for this.
He also linked the decoloniality project to the need to understand the inegalitarian structures through words from the people’s mouths and the words that structure everyday relations. In this context, he cited a word from Malayalam language as an example – Othukkam which carries different connotations within Kerala’s social, political, and cultural spheres. He pointed out that the word Othukkam is repeatedly used in the Malayalam-speaking society around the bodily comportments of women, making the word occupying a central place in the Malayalee universe of patriarchy. We can identify end number of words and phrases in our languages that enables us to trace the historical making of societies and hierarchies, changing ideologies and shifting orientations. Prof. Menon brought the examples of certain key figures in the Kerala public sphere whose historical imagination of the region traversed spatial boundaries, only to be shrivelled to a terrestrial imagination of closure as modernity progressed.
The lecture was followed by inquisitive questions from the students and faculty to which the speaker passionately and lucidly responded.
This lecture was held at the C.V. Raman Auditorium on 28 January 2025 as part of the ‘Brokering Mobility’ project initiative of the Institution of Eminence, University of Hyderabad. Dr. V J Varghese introduced the speaker and Prof. Bhangya Bhukya moderated the session. The lecture witnessed the presence of a large and enthusiastic crowd composed of faculty and students from diverse disciplines.
Contributed by: Chitran D, Research Scholar, Department of History