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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

Knowledge production in higher education does not develop in isolation: it depends on how we teach. At the same time, effective pedagogy depends on knowledge grounded in critical thinking and academic rigour. Research and pedagogy therefore shape one another, and both must be questioned and renewed if higher education is to support individuals, communities and civil societies.

Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), critical reflection on the production of academic knowledge has been widely directed at the colonial and imperial roots of modern, western (or westernized) academia, giving rise to post-colonial, postmodern and, more recently, decolonial perspectives (Maldonado-Torres, 2016; Mbembe, 2016; Mignolo, 2011; Moosavi, 2022). At the same time, educators worldwide have developed critical pedagogies that confront inequalities linked to class and race (Freire et al., 2021; hooks, 1994). These approaches overlap: critical and engaged teaching is, in many respects, decolonial. Yet, while theories of decolonizing knowledge are now well developed, we still lack a clear account, in both theory and practice, of what genuinely decolonial pedagogy looks like in everyday academic life.

Take, for example, Leon Moosavi, one of the leading academics promoting the decolonization of higher education in the UK. Moosavi (2022, pp. 10–11) writes:

My attempt to decolonise the curriculum was not accompanied by a sufficient effort at seeking out a decolonised pedagogy. Nor did it offer any consideration about the much-neglected question of decolonising the hidden curriculum. Moreover, I taught the traditional canon in much the same way that it would be taught in traditional social theory courses; that is, without deploying sufficient ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.

The phrase ‘decolonize the curriculum’ denotes the practice of diversifying course syllabi with non-European authors, which many of us teaching in Euro-American contexts strive to achieve and are actively encouraged to do. But this is insufficient, and in some learning and teaching environments, ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ can be challenging given the heavy reliance on English medium global academia, where native speakers of English perform best in terms of scientific publication and visibility (Mukhopadhyay, 2025).

Like Moosavi, many of us also encounter the challenge of the ‘hidden curriculum’. For sociologists like Moosavi (2022), the box-ticking exercise of diversifying the citations based on gender and ethnicity falls short of tackling the over-reliance on ‘northern theories’, the constant need to refer to European thinkers like Marx, Weber and Durkheim as the universal foundation of sociology. This challenge is neatly phrased by Achille Mbembe (2016, p. 32): ‘A Eurocentric canon is a canon that attributes truth only to the Western way of knowledge production’. A decolonial pedagogy in South Asian Studies would, therefore, seek ways to address the heavy reliance on the ‘classical’ Indological canon, for example, by moving away from the ‘classical’ texts in translation into storytelling using visual or oral modes of telling. ¹ In theory-oriented teaching, decolonial pedagogy in South Asian Studies would reflect on ‘what Latin Americans in particular call “epistemic coloniality”’, that is, ‘the endless production of theories that are based on European traditions […] produced nearly always by Europeans or Euro-American men who are the only ones accepted as capable of reaching universality’ (Mbembe, 2016, p. 36). Thus, for example, when discussing theoretical models of languages in South Asia, decolonial pedagogy would balance Sheldon Pollock’s (1998) philological models of ‘language cosmopolis’ and ‘vernacularization’ with Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas’ (1989) socio-historical model of ‘Sanskritization’. It cannot, however, be overstressed that the issue here is not necessarily with the ethnic or gender identity of the scholar, but rather with universalist perspectives on culture and history where Eurocentric biases remain invisible, such as the biased judgement of what is a ‘classical’ literature or a ‘vernacular’ (Ramaswamy, 1997; Venkatachalapathy, 2009).

Moosavi further suggests deploying the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, a term used by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) for rejecting Eurocentric universalism by ‘giving special attention to the suppressed or marginalized smaller traditions within the big Western tradition’. Since hermeneutics is the bread and butter of the Humanities, Moosavi’s suggestion is as valid for educators in the Humanities as it is for sociologists. For Santos (2014), the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is the stepping stone towards a systematic hermeneutical method, which he terms ‘diatopical hermeneutics’, to remedy the epistemic erasure (which is, according to him, also violence) inflicted by Eurocentric epistemology. He demonstrates the diatopical hermeneutic method with an example of how to approach the Western idea of human rights as a topos, a ‘cultural location’, emerging from an incomplete culture and therefore in need of complementary topoi emerging from other incomplete cultures, such as Hindu dharma or Islamic umma. For educators specializing in South Asian languages and cultures, diatopical hermeneutics offers an extraordinary opportunity to engage learners in radical listening to intercultural conversations. This is, in many respects, a form of pedagogical translation, initially proposed by Raymond Panikkar (1979, as cited in Santos, 2014).

