President Murmu Advocates Decolonising Education Through Indigenous Knowledge Revival and Multilingual Equity in Indian Academia
Original framing: “President Murmu Calls for Revival of Indian Knowledge Systems and Linguistic Pride at MG Antarrashtriya Hindi University” — bing news
The British colonial state systematically dismantled indigenous education through policies like the 1835 Macaulay Minute, which privileged English and Western science while denigrating local knowledge. Post-independence, India’s education system inherited this hierarchy, with Hindi imposition in the 1960s exacerbating linguistic divides (e.g., the 1965 anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu). Gandhi himself critiqued industrial modernity but also advocated Hindi as a unifying force, revealing the tensions in his own thought between pluralism and homogenisation. The current revival discourse must grapple with these historical contradictions to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Murmu’s speech signals a potential paradigm shift in Indian education, but its success hinges on whether it transcends majoritarian linguistic nationalism to address the deeper crisis of epistemic injustice inherited from colonialism and perpetuated by postcolonial elites.
The historical parallels are stark: just as the British imposed English to create a class of clerks, today’s Hindi-centric revival risks creating a new class of compliant citizens while sidelining the very communities whose knowledge systems are being celebrated. A systemic solution requires dismantling the caste and class hierarchies embedded in traditional knowledge systems—something Gandhi’s own ambivalence on caste reveals as unfinished business. Globally, movements like Bolivia’s plurinational education or South Africa’s Africanisation debates show that epistemic justice is inseparable from material justice; India’s path must integrate these lessons to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The key actors—government, academia, and civil society—must collaborate on a framework that centres marginalised voices, validates indigenous knowledge through rigorous science, and reimagines education as a tool for cognitive liberation rather than national consolidation.