Professor Dilip Menon is Professor of History and International Relations and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He was educated at the Universities of Delhi, Oxford and Cambridge and did his PhD at Cambridge. His research for the past decade has engaged with issues ranging from caste, socialism and equality in modern India to oceanic histories and epistemologies of the Global South. He has worked collaboratively with scholars from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to develop a conceptual vocabulary for the social sciences from traditions of intellection in these spaces. He works with the idea of paracoloniality; of what always exceeded the temporality of the colonial encounter in the making of the modern world. He has published widely on these themes, including Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (co-authored with Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra, and Saarah Jappie), Walking on Water: Globalization and History, The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in modern India, and edited volumes including The cultural history of Modern India, Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South and Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (with Kaveh Yazdani).

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Where do you see the most exciting debates/research happening in your field?

That is a difficult question to answer since the idea of what one’s field is changes from time to time and is governed by the world as it is. For instance, as an undergraduate studying history in the 1980s, the Subaltern Studies collective framed the thinking of a generation trying to wrestle with the iniquities of the nation state and the uncertain legacies of nationalism. Even for those studying modern India, it became de rigueur to read French postructuralism, the Annales school, the British Marxist social historians and so on. Being a mere historian was not enough. The agitations against the recommendations of the Mandal Commission extending the remit affirmative action in the 1990s meant that, belatedly, Indian social sciences had to engage with the social animosities engendered by the persistence of caste. Historians turned to literary scholars and their studies of dalit autobiographies in search of a paradigm that engaged with the inquities of an academic space dominated by upper castes. The point that I am trying to make is that the very idea of a field is protean, contingent, conjunctural and so on. That is, if one is an interesting scholar not invested in a rigid idea of a discipline: the belief, for example,  that history can be done only by working with the archives of the state and other archaic notions!

My move to South Africa and a society in transition demanded an engagement with the idea of decoloniality and the conceptual challenge of thinking a paradigm that was not Europhone, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it. The idea of “southern fact, northern theory” is a given in the social sciences, reflecting the intellectual biography of academics as much as the political economy of academe centred in EuroAmerica. Therefore, for me the most exciting debates were happening less in history, a theoretically conservative discipline, and more in the fields of anthropology (Eduardo de Viveiros Castros, Eduardo Kohn), political economy (Enrique Dussel, Bonaventura de Sousa Santos), literature (Walter Mignolo) and philosophy (Sylvia Wynter and Achille Mbembe). All of them were thinking less with the idea of the postcolonial and more with the idea of a persistent coloniality (“imperial durabilities” as Ann Stoler put it); their questions related to epistemological dependence rather than territorial independence. Alongside this were attempts to think against the Eurocentric definition of philosophy drawing upon the longer temporalities of Islamic and Confucian traditions of intellection (Peter Adamson, Bryan van Norden, Wang Hui). Ranajit Guha, in his time, had been insistent that history needed to be conceptual, if it were not to become a dull accumulation of facts, and it was this impulse that stayed with me. This led to my edited volumes titled Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (2020) which tried to decentre the history of capitalism from Europe and Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (2022) that attempted to begin the enterprise of generating a conceptual vocabulary from the languages of the Global South from Arabic to Zulu.

Moving away from the inheritance of a colonial pedagogy and the persistent structures of the political economy of academic publishing meant adopting the strategic essentialism (to borrow Spivak’s phrase) of the term Global South. However, given the fact of global warming and the emergence of thinking about the Anthropocene, the exigent problem became one of thinking with the planet as opposed to the human centred notion of the globe, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has so lucidly argued. Living on the edge of a precipice, and, in many cases, literally with water up to our necks, categories like the First World and Third World, Global North and Global South seem to have exhausted their polemical purchase on our imagination. There have to be authentic trans-hemispheric conversations and a genuine global history that engages with the ocean and transnational connections as well as a longer temporality than the colonial and post colonial (the latter equally a polemical category). So given the trajectory of my thinking, I have been drawn to histories that engage with the time and space of the ocean like Engseng Ho’s magisterial Graves of Tarim that looks at the space between the Hadramawt and SE Asia over a period of five hundred years; a space-time that sits alongside the colonial yet not wholly determined by it. Or Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s commanding work, including the productive idea of connected histories that thinks athwart conventional continental divisions and connects Europe, Asia and south America thematically. 

An old fashioned concentration on British Empire, French Empire etc is no longer possible given the multiple intersections of geographies and lives. For me the most fascinating emergent work has been on Indian Ocean Islam and Islamic cosmopolitanism (Nile Green, Mahmood Kooria, Wilson Chacko Jacob, Ronit Ricci, Seema Alavi) that through engaging with the movements of trade, migration, and theology connect Indonesia to India, and beyond to East Africa and West Asia. The idea of connected oceans as in the work of Renisa Mawani and Isabel Hofmeyr allow us to move beyond the heuristic of the separateness of the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as also narrow national histories. A whole slew of new works (Johan Mathew, Jatin Dua, Nidhi Mahajan, Thomas McDow, Pedro Machado, Jeremy Prestholdt) allow us to think about the global connections from India to the USA of slavery, textiles, and mercantile capital in the 19th century. The new generation of historians pose a significant challenge to the narrow national and area studies histories by seeing the world as their oyster.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

If I think about my life, being born in independent India in the 1960s and witnessing the growing authoritarianism of the ruling party culminating in the Emergency in the mid 1970s, the idea of nationalism soured early. At the same time, we lived alongside the vestiges of larger imaginations of political solidarity, from the invocation of the Bandung Conference to ideas of non-alignment, the Third World, and uncanny connected geographies from Egypt to Yugoslavia. This was an inheritance of internationalism that connected us back to the early 20th century when nationalism meant a perception of nations among other nations, not an exclusive inwardness. Alongside this understanding of geography which imagined a map of anticolonial affinity beside the pink map of empire, there was also the ideological map of socialism with its centre in the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, American coups and wars on countries ranging from Korea to Guatemala, Iran and Vietnam, sat alongside the wars of national liberation as African countries gained their independence from the 1960s onwards. Then the Soviet Union came to an end: everything that had seemed........

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