Neo-Orientalism 2.0: The digital recolonisation of knowledge

‘ One pill makes you larger/ And one pill makes you small/ Go ask Alice/ When she’s ten feet tall’.

Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 psychedelic anthem ‘White Rabbit’ captures the disorienting rush of altered perception – a mind expanding under chemical influence, confronting a world that no longer makes familiar sense. I think of this ‘pill’ as the LLM, AI’s large language models, feeding us a hallucinatory knowledge that feels boundless yet subtly warps reality in orientalist directions.

LLMs are AI behemoths that promise to democratise information. We’ve marvelled at how these systems synthesise vast swathes of human knowledge, spitting out essays, analyses, and even poetry with uncanny fluency. But pause for a moment: whose knowledge, exactly? The bulk of what’s been digitised, published, and uploaded into the global data pool hails from the West, steeped in centuries of orientalist scholarship. From colonial-era textbooks to modern academic tomes, the lens has been one of exoticising the East, reducing its complexities to footnotes in a Eurocentric narrative. Now AI amplifies this, but with a politically correct veneer – lots of apologies baked in, disclaimers about bias, yet the core remains unaltered. It’s orientalism with a woke edge, polite but pervasive.

‘And if you go chasing rabbits/ And you know you’re going to fall/ Tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar/ Has given you the call’.

This isn’t just theory. This is the practical machinery of how knowledge gets produced and consumed. Publishing pipelines, academic curricula, and digital archives have long favoured Western paradigms, even when they purport to ‘include’ non-Western voices. And, of course, the very corrections to this orientalism – the postcolonial and decolonial theories that emerged post-1980s – have themselves been predominantly transatlantic affairs. Entrenched in universities across the USA and UK, these critiques become yet another export, transplanted into the Indian context rather than organically grown here. I explored this in my 2017 book Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Swaraj, arguing that the nativist turn in Indian political theory was perpetuating orientalist frameworks by assuming that our elite traditions were immediately accessible without critique, ignoring the colonisation of the mind and polity.

What will unfold now, short-to-mid-term, is the digital recolonisation of the Indian mind. As LLMs flood academia, generating student essays, research papers, and even policy briefs, whether we call it plagiarism or augmentation, the humanities and social sciences will be swamped with content moulded by orientalist paradigms. In the transatlantic world, this comes wrapped in guilt-ridden PC-perspectivalism. AI’s ‘inclusivity’ bandages over its orientalist core, fostering a self-righteous neo-colonial attitude.

The word from the West (via AI proxies) is once again universal, especially in India, where resources are scarcer, access to alternative information pools is limited, and self-correction mechanisms are weaker than for the transatlantic scholar. We have fewer libraries, fewer indigenous databases, and more reliance on these ‘universal’ tools. The result is a neo-orientalist stranglehold on global academia, where Indian thought is refracted through Western filters, accepted not just grudgingly but enthusiastically in regions hungry for efficiency. I had shown in my book that theorists of Indian politics continue to work with categories and concepts alien to the lived social and political experiences of India’s common people, emphasising the need to decolonise Indian political theory and rescue it from the grip of Western theories. That was when knowledge was still largely analogue.

‘When logic and proportion/ Have fallen sloppy dead/ And the White Knight is talking backwards/ And the Red Queen’s off with her head’.

However, amid this gloom, there is a hint of an optimistic horizon: a possible mid-term pivot. Just as the 1980s saw a critical mass of scholars recognise the inherent orientalist and neo-colonial structures in international academia, a similar awakening could dawn. We’re focusing on the arts, humanities, and social sciences, where the influx of AI-generated, albeit inflected, information might paradoxically build that critical mass within Indian academia. Imagine: a new reawakening to the system’s nature, birthing fresh postcolonial, decolonial, or even anti-orientalist approaches – forging non-colonial, non-orientalist ways of knowledge production and practice. This might kick off, as often happens, with South Asians in transatlantic hubs, then get imitated, refined, and radicalised back in India.

‘Remember what the dormouse said/ Feed your head/ Feed your head’.

‘White Rabbit’ ends not in surrender but with a defiant imperative: feed your head. In the shadow of AI’s neo-orientalist flood, this is the gambit: the very distortion it imposes might finally provoke a backlash strong enough to redefine knowledge on truly equitable terms.

The writer as Dr Jekyll is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.