Moosavi’s predicament in bridging between the decolonial critique of advanced scholars and decolonial practice in the classroom reveals imbalances and conflicting agendas. Compared to the body of literature that the post-colonial and decolonial critiques have produced to address academic knowledge production, much less is available on decolonial pedagogies. To some extent, attempts to systematize and reflect on decolonizing pedagogies are underway with concepts such as ‘culturally responsive pedagogies’ (Martin et al., 2017) and ‘praxis of becoming’ (Canagarajah, 2023). Such attempts, however, seem to be more prevalent in the fields of sociology and political science, as well as in education, whereas some fields of study remain somewhat frozen in time, still awaiting their ‘redemption’ from the old shackles of Eurocentric pedagogies. The wider field of South Asian languages, cultures and histories—periods and regions scarcely represented in colonial archives—has many cases still awaiting sustained engagement with the decolonial turn.

From Post-colonial Critique to Decolonial Pedagogies

Given the colonial legacies closely intertwined with the academic study of South Asia, the shrinking space of South Asian Studies in the Arts and Humanities might be due to complex historical processes beyond those trends that cause the decline of the Humanities more broadly. After decades of post-colonial critique, it is widely acknowledged that the history of knowledge production in modern academia, especially in the Humanities, has been fraught with the troubled relations between Orientalist scholarship and the languages and cultures that were subject to the Orientalists’ gaze. Some 50 years ago, Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism (1978), paved the way to critical thinking on various fields of knowledge, especially in the Arts and Humanities, recognizing the utilization of knowledge in the subjugation and exploitation of the colonized world. Since Said, several influential post-colonial scholars have been writing from within and about South Asia, like Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakravarti (Mongia, 1996). More recently, Latin American scholars like Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres identified the Eurocentrism inherent in academic knowledge production—modernity and rationalism—recognizing the enduring impact of colonialism, imperialism and neo-colonialism even as post-colonial studies reflect, in hindsight, on power relations that are anything but ‘post-’. Quijano (2007) called for the liberation of knowledge production from European coloniality/rationality. Mignolo, in his analysis of modernity/coloniality, demonstrates how knowledge production remains colonial even in and despite of the post-colonial turn and, as such, the prerequisite is decolonizing knowledge and de-westernizing modernity (Mignolo, 2011, pp. 127–139). Maldonado-Torres strives for a way out of the ‘coloniality of being’. In this formulation, the valued assets of modernity and European Enlightenment, the bread and butter, so to speak, of the Arts and Humanities, are considered detrimental to the Indigenous and local knowledge produced and transmitted by colonized peoples. The call for decolonizing higher education that has become ubiquitous and more often than not misconstrued addresses the need to redeem academic knowledge and indeed higher education from the clutches of Eurocentric modernity entrenched in the ‘coloniality of being’. And so, despite the well-developed field of post-colonial studies in and on South Asia, we need to ask whether decolonial thinking has led to shifting practices in the ways we teach, conduct research and shape Humanities knowledge in South Asian Studies. ² The answers emerging from each paper in this special volume are a resounding yes.

Addressing Erasure and Marginalization

The articles in this special issue each provide a fresh perspective on certain areas of study related to the Malabar Coast while tackling diverse aspects of colonial epistemological erasures and their impact on knowledge production and pedagogies in and on the Malabar Coast and the Modern State of Kerala.

This pattern of erasure is noted by Ophira Gamliel, who draws attention to the omission of a particular episode in the Malayalam chronicle Keralolpatti, arguing that the passage derives from an Arabic narrative account of Cheraman Perumal’s conversion to Islam. Ines Weinrich discusses a similar pattern of erasure but from the other side of the Arabian Sea, namely the erasure of the Malabar Coast as a site of knowledge production in Arabic since at least the thirteenth century, focusing on the episode of the moon splitting as the axis of revolving tropes and origin legends circulating from the Malabar Coast to the Arab hinterlands.

