Write short note on Colonial hangover and its social impact. (2009)
“Colonial hangover” names a sociological fact rather than a grievance: political sovereignty was transferred in 1947, but the institutions, classifications and self-images built under colonial rule were not. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), showed why the last of these is the hardest to shed — domination survives as an internalised measure of worth long after the ruler leaves.
The institutional residue
Hamza Alavi, in “The State in Post-Colonial Societies” (1972), argued that the newly independent state inherits an apparatus overdeveloped in relation to its own society, because it was designed to subordinate that society rather than represent it. The consequences are visible in a bureaucracy organised around hierarchy, secrecy and the file; in policing still framed by the Police Act of 1861; and in a vocabulary of “subjects” and “sanction” that keeps citizens at a supplicant’s distance from the officials who serve them.
The residue in categories
Bernard S. Cohn, in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1996), showed that the colonial survey, census and ethnography did not merely record Indian society but objectified it, turning fluid, local, negotiable identities into enumerated, ranked and all-India ones. Nicholas B. Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), pressed the argument further: caste as a single, nationwide system of ranked communities was substantially a colonial artefact of governance. Tribe was fixed in the same way, and the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 stigmatised whole communities — a stigma that outlived the Act’s repeal in 1952 and still attaches to denotified groups.
The residue in the mind
- Edward W. Said‘s Orientalism (1978) and Syed Hussein Alatas‘s The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) traced how colonial knowledge produced the colonised as deficient, and how the captive mind of the postcolonial intellectual then reproduces borrowed categories uncritically.
- Ashis Nandy, in The Intimate Enemy (1983), located colonialism’s deeper victory in the psyche, in an acquired scale that made the coloniser’s masculinity, rationality and adulthood the standard of the human.
- Thomas Babington Macaulay‘s Minute (1835) wanted interpreters “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”. English accordingly works as cultural capital in Pierre Bourdieu‘s sense, reproducing an elite through convent schools and legacy universities — the “brown sahib” the critics named.
- Colourism is its most intimate expression, visible in skin-lightening markets and matrimonial advertising; the renaming of India’s best-known fairness brand as “Glow & Lovely” in 2020 marked the argument, not its close.
Undoing it
The colonial criminal codes were replaced on 1 July 2024 by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and its companion statutes on procedure and evidence. The Repealing and Amending Act, 2025 cleared 71 obsolete enactments, part of more than 1,500 outdated central laws removed since 2014. The National Education Policy 2020 privileges the mother tongue in early schooling.
Conclusion
Renaming and repeal are the easy half. The hangover persists where it is structural — in an administration that governs more readily than it serves, in categories that now organise politics too deeply to discard, and in an aesthetic and linguistic hierarchy that quietly allocates opportunity. Decolonisation, on this evidence, is a sociological project rather than a legislative one.