Decolonial Pedagogies and South Asian Studies: Knowledge Production, Erasure and Recovery in Higher Education

This introductory essay places the special issue in the context of current debates about decolonizing higher education. We consider how knowledge production and teaching practices are still shaped by Eurocentric ways of thinking, especially in South Asian Studies. Post-colonial scholarship has already shown how academic disciplines are rooted in colonial histories, but there has been far less focus on what decolonial teaching might look like in practice. The articles collected here, with a focus on the Malabar Coast and Kerala, study erasure, marginalization and harmful systems of classification across journalism, architecture, performance, literature and religious history. Together, they identify transcultural connections and Indigenous knowledge systems that challenge civilizational hierarchies and narrow disciplinary approaches. We set these discussions within the wider crisis facing the Humanities and the decline of language-based area studies, arguing that decolonial pedagogy depends on renewed engagement with local languages, archives and knowledge traditions. By looking at the Malabar Coast as a site of disconnected histories and numerous co-existing knowledge worlds, the issue proposes decolonial approaches that link research, teaching and critically reflective academic practice.