Growing up in Mumbai, Shloka Murarka received an education based on a UK curriculum. Literature classes featured all the usual writers from the west (Shakespeare, Orwell, et al), but slim pickings from an Indian literary canon which stretches back to 1500BC and has produced authors such as RK Narayan and Arundhati Roy. It was the same when it came to geography. “We’d learn about how seasons worked in Europe or North America, which is where the textbooks were written, but there was hardly anything in these books telling us about climate in the Indian subcontinent,” she says. “This education was seen as ‘elite’, but also meant we weren’t sensitised to local issues.”
The legacy of colonial education in India was partly why Murarka opted to enrol on an economics degree at Soas University of London. Murarka’s BSc degree – like most of the courses at Soas – follows a decolonial approach, focusing on the history, culture and academic thinking of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and their diasporas (which collectively comprise three-quarters of the world’s population). Murarka only started her course last September (arriving in London the same week as the mini-budget probably gave her the perfect introduction into the flaws of western economics) but has already crafted a “radical reading list” for her course, including writers such as Guyanese academic [and Soas alumnus] Walter Rodney and Indian economist BR Ambedkar.
