India’s Multiplicity and the Cosmopolitan Mind

Sujata Patel, you are recognized as one of the most prominent Indian sociologists and a globally respected voice in postcolonial thought. What are the roots of your intellectual development?

My thinking was deeply shaped by my childhood home. My parents were part of the Indian national movement and followers of Mahatma Gandhi. They were even imprisoned several times due to their political activism. My parents were profoundly concerned with the question of what form of education a postcolonial country actually requires. Later, during my Master’s Studies at Bombay University, I encountered a tension in sociological teaching: while most focused on rural India and the caste system, we studied early capitalist development and social classes in modern India. This fascination with class conflict led me to pursue a PhD in history, where I focused specifically on the growth of classes in early 20th-century Indian cities. By integrating economics and political science into my historical research, I eventually evolved into a historical sociologist.

In what way did this approach shape your academic trajectory?

This academic path allowed me to develop a “sociological map of India” through extensive research across the country, moving beyond the small case studies that often characterize the field. At the same time, I entered into subsequent international collaborations with European scholars, particularly in France and Holland. It was through these interactions that I realized the prevailing European models of modernization, which assumed that industrialization inevitably leads to urbanization, did not apply to the Indian context. I observed a process of urbanization without industrialization, which convinced me that we need alternative models of modernization to understand the Global South.

In 2023, India overtook China as the most populous country in the world, yet in the global discourse, India often seems to remain under the radar compared to its neighbor. What can you tell us about the socio-economic reality of India?

There is a global perception that Indians dominate the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry, but this is largely a backend service industry. There is still very little investment in innovative software development. Furthermore, there is enormous inequality. Roughly 85% of the population is employed in low-end jobs, such as delivery services or platform economies. While there has been significant investment in higher education, school education and lower-level technical training have been neglected, leaving many in a state of survival poverty where they cannot aspire to more.

Sociologically and culturally, India is extremely complex. I call it a “multiplicity”. While China is a centralized system with a regulated language and identity, making it easier for the West to grasp as a singular power. India has 22 official languages, hundreds of dialects, and vast ecological and regional differences. This makes India an intellectual challenge, but it is precisely this complexity that offers the chance for a truly cosmopolitan way of thinking.

Much of your work deals with the change and persistence of colonial structures. In your recently edited volume, Anti-colonial Global Scholarship, you address how the question of coloniality has shaped thinking and what must come after. What are the core objectives of this approach?

To understand this, we first have to distinguish between different frameworks of what comes after colonialism. Postcolonialism emerged largely from literary studies in North America, focusing on how the colonized were perceived in art and media. Decoloniality, arising primarily in Latin America, focuses on reviving the knowledge and cultures of indigenous peoples wiped out by Iberian colonialism. Anti-colonialism, however, is a philosophy of action. It is about how those colonized in South Asia or Africa understood colonial knowledge and resisted it.

Our intention with Global Scholarship is to build upon this by creating a larger, interdisciplinary map that brings together philosophical and cultural ideas from across the world. It is about moving away from a “universal” Euro-American theory and instead engaging in a dialogue between different worldviews to see how we can create new ways of understanding our shared human society.

Post-colonial thought has recently come under political pressure, and nationalism is on the rise. In your view, is colonialism making a comeback?

I do not believe colonialism ever truly went away. It simply changes its quality. Colonialism is, at its core, the extraction of wealth, material, ecological, and cultural resources. We see this today in the interest in precious materials in Iran or the current geopolitical struggles over Venezuela. It is even happening in outer space: The race to colonize the moon is driven by the desire for minerals.

I agree that we are seeing a revival rigid thinking. I believe this was accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis, which created a profound sense of insecurity and uncertainty about the future. This instability has led people worldwide to retreat into religious orthodoxisms and nationalist ideologies. We see this in the rise of “nationalist social sciences” that reject open, differentiating thought in favor of a closed, national identity.

Given this political environment, what are you doing to promote global thinking?

I see it as my mission to use my position to promote democratic discussion. I am currently focusing on giving as many lectures as possible to convince people in academia that there are different ways to think and that we must engage with them. For instance, I was very happy to see the overwhelming response to my lectures at the University of Freiburg, where students packed the room. It shows that there is a hunger for these perspectives. My goal is to promote a Global Social Science that doesn’t just study the world from a distance but learns from the multiplicities of different worlds, challenging our own perspectives again and again.