Making sense of decolonising MOS from an Indian location

This essay engages with the current discourse of decolonising management and organisation studies and reclaiming traditional knowledges in the Indian and South Asian context. It contends that it is necessary not to lose hope because of the (ab)use of decolonising. It suggests that extending the extant decolonising discourse directly to India could be problematic due to diverse trajectories of colonialism in India and the Americas. It further advocates for expanding the meaning of indigenous to account for an Orientalist colonising that is distinct from settler colonialism. It then suggests that Indian decolonising management scholars can engage in foundational revisions by examining traditional and indigenous practices/texts from a structural–functional analytical standpoint and pursue “inter-cultural translation” (Santos, 2015), rather than mere linguistic translation. The actions of decolonising management scholars are inevitably ethico-political and therefore we should be cognizant of our praxis as well as our theorising.