( This article is an expanded version of the address delivered by the author at the Anil Sinha Memorial Lecture Series in Lucknow on 21st February, 2026 )

In academic circles, identity discourses have long been regarded as a post-colonial phenomenon. In the latter half of the 20th century, nations and civilisations that had freed themselves from imperialist colonial subjugation witnessed the organised emergence of distinct social, political, gender, ethnic and linguistic identities. It is generally observed that anti-colonial movements tend to deny the existence of these identities in the name of broader national interests. Yet these discourses not only questioned the epistemology of colonial knowledge, but also gave voice to expressions that had been suppressed for thousands of years. Identities are constructs of discourse, developed under the various dimensions of post-colonial thought. Although this idea emerged from a linguistic discipline such as post-structuralism, its impact is revolutionary — distinguishing itself from a capitalist framework like postmodernism. In the 1980s, serious and multidimensional research and debate on this subject began in universities across America and Europe. Writers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Fredric Jameson shaped the contours of post-colonial discourse. Works like ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ and ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (Fanon), ‘Orientalism’ (Said), ‘The Location of Culture’ and ‘Nation and Narration’ (Bhabha), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (Spivak), and ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (Jameson) challenged the knowledge-based dominance of the West and provided a theoretical foundation for the discourses of Black people, women, minority and other oppressed identities in the Third World. Behind these debates lay references to left-wing thinkers such as Gramsci and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the liberation struggles of Black people in Algeria, the African-American movement, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and India’s own renaissance and anti-colonial movement. Together, these gave post-colonial identity discourse a left-leaning orientation and a neo-leftist character.

A right-wing thinker like Francis Fukuyama, a fervent supporter of corporate capitalism behind the façade of so-called liberal democracy, describes the idea and movement of identity as a strategic manoeuvre by the left. He writes that until the mid-twentieth century, Western leftists waged a struggle for socio-economic equality centred on the working class. However, global capitalism, particularly in America and Europe, economically elevated the working class to the status of the middle class, gradually freeing them from a proletarian identity. The global proletarian movement weakened, and socialist state systems like the Soviet Union and China descended into authoritarianism. As a result, the goal of social and economic justice that the old left had set could no longer be achieved through class struggle.

In this context, following the May 1968 student movement in France, academic leftists in the 1960s and 70s turned their attention to social issues — issues that were simultaneously arising in America as well. These included minority rights, feminist questions, environmental concerns, the problem of migration, LGBT rights, and most prominently the question of racial discrimination. Fukuyama calls the thinkers who engaged with these questions the ”Generation of 1968.” He argues that the left, thus, abandoned class struggle and began to mobilise around various identities and marginalised groups — a development that manifested as identity politics. He further contends that left-wing identity politics created the conditions for the rise of right-wing identity politics, giving rise in America and Europe to demands for white rights, men’s rights, and claims that jobs, wages and resources should be the primary entitlement of local white populations. This tendency can be understood in the Indian context through the lens of Hindu rights, upper-caste and male entitlement, and slogans like “Long Live Brahminism.” In Fukuyama’s view, the left is responsible for the rise of identity and identitarianism, while right-wing identity politics, which presents dominant groups as victims, is merely a reaction. He declares identitarianism dangerous to democracy because it fragments the nation’s broader structure and identity, creating a negative environment for national unity, dialogue and cohesion. As a remedy, he advocates an inclusive liberal democracy as the only effective solution. Throughout this entire analysis, however, he conveniently shields corporate capitalism by blaming identitarianism for the authoritarianism festering within liberal democracy, the economic inequality generated by capital, and the crisis of democracy itself.

Let us now attempt to understand the conditions surrounding the rise of this ideological current in India using the above framework. Prof. Pranay Krishna, in his book ‘Sources of Post-Coloniality and Hindi Literature’, writes: “Identity or self-recognition cannot be formed without the Other. Every identity is the result of a process of ‘Othering.’ What we are will be determined by what we are not. The differential meaning-process of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is present in all identity discourses — be they national, ethnic, racial, or gendered.”

