Problem Postcolonial thought and decolonial thought are connected, but they are not identical. Said, Spivak, Bhabha and Subaltern Studies chiefly raise questions of colonial representation, discourse, subjectivity, the archive and nation-building; the Latin गजेन्द्र ठाकु र American modernity/coloniality tradition asks why colonial patterns of classifying power, knowledge, the economy, race, gender, nature and humanity persist even after colonial rule has formally ended. The first condition for making this distinction is terminological discipline. Colonialism may denote a historical form of rule: a system of territorial domination, extraction, law, military power, bureaucracy and political sovereignty. Coloniality is a concept for the long-lived pattern of power generated by such domination, a pattern that may reproduce itself in institutions, labour, knowledge, classification and aspiration even after formal independence. Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the “coloniality of power” reads the modern world-system as a combined structure of race-organised social classification, labour control and Eurocentric knowledge. From this perspective, “modernity” is not merely a narrative of emancipation, science or progress; its formation cannot be separated from conquest, slavery, extraction and racial ordering. Yet Quijano’s framework arose from the specific history of Latin American conquest, race formation and world capitalism. Directly copying it onto caste, tribe, religion, language, indigenous relations or the South Asian colonial experience would be an analytical error. Comparison requires functional axes; it must not presume genealogical identity. Walter Mignolo develops the language of colonial difference, border thinking, delinking and epistemic disobedience. The question is: what are the geo-history and body-politics of that which presents itself as universal knowledge? “Who knows?” and “From where does one know?” are not external questions added to epistemology; they form part of epistemology itself. Nelson Maldonado-Torres uses “coloniality of being” to emphasise the ontological effects of domination: when the existence, humanity, vulnerability, voice and death of some groups are assigned unequal value, coloniality becomes not merely a question of policy or curriculum but of lived being. María Lugones exposes the gender-related limit in Quijano’s framework. If analyses of race, labour and coloniality do not treat gender and sexuality as constitutive of the modern/colonial formation, the “coloniality of power” remains incomplete. This intervention gives decolonial feminism particular importance. Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation and the question of transmodernity test modernity’s self-narrative not from within Europe but from the standpoint of the victims of conquest and of exteriority. Yet treating the “outside” as pure, untouched or premodern innocence creates another problem; in history, exteriority itself may have been formed through interaction, violence, translation and hybridity. A danger in popular uses of decoloniality is to call every inequality, every bureaucracy, every Western concept or every modern institution “colonial”. If the concept expands too far, explanatory precision disappears. The question is not whether coloniality is everywhere, but which mechanism, classification, institution or epistemic hierarchy can be historically traced. A second danger is nostalgic restoration. A precolonial tradition may have been a victim of colonial domination, but that fact does not automatically make it just, gender-equal, caste-free, scientifically reliable or ethically superior. Decolonisation is not tradition-worship exempt from criticism. A third danger is epistemic relativism. If all knowledge is merely the product of location, by what criterion are conflicting claims judged? Decolonial critique must protect the dignity of local knowledge while also making explicit standards of empirical testing, logical consistency, intersubjective criticism and harm-sensitive ethics. A fourth danger is the invisibilisation of internal domination. A binary such as “West versus Rest” can conceal local elites, caste hierarchy, patriarchy, majoritarianism, class domination, linguistic privilege and regional centre-periphery relations. Critiquing coloniality does not exempt indigenous or local power from criticism. A fifth problem concerns institution-building. Changing a syllabus, diversifying an archive, producing knowledge in local languages, reforming land and forest rights, and changing research ethics are distinct levels of decolonial praxis. If the distance between slogan and institutional design is not bridged, decoloniality may become merely a rhetorical identity. The aim of this chapter is to understand the intellectual transition from postcolonial thought to decolonial thought, not to proclaim the victory of any one school. The question is how useful—and how limited—the concepts of modernity, power, knowledge, being, gender, nature, border, pluriverse and epistemic justice are, and what Parallel Philosophy can learn from them. Core Proposition The core proposition of this chapter is that the idea of coloniality is useful for showing the difference between the end of formal empire and the end of domination. Political independence is necessary, but hierarchies of knowledge, racialised or civilisational classification, extractive economies, developmental norms and cultural inferiority can persist. Quijano’s principal contribution is to view power not along a single axis but across interconnected domains: social classification, labour and control of resources, authority, sex and gender relations, and subjectivity and knowledge. Although parts of his framework were later revised by other thinkers, it remains a foundation for multi-domain decolonial analysis. The modernity/coloniality thesis holds that Europe’s modern self-image and the colonial world are not separate histories. If the prosperity, institutions of knowledge and political forms of the “modern” centre are read apart from colonial extraction, plantation economies, slavery, conquest, racial hierarchy and the global division of labour, the history remains incomplete. This thesis does not mean that modern science, constitutionalism or rights should be dismissed as merely colonial deception. A