These patterns of erasure are reinforced by other forms of colonial knowledge production, including the standardization, classification and codification of Indigenous cultural expression and knowledge systems. As modern educational structures in formerly colonized societies emerged from regimes of colonial domination, the epistemic violence of colonialism became sedimented in what Maldonado-Torres describes as the ‘coloniality of being’—a pedagogical inheritance carried, often unwittingly, into both colonial and post-independence India.

The articles by Percy Arfeen-Wegner and Rajashree Raju show us the enduring influence of colonial education and its afterlives within projects of nation-building and modernization in India. Rajashree Raju looks at the transformation of performance arts in Kerala from hereditary modes of transmission to the state-sponsored youth-festival model, which effectively sanitizes forms of artistic expression deemed irreverent or unsuitable for regional and national identity formation. Although this transition was shaped by the newly formed state of Kerala and articulated through popular and socialist idioms, it remained deeply entangled with processes of modernization set in motion under colonial administration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From the perspective of Latin American theorists of coloniality, modernity itself is inseparable from colonial power, often articulated as modernity/coloniality in the work of Maldonado-Torres and Mignolo. In Kerala, the shift from so-called ‘traditional’ performance forms—specifically those relegated to the category of ‘folklore’ rather than ‘classical’—to institutionalized modes of arts education rely upon pedagogical frameworks inherited from colonial schooling systems. The case of the Kerala State Youth Festivals thus offers a revealing illustration of how colonial epistemologies continue to shape cultural value, aesthetic discipline and the governance of performance in post-colonial modernity.

Arfeen-Wegner intervenes directly in the decolonization of architectural historiography in Kerala by interrogating colonial classificatory schemes that divided religious buildings into ‘Indic’ and ‘non-Indic’ types, thereby imputing fixed sectarian identities to architectural forms. She traces the emergence of this mode of architectural knowledge back to the colonial period and shows how coloniality became embedded in modernity through the construction of a national ‘Indic’ identity, defined in opposition to racialized and religious ‘others’ and grounded in notions of an ancient, static and essentialized Hindu or Indic culture. Historical erasures, in particular, are explored from different perspectives—the performance arts (Rajashree), textual traditions (Weinrich, Davies), religion (Gamliel), and material culture (Arfeen-Wegner). Each article thus offers new comparative paradigms that are otherwise ignored because of disciplinary biases rooted in epistemic models inherited from the colonial period. Thus, one recurring pattern of erasure is that of the historical connections between the Arab-Muslim world and Indigenous systems of knowledge production in Malabar. The result is the erasure of not only historical connections but also, perhaps even more so, of patterns of disconnections, especially of Indo-Arab and Muslim-Hindu connectivities.

As in the case of the Kerala State Youth Festivals, a Eurocentric modernist logic of classification and codification came to structure the production of architectural knowledge—one that continues to shape scholarly approaches to Kerala and Malabar architecture today. Arfeen-Wegner therefore shifts the analytical paradigm away from essentialist and sectarian models of modernist knowledge production, opting instead for a framework of transcultural analysis that refuses inherited hierarchies of religion and rejects assumptions of fixed or immutable origins. She proposes a way beyond the modernity/coloniality impasse by returning to the practice of close architectural reading, attentive to lived, oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge systems, including the vāstuśāstra textual corpora on design and architecture. In doing so, she re-centres local epistemologies and embodied practices as critical resources for rethinking the historical interpretation of religious and architectural forms.

A transcultural paradigm shift in art-historical historiography has emerged in the twenty-first century, notably in the work of scholars such as Serena Autiero and Matthew Adam Cobb (2021). This approach enables new ways of thinking about cross-cultural connections across regions not usually treated as sites of contact or exchange. In this light, the story of the moon splitting, discussed by Weinrich in relation to miracles and prophecy in thirteenth-century Arabic sources, appears, strikingly, in the Latin Chronicle of Melrose Abbey from the same century, discussed by John Davies in this special issue.

