From Colonial Epistemicide To Knowledge Plurality

Abstract

Colonialism functioned not merely through territorial conquest or economic exploitation but through a systematic reordering of knowledge that produced epistemicide—the delegitimization and displacement of non-Western epistemologies. This study aims to examine colonialism as an epistemological project and to analyze its impact on Indian and Islamic knowledge traditions. Using qualitative library research and critical textual analysis, the paper engages the works of Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to conceptualize epistemic violence operating at psychological, institutional, and discursive levels. Placing these theorists in dialogue with Indian epistemology (pramāṇa) and Islamic epistemology (ʿilm, tawḥīd, and adab), the study argues that colonial modernity fragmented holistic knowledge systems and imposed Eurocentric hierarchies of reason. The paper concludes that epistemic sovereignty and knowledge plurality are essential conditions for genuine decolonization and for reconstituting intellectual traditions beyond colonial categories.