In India, when the question of Shudras, “untouchables”, Adivasis and women- marginalised by the caste-patriarchy rooted in the varna system — entered the world of literature, culture and thought, identity discourse was born. The politics that began around the participation of Dalit and backward castes after the Emergency came to be called identity politics. Since the question of caste, and the goal of eliminating caste-based discrimination from India’s social, cultural and political life, was never taken seriously by India’s ruling classes, and was equally neglected in the world of literature, identitarianism, upon its emergence, filled the vacuum left by the left-democratic movement. The consequence was severe damage to the politics and ideology of the socialist-left across virtually all of India. Not only did they suffer a loss of social base, but they also faced a formidable intellectual challenge. Consequently, the left in India, particularly in the Hindi-speaking belt, began to view identities as antagonistic to the concept of class. The dialectic of caste and class, which had persisted since the time of Dr. Ambedkar, was applied wholesale to the context of identity. Progressive writers and thinkers expended their energy branding identitarianism as the primary cause of the left’s weakening, labelling it a divisive, fragmentary ideology, and thereby reinforced a narrow conception of class based on the old base-superstructure dialectic. In sum, against the backdrop of postmodernism’s rise in the West and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, identitarianism came to be viewed as an enemy ideology, and the possibility of any dialogue or cooperation with it was foreclosed. It is instructive to note that while in the West identitarianism was understood within the framework of the left, in India it became established as a reactionary idea. In this context, Prof. Pranay Krishna writes: “It was precisely because Dalit identity took shape during the colonial era that its clash with nationalism became inevitable. One must remember here that the Dalit identity movement was led by the Dalit middle class, which had itself come into existence through the processes of colonial modernity. On the other side, the reins of the nationalist movement too were in the hands of the new middle class and industrialist classes produced under colonial processes. Frequently, critics obscure the historicity of these processes by employing evaluative rather than factual language. What is needed is not to draw conclusions by treating identity discourse or the discourse of the nation as normative givens, but rather to analyse the objective processes through which they came into being.”

The caste-class dialectic has existed within the Indian left movement from its very inception. Rather than accepting caste as a fundamental social reality, the left tended to treat it as a cultural veneer, assuming that with the abolition of private property through economic revolution, the caste system would dissolve of its own accord. M. N. Roy, one of the earliest leaders of India’s communist movement, wrote in his 1922 book ‘India in Transition’ that colonial rule had, through the economic and political measures of a highly developed capitalist state, carried India beyond the feudal stage, and that caste, as a feudal remnant, therefore held no significance. This understanding of caste persists in large sections of the Indian left today, where caste is dismissed as inconsequential and class is determined solely on an economic basis in the classical Marxist sense. Yet Lenin, the great leader who made revolution possible in Russia, included in his definition of class a person’s position within a historically determined system of social production, as well as the exploitation of one person’s labour by another on the basis of social position. In other words, Lenin too considered social factors important in determining class relations within production. In India, the varna system has historically been a division of labour based on socially enforced laws, and this point merits serious consideration.

Dr. Ambedkar held that social transformation was a prerequisite for any political transformation. He argued that whether the aim was to build a democratic nation or to carry out a socialist revolution, the annihilation of caste must be the first step. He raised fundamental questions about this critical shortcoming of India’s freedom movement, which is why both the national movement and the communist movement regarded him as a divisive force within popular unity. Ambedkar, however, had attempted to understand the dialectic of class and caste in India in a dialectical manner. He accepted class as the basic unit of society and concluded that “caste is an enclosed class.” That is, for class structure to become free, the shackles of caste must be broken, something that will not happen automatically after an economic revolution. Ambedkar further argued that caste and patriarchy in India are mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing, and therefore the struggle for women’s identity is inseparable from the struggle for caste annihilation. Thus in India, a unified and interdependent form of identities emerges — one that is a vehicle for revolutionary change, not an obstacle to it.

The landscape of identity politics that has emerged over the past three decades has demonstrated that it possesses no fundamental agenda for the liberation of the oppressed, for social justice, equality or democracy. It is confined to securing participation within the existing capitalist-feudal order, which is why goals such as caste annihilation, women’s equality and rights, secularism and economic justice hold no real significance for it. Focused narrowly on cultural identity and the achievement of social respect for its own community, this ideology and politics is highly susceptible to sliding into the right-wing camp and being absorbed by the broader identity politics of Hindutva. We are witnessing today numerous political parties rooted in Dalit and backward identities becoming fellow travellers of Hindutva politics. Many so-called Bahujanist and Ambedkarite, Mandalist writers, thinkers and literary figures are falling into the camp of the RSS and Hindutva. On the other side, Hindutva ideology and politics is pursuing a strategy of constructing a broad Hindu identity by “Othering” Muslim minorities. The historical and cultural differences between Hindus and Muslims are being established as their permanent identities, and by portraying the majority Hindus as defeated, victimised and vulnerable, slogans of Hindu unity and a Hindu nation are being manufactured. To construct this reactionary Hindu identity, a false history of Shudra and Dalit castes is being fabricated — one that holds Muslim invaders responsible for the inhumanity and brutality of the caste system. In this fabricated and invented history, Shudras and Dalits are portrayed as part of a noble lineage who were subjugated for refusing to submit to Islam.

Under this reactionary identity construction, concepts such as upper-caste identity and male identity are being cultivated — presenting dominant social groups as victims in order to pit them against genuinely marginalised identities. This is, in essence, a conspiracy to manufacture a conflict between progressive identity and reactionary identity.

In such circumstances, the progressive and left-democratic camp must engage in dialogue and joint action with identity movements. In this moment of confrontation, it is necessary to make the cause of marginalised identities one’s own. It is essential to understand that identities do not fragment the concept of class, but that they broaden it. Rather than treating identitarian ideology as an enemy or as a fragmentary creed, it is necessary to build a commonality among identities and make them fellow travellers of revolutionary change. In this direction, greater research, reflection and shared struggle are urgently needed.