From Capital to Coloniality: Rethinking Marxist Literary and Cultural Discourse in India and the Global South

Abstract

Since the 1930s, Marxism has served as one of the dominant frameworks for literary and cultural criticism in the Indian subcontinent. Yet its analytical adequacy in societies where domination is reproduced not only through class relations but through colonialism, caste hierarchy, and epistemic violence has remained deeply contested. This article undertakes a theoretical and comparative reexamination of Marxist literary and cultural discourse in India and the Global South. Drawing on three bodies of sources   classical and neo-Marxist texts, Subaltern Studies and Indian postcolonial theory, and decolonial thought from the Global South   the article argues that the Progressive Writers’ Association (1936), despite its pivotal role in linking literature to radical critique, suffered from significant theoretical limitations in representing caste oppression and Dalit identity due to its reliance on European Marxism. Chakrabarty’s critique of the universalism of European categories, Spivak’s interrogation of subaltern representation, and Ambedkar’s insistence on the irreducibility of caste to class, alongside the concepts of coloniality of power hegemony, and epistemic disobedience, constitute the article’s theoretical framework. The parallel trajectories of Mariátegui in Peru, James in the Caribbean, and Ngũgĩ in Africa further demonstrate that the critical rearrangement of Marxism from within the Global South constitutes an independent theoretical current, not an exception. The article concludes that the move “from capital to coloniality” is not a rejection of Marxism but its critical extension — an effort to situate capital within a broader matrix of colonial power, caste, language, and epistemic hierarchy. Within this horizon, literary texts are not merely representations of class contradiction but sites where capital, caste, and colonial inheritance simultaneously shape subjectivity, voice, and the possibility of epistemic disobedience.