There are, of course, significant differences between the accounts, and the possibility that the narrative travelled between the Arab world and Scotland remains remote. Nonetheless, there are notable points of convergence, specifically in the attribution of the story to figures positioned at the margins of authoritative theological discourse: the quṣṣāṣ in Arabic contexts, and the ‘female soothsayers, witches and enchantresses’ (phitonissas et maleficas et incantatrices feminas) in the Latin text. A transcultural mode of analysis allows such correspondences to be studied without requiring the identification of a direct route of transmission or demonstrable historical contact.

For historians, art historians and scholars of literature and religion working on periods preceding the expansion of European colonial networks, the decolonial task thus lies in recovering transcultural patterns and shared imaginaries before the over-celebrated ‘Age of Discoveries’. It is at least conceivable that Europe was, in certain respects, ‘discovered’ by South Asia long before South Asia was ‘discovered’ by Europe. For decolonial pedagogies to be effective, educators must therefore critically reassess the civilizational models they have inherited, reproduced and taught in modern academic frameworks.

To be sure, there is no dearth of post-colonial critique in the academic discourse in Kerala and on Kerala, even if less known and somewhat marginalized compared to ‘classical’ post-colonial scholars such as Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, to name a few. Decolonization of knowledge and curricula, however, seems to be rather limited in scope, at least in the sense of unwinding Eurocentric modernity, nationalism, and epistemic erasure and violence. Some exceptions are J. Devikaȁs (2018) critique of S. K. Pottekatt’s travel writing, V. M. Santosh (2015) on decolonial English language pedagogies in Kerala’s higher education, and Rajan Gurukkalȁs (2016) critique of the historiographical approach to ancient South Asian and Mediterranean coastal connections as ‘Indo-Roman trade’. Devika demonstrates how the ongoing workings of the colonial legacy within nationalist–developmentalist discourses translate into racist–elitist discourse, and Santosh offers avenues to decolonizing English teaching curricula with examples of good practice from universities in Kerala. Gurukkal deconstructs the ubiquitous term ‘Indo-Roman trade’ that still dominates the discourse on the coastal connections of the southwestern coastal belt in ancient times. In breaking the equation between ‘Indic’ and ‘Roman’ civilizational models, he problematizes the notion of overseas ‘trade’ as a complex system of transregional networks and various types of exchange, steering away from Eurocentric historiography.

Disconnections and the Colonial Legacy

Yet, as the articles in this special issue demonstrate, there remain extensive gaps and blind spots in several areas of study, especially those that are typically Humanities-centred. As Indrani Chatterjee (2018) argues, unwinding the disconnections that Eurocentric historiography forged during the colonial period is a task so onerous that South Asian historians can only dream of accomplishing. One major reason for the lag in internalizing the decolonial reflection may lie in the wider field. The study of South Asia as a discipline within the Arts and Humanities has been steadily declining over the past three or four decades. The decline is discernible in shrinking and disappearing departments, fewer positions and dwindling resources for teaching languages, with the conventional wisdom that English is a good enough medium for research and teaching South Asian cultures and histories. Moreover, Humanities-centred scholarship in and on South Asia seems to be especially vulnerable to structural reforms, budgetary cuts and layoffs in a climate of professionalization and impact-driven policies in higher education. In Kerala, the region with which most articles in this special issue are concerned, the Humanities suffer similar challenges in what Devika (2022) terms ‘post-liberalization higher education scenario’ starting in the 1990s. She also describes a peculiar feature of Humanities scholarship in Kerala at the intersection between the public sphere and academia, to the extent of identifying public Humanities as an institution in its own right.

Devika’s detailed survey of the Humanities in Kerala touches briefly on language pedagogies and curricula. She points to the development of language education in Islamic institutions, where Humanities curricula have been introduced to complement theological training with non-religious subjects. It remains difficult to gauge, however, to what extent language education in Kerala equips students to undertake research using Indigenous sources in Malayalam, Arabic or other non-European languages that might support decolonial pedagogies in historiography, folklore, ethnography and literature predating—or marginalized by—modernity/coloniality. By contrast, in the UK and Europe, the study of South Asian languages is now close to extinction, surviving only in a small number of departments mostly interested in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Tamil and Hindi. Language varieties such as Arabic-Malayalam and Arwi, despite the extensive scope of knowledge production in written sources, are almost entirely overlooked. Smaller and still more marginalized Indigenous languages of tribal and Dalit communities scarcely register at all with the global academic community.

