India's Obsession With Decolonization Is a Lie | Devdutt Pattanaik EXPOSED the Debate

ELI5 / TLDR

Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik sits down with a UPSC history teacher and basically says the whole “decolonize India” project is a fantasy. His core move is splitting everything the British brought into two buckets: tools (railways, courts, the stock market, the idea of a “border”) and tales (the stories rulers tell to justify being in charge). You can’t undo the tools, and the tales were never uniquely British anyway — every ruler, Indian or foreign, has imposed a language and a story. His punchline: the people shouting “decolonize” are usually just swapping one story for another while pretending it’s the original, timeless truth.

The Full Story

The potato in the dal

Pattanaik opens with an image he keeps circling back to. Imagine you cook a dal, adding spice after spice over the years, and the last thing you threw in was a potato. The potato has long since melted into the dish. Now someone walks up and says: remove the potato, because the “real” dal existed before it.

“So now everybody’s trying to remove the potato called colonization. So this is an engineering mind which thinks that culture is a series of blocks and I’ll remove a block and the old block will come back. It shows a lack of intellectual rigor.”

Culture, in other words, is not Lego. You can’t pull out 200 years and have the pre-1800 version snap back into place. His verdict is blunt — decolonization “is a theoretical argument which sounds very good, which will win you elections, which will win you debates, but will never be successful.” What you can do is add new ingredients to dampen the bad effects and amplify the good ones. That’s it.

He also says something most guests wouldn’t: in the UPSC exam, write the opposite. Say colonization was horrible and we must decolonize, because that’s the answer the examiner wants. The exam isn’t testing truth, it’s testing alignment. “Get rid of Devdutt yourself and give them the answer they want to hear.”

Tools and tales

This is the spine of the whole conversation. Two words.

Tools are tangible. The railway, the clock tower, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the parliament, modern banking, the printing press. And underneath all of them, one quietly radical invention: the institution — something you can join and leave.

Think about what that replaced. Before, your birth was your destiny. Born in a shepherd’s family, you die a shepherd. The colonial idea that a shepherd’s kid could enter an institution called “school,” then another called “the bureaucracy,” and become a civil servant — that machinery of social mobility simply didn’t exist 200 years ago. Nobody, Pattanaik notes, actually wants to give these tools back.

Tales are the stories rulers tell to justify their presence. The British story was “you are savages, we bring civilization.” They even ran what he cheekily calls an “IT cell” — propaganda, complete with data, about Indians burning women, partly because after 1857 the Crown needed to justify its actions to its own Parliament. Today’s politician, he says, runs the same play with a different script: “Hinduism is in danger.”

“So when somebody says I want to decolonize, they’re not talking about the tools. They’re talking about the tales.”

And here’s the trap. The decolonizer says: they told us we were savages, we’ll prove we weren’t. But to do that you’re still arguing inside their frame. “You’re buying their story.”

The other invention: borders

One tool gets special attention because it reshaped everything. The boundary. Pattanaik points to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as the moment the world got the idea of a hard line on a map.

Empires never had boundaries — the Mughal empire had no edge a nomad couldn’t cross. Once you draw a border, the nomad needs a permit, the tribe gets sliced in half, and you can finally measure the land. “Border” and “measurement,” he says, are the two deepest things colonization installed. When the British asked Indians to define India’s borders, people pointed at mountains and rivers. No, the British said — you need an institution.

The English trap, and the Hindi one

The interviewer presses on language, since Pattanaik writes in English while writing about tradition. Isn’t English the tool of colonization?

His response flips the question. Imagine a Naga tribal kid in Nagaland. Why should he learn Hindi? Hindi isn’t his mother tongue any more than English is. “How is Hindi a non-colonial language and English a colonial language? It’s a point of view, an argument — but it is not a fact.”

He gets personal: he’s Odia, raised in Maharashtra, fluent enough in Marathi to give a speech but not in his own Odia. He uses Hindi purely because it expands his market and reach. Meanwhile Delhi — a single north Indian city sitting on the Gangetic plain’s vote bank — has imposed its language on the whole country and quietly erased dozens of dialects: Bundelkhandi, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Marwari, Awadhi. A tribal child learns Hindi in school and loses the poetry of her own community. “Have you not colonized that tribe?” His closing jab: nobody asks what language President Draupadi Murmu speaks at home, or what her mother cooked. We only interrogate the British.

His larger point: court languages have always changed with power. Ashoka’s was something close to Prakrit; then Brahmins — whom he wryly calls “statecraft consultants” who wrote the Dharmashastra as a survival strategy — installed Sanskrit, exporting a “Sanskrit cosmopolis” from Afghanistan to Vietnam. Then Turkish warriors brought Persian, which fermented into Urdu. Then the British brought English. Every layer was an imposition. Singling out the last one is arbitrary.

Art is a tale wearing a costume

The second half turns to the new National Education Policy (NEP 2020) and its push to teach art, culture, and “Indian Knowledge Systems” (IKS). Pattanaik’s reframe: tales are communicated through three channels — stories, symbols, rituals — and art is how you read them. The Constitution is a purana; the flag and the four lions are symbols; the national anthem is a ritual you stand for without knowing its meaning, “exactly like my friend could recite the Quran without understanding it.”

His showpiece is a single naked statue. You’re told it’s a Jain Tirthankara, but suppose you knew nothing. Why is the man nude, muscular, handsome — clearly privileged — yet sculpted with a flaccid penis and a calm, steady gaze? The artist is communicating, without a single word, a man who has renounced a world that can no longer arouse him. Contrast that with a dancing Shiva carved with an erect penis and closed eyes: arousal turned inward, bliss (ananda) sourced from internal realization rather than the external world. Two sculptures, two whole philosophies, no text required — if you know how to read them.

Then he turns the same lens on the present government: the new lion statues and rebuilt parliament in Delhi are themselves political art, architecture flexing power. And the lions? Lions are savanna animals; India barely has the habitat. “We need foreign things to justify our Indianness — like the potato.”

Nothing is timeless, and Indians colonize too

A recurring theme: the word “classical” is political. Almost every Indian classical art form was created by courtesans (devadasis) — women who didn’t have to marry, took lovers, and passed property to daughters. Half the Buddhist monasteries were funded by them. Then the Brahmin establishment “sanitized” the dances and erased the women from history. Bharatanatyam was a devadasi tradition before the reformer Rukmini Arundale made it Victorian-respectable. “The British plundered India, and Arundale plundered the heritage of the courtesans.” His point: Indians colonize Indians. The Cholas sacked Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka. South India had no Brahmins 2,000 years ago — so did Brahmins colonize the south?

Even “Sanskriti,” the word for culture, was coined only ~100 years ago when Tagore needed a translation for the English “culture.”

He saves his sharpest scalpel for historical certainty itself. We don’t actually know the Buddha was historical — the stories arrive centuries later. Same for Jesus, Muhammad, and the philosopher Shankara. He points out that the Shankara Digvijaya (the text describing Shankara conquering all of India intellectually) was written in the 14th century, right after the Madurai Sultanate was destroyed — a “cultural production” manufactured to reclaim a civilization that felt under threat. History shapes culture, and culture is then dressed up as eternal.

So what should education actually do?

His prescription is almost anticlimactically simple. Don’t decolonize — observe. Look at your own house. What food do you cook (economics)? Who makes the decisions (politics)? What idol sits where, what furniture, what clothes, what festivals (culture)? Then compare with your neighbour’s house. That’s how you learn that culture is roti, kapda, makaan — and, by the way, you sit on a chair, which is a colonial invention, so good luck decolonizing that too.

Key Takeaways

Tools vs. tales is the central model: tools = tangible colonial imports (railways, courts, institutions, the stock market, parliament); tales = the stories rulers tell to justify ruling. You can critique tales but cannot reverse tools.
The deepest colonial “tool” was the institution — something you can join and leave — which replaced a birth-determined caste destiny and created social mobility.
Borders and measurement entered the world with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia; before that, empires had no fixed boundaries and nomads/tribes moved freely.
Every ruler imposes a court language: Ashoka’s Prakrit → Sanskrit (via Brahmin “statecraft consultants”) → Persian/Urdu (Turkic rulers) → English (British) → Hindi (Delhi today). Calling only English “colonial” is arbitrary.
Delhi’s imposition of Hindi erased local dialects (Bhojpuri, Maithili, Marwari, etc.) — by Pattanaik’s logic, that is itself a form of internal colonization.
Art communicates philosophy without words: a Tirthankara’s flaccid penis = renunciation of a world that can’t tempt him; a dancing Shiva’s erect penis + closed eyes = bliss sourced internally.
Most Indian “classical” dance and music was created by courtesans (devadasis), then sanitized by the Brahmin establishment and erased from textbooks — Indians did this, not the British.
“Classical,” “timeless,” and “Sanatan” are flawed labels; Indian thought’s own yuga cycles assume constant change. “Sanskriti” is a ~100-year-old coinage from Tagore’s circle.
The historicity of the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and Shankara is an assumption, not a documented fact — their stories appear centuries after the supposed events.
The Shankara Digvijaya (14th c.) was “cultural production” — a narrative manufactured after the Madurai Sultanate’s fall to reclaim a threatened civilization.
The IKS push labels everything a “science” (culinary science, civilizational science) out of “science envy,” and uses a swan — a European bird — in its logo instead of the actual Indian bar-headed goose.
Practical method for cultural literacy: study your own household — its food (economics), decision-making (politics), and objects/idols/clothes/festivals (culture) — then compare with a neighbour’s.

Claude’s Take

This is Pattanaik in his comfort zone: a single clean framework (tools/tales) that he applies relentlessly until the audience’s certainties start wobbling. The tools-vs-tales split is genuinely useful — it cuts through a debate that’s usually all heat. And his strongest, least-deniable move is the symmetry argument: if imposing a language is colonization, then Hindi-over-Bhojpuri and Sanskrit-over-Prakrit are colonization too, which deflates the idea that only the British did this. That’s a hard point to wriggle out of, and he lands it well.

Where I’d apply the BS filter: the framework is a little too clean, and he leans on it as a universal solvent. Saying “economists are storytellers, politicians are storytellers, all of humanities is just tales” is a fun provocation but flattens real distinctions — some stories are better evidenced than others, and treating all of them as equally “just arguments” is its own kind of intellectual shrug. His radical-skeptic turn on historicity (“we don’t know the Buddha existed”) is technically defensible about details but slides toward a rhetorical move where nothing can be known, which conveniently lets him win every argument. And the title — “India’s Obsession With Decolonization Is a Lie” — is the channel’s clickbait, not his nuance; he actually says decolonization “has its place,” just that it’s done lazily.

The format hurts it too. The auto-transcript is mangled (names garbled, the interviewer’s UPSC-iconography tangent on Ganesha/Lakshmi arm-counts runs long and adds little for a general viewer), and it’s a live event so it meanders. But the central ideas survive the noise, and a few images — the melting potato, the two statues — are the kind that lodge in your head. A 7: smart, quotable, slightly over-confident in its own cleverness.