These circumstances are less than helpful in terms of curricula development, with universities disinclined to support small cohorts of students willing to work hard on primary source languages such as those required for the committed and serious study of South Asian cultures and histories. Given the persistent calls by academics and university administrators alike to ‘decolonize the curriculum’, the need to revise and update the syllabus as well as the approach to sources and learning outcomes seems to grow more pressing. We therefore need to approach our practice in higher education from two perspectives; one is the theoretical, constant reflection on decolonization in research (Moosavi, 2022; Shahjahan et al., 2022); the other is the application of theory in our day-to-day pedagogical practice, in an engaged and transformative manner, aiming at positive impact on the life of individuals and society as a whole (cf. hooks, 1994).

The decolonization agenda is challenging in many ways, especially but not exclusively for those of us working in Global North academia, where the study of South Asia in the Humanities has been fundamental to the emergence of nineteenth-century philology and, to some extent, modern linguistics (Pollock, 2009). In South Asia, by contrast, the development of modern academic institutions during the same period promoted Eurocentric Humanities disciplines and introduced language education primarily as a means of facilitating the ‘dissemination of European knowledge’ (Mohapatra, 2024, p. 7). It is precisely in this formative moment that the ‘original sin’ of coloniality lies. The study of South Asia as a discipline in the Humanities is deeply rooted in the philological tradition, which, despite decades of post-colonial critique, continues to shape undergraduate course curricula and textbooks. We still use more or less the same set of textual sources that were selected by European Orientalists like Max Müller and Monier Monier-Williams in the nineteenth century, whose ‘textual activities such as purifying, translating, editing, categorising, and codifying texts, and in formulating a fixed body of knowledge and treating it as an authoritative source’ established the intellectual paradigm within which the field still operates (Sugirtharajah, 2010, p. 72). Interestingly, the call for decolonizing knowledge, or ‘swaraj in ideas’ (K. C. Bhattacharya, as cited in Mohapatra, 2024, p. 19), still awaits its response in the Humanities and the Arts in the Indian academia. As Mohapatra (2024) notes, the reliance on English medium in the Indian academia results in derivative production of Humanities-centred knowledge. Thus, the neglect of regional languages in teaching and research in higher education is especially detrimental to the sustenance and development of Humanities disciplines in South Asia. Yet, as budgets continue to shrink, it is difficult to imagine the sustained language training and transfer of language skills required to revise and expand the canon of texts available in reader-friendly translations. As a result, the canon of texts used to represent South Asian cultures often appears fixed, despite the extent to which its formation was shaped by notorious Eurocentric and Christian-centric biases and assumptions (Hirst & Zavos, 2005; Masuzawa, 2005; Owen, 2011). With the faded to non-existent interest in fostering research in and on South Asian regional languages and language varieties, the prospects of decolonizing the curriculum in South Asian Studies remain uncertain.

The Crisis in the Humanities and South Asian Studies

Concerns for the future of Arts and Humanities in higher education, South Asian Studies included, are nothing new. In South Asia, where the higher education sector could and should lead the way into decolonial pedagogies and knowledge production on Humanities-centred South Asian Studies, the language of crisis in the Humanities has prevailed for decades (Mohapatra, 2024). While laypersons might consider the Humanities as unproductive and redundant in a world with fast-dwindling resources, academics are concerned that knowledge production oblivious of Humanities approaches and methods does not bode well for the future of cultivating critical thinking skills and civil societies around the world (Nussbaum, 2010; Pollock, 2017; see also Devika, 2022; Mohapatra, 2024). With the recent cuts targeting Humanities centres and projects in the USA, according to a UK Higher Education Policy Institution report, the much-dreaded crisis in the humanities may be less acute in the UK than it is in the USA (Thain et al., 2023). When it comes, however, to the teaching and learning of South Asian languages, cultures, literatures and histories, British academia does not seem to fare better than its counterpart in the USA. Only a handful of universities, such as SOAS, Oxford and Cambridge, offer undergraduate courses in South Asian languages, and these too are limited to ‘classical’ languages such as Sanskrit or Tibetan. In Germany, the Netherlands and other European universities, the study of South Asian languages is generally better supported, at least until recently. Yet, the funding landscape, with ever-declining rates of tenured positions and enrolled students in Humanities programmes, does not bode well for the future of South Asian Studies in the Humanities in Europe as well. In South Asia, the declining enrolment rates of students in Humanities courses, the rise of vocational education and private universities, and the lack of interest in government investment in the Humanities are equally concerning (Mohapatra, 2024). Despite the different circumstances, there are overlaps between the South Asian and the Anglosphere academic institutions in Humanities-centred teaching and research on South Asian heritage and culture.

In the Global North, the growing constraints on teaching and research of South Asia in the Humanities and the Arts result in a sense of isolation among South Asianist scholars, who ‘even in a relatively small country like Britain, feel starved of contact with others who work in related fields and on comparable sources’ (Arnold, 2017, p. 72). Seeking for synergies and intersections across disciplines in our immediate academic environment, we initiated in 2023 the workshop, the proceedings of which are included in this special issue, around the theme of South Asian coastal heritage to invite interventions by way of associating with cosmopolitanism, as well as liminality, of the coastline. At a time of multidimensional crises and challenges, environmental, societal and geopolitical, the focus on coastal heritage brings heightened awareness to the immanent risks to the survival of the coastal heritage we seek to study and teach. At the same time, coastal heritage is potentially a source of strength owing to the web of connections across the oceans and into the hinterlands, integrating the local and the global in port towns and trade emporia. These connections go back far in history, leaving us today with a rich legacy in multiple languages, literatures, traditions and registers of being and experience. Such a conceptual framing of coastal heritage studies enables us to engage ourselves, our colleagues and our students in a conversation that transcends the divide between the Global South and the Global North, seeking to reconnect the past with the present and to render the Humanities and the Arts meaningful in addressing vulnerabilities and risks.

We recognize a gap in our higher education institutions in the study of heritage, tangible and intangible, not only in South Asia, but in Asia by and large. The study of histories, languages, cultures and arts beyond the so-called West is absorbed into a wide variety of disciplines across colleges and schools, somewhat fragmented and limited to a handful of undergraduate courses. This is in contrast to the decades following the dismantling of European colonialism around the mid-twentieth century, when South Asian Studies (or Indology) in world-leading institutions generated deep acquaintance with specific regions and their respective written and spoken languages, even if reluctant to come to terms with the post-colonial critique. There may be many different reasons behind the decline in Humanities-centred South Asian Studies, not the least the neoliberal restructuring of higher education institutions in the UK in the 1990s, tectonic changes in the job markets and the increasing emphasis on applied pedagogies, namely higher education aimed at professionalization of graduates to proceed to the job market rather than seek advanced research careers. All these factors led to what has been generally defined as the decline in the Humanities. Is the fate of South Asian departments embedded in the Arts and Humanities premised on the more general trend of demand and supply?

Coastal Heritage Connections and Decolonial Knowledge Production

The papers in this special issue address the decolonial turn from different disciplinary perspectives, offering diverse pathways to the production of decolonial knowledge on typical Arts and Humanities subjects in South Asian Studies. Several papers presented in the 2023 workshop revolved around the social and cultural history of Kerala, or the Malabar Coast, approaching it from an interdisciplinary perspective for analysis of society and politics, art history and literature, as well as religion, gender and caste. All the papers explore different aspects of supra- and transregional connections converging in and around Malabar, and all of them deal in various ways with the disconnections and disruptions brought about by colonialism, orientalism and conflicted trends of modernity.

This special issue seeks to conceptualize the heritage of the south-western coastal regions of India as the product of sustained connections with other parts of Asia since at least the beginning of the Common Era. In doing so, it builds on a growing body of scholarship among South Asian historians that brings these long-standing networks of contact and exchange into clearer view. At the same time, it draws attention to the histories of disconnection, segregation and erasure that accompanied the colonial period, were reinforced through modernity and were further entrenched by the borders imposed by post-colonial nation-states.

In the contemporary moment, the pressures of unsustainable development, compounded by rising geopolitical tensions, increasingly threaten the cultural inheritance that has come from centuries of regional and transregional interaction. This special issue therefore undertakes a critical examination, recovery and rearticulation of erased connections and fragmented cultural legacies across literature, media, architecture, religion and history. In doing so, it contributes to the development of innovative theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches in Arts and Humanities higher education.