parallel perspective examines both contribution and complicity: which modern institutions possess emancipatory capacities, which reproduce exclusion, and how they can be reworked. The coloniality of knowledge investigates the provenance of epistemology. Canon, discipline, citation, archive, university, language of scholarship, methodology and category-making are not neutral containers of knowledge. Yet examining provenance does not automatically cancel a claim’s truth-value. The philosophical strength of border thinking lies in recognising that knowledge may arise not merely from outside the centre but from boundary-crossing positionality. A border is not only a physical frontier; it may be a site of linguistic, racial, epistemic, civilisational and institutional difference. The best meaning of epistemic disobedience is not evidence-free rebellion but a refusal of epistemic monopoly. Removing one dominant canon only to establish another unquestionable canon is not decolonial; granting alternative sources, languages, methods and concepts critical parity can be. Delinking does not mean isolation from world knowledge; it means breaking epistemic dependence on “the single valid standard”. Here the parallel method of world philosophy becomes useful: dialogue on terms of equality rather than imitation or self-dissolution. The coloniality of being raises a question for dignity-based ethics. When some lives are systematically described as disposable, uncivilised, backward, primitive or less rational, classification produces both material violence and ontological devaluation. Decolonial feminism shows that gender is not a peripheral topic within coloniality. Without studying the relations among race, local hierarchies such as caste, labour, sexuality, family, property, reproduction and embodiment, the matrix of power remains incomplete. Pluriversality is not the simple opposite of universalism. The formula “one world, many world-making traditions” can be useful, but shared constraints involving climate, disease, violence, mathematics and physical reality cannot be denied in the name of plurality. Parallel Philosophy draws three principal lessons from decolonial critique: examine the geography of knowledge; investigate the classificatory power of institutions; and recognise the epistemic dignity of local and embodied experience. But it adds three safeguards: do not abandon evidential criteria; criticise internal domination; and do not erase historical differences. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ The formula of this chapter is: “Colonial rule may end; coloniality may persist by changing form. But if you call something coloniality, show the genealogy, mechanism and evidence.” A second formula is: “Examine the location of knowledge; examine its truth-claim as well. Location influences truth; it does not replace it.” Principal Arguments First argument—the question of historical duration. The date of independence is a turning point in political sovereignty; social classification, land relations, language hierarchy, bureaucratic categories and educational canons may move according to different temporal rhythms. Decolonisation may therefore be an event, while decoloniality can be a long process. Second argument—the question of race and classification. In Quijano’s Latin American context, race becomes a constitutive category of world power. Other societies may contain comparable classifications, but it is wrong to say race = caste = ethnicity. The genealogy, institutions and mechanisms of reproduction of each hierarchy must be examined separately. Third argument—the question of labour. Coloniality is not merely discourse; it is linked to labour control, land, mines, plantations, debt, wages, migration and global commodity chains. Epistemic critique is incomplete when separated from material political economy. Fourth argument—the question of authority. Even after state sovereignty changes, administrative routines, police categories, property law, district boundaries, civil-service language and statistical conventions may retain colonial inheritances. Inheritance does not mean unchanged continuity; a postcolonial state may also reorganise them for its own purposes. Fifth argument—the hierarchy of knowledge. University syllabi, citation networks, journal languages, archive preservation, funding priorities and credentialing determine what forms of knowledge become visible and legitimate. Decolonial reform is not merely the addition of content; it also analyses institutional gatekeeping. Sixth argument—the question of language. If scholarly thought is valued only in a dominant language, local concepts may become impoverished in translation. But a claim written in a local language is not automatically reliable. Linguistic justice and epistemic rigour must advance together. Seventh argument—the travel of concepts. Latin American concepts such as coloniality, border thinking and pluriverse may be useful heuristics in South Asia, but local categories—caste, varṇa, birādari, Adivasi, tribe, language, pañjī, land and community— must not be forced into them. Eighth argument—the body-politics of knowledge. The knower is not an abstract disembodied mind; gender, race, caste, class, language, institution and geographical access shape knowing. Situatedness is not a substitute for intellectual accountability. Ninth argument—the critique of the “zero point”. Claims to a neutral view can sometimes conceal positional privilege. The answer to this is not complete subjectivism but a combined regime of methodological transparency, replication, adversarial criticism, data provenance and positional reflexivity. Tenth argument—the coloniality of being. Dehumanising classifications may appear in everyday encounters, policing, health, border control, labour valuation, grief and legal protection. Dignity-based ethics opposes this ontological asymmetry. Eleventh argument—the question of gender. Lugones’s critique shows that colonial orders can reorganise gender categories and heterosexual norms together with racial classification. Yet precolonial gender forms differed across societies; one must not invent a universal condition of precolonial gender innocence. Twelfth argument—the question of nature. Colonial extraction can transform land, forest, river, mineral, animal and community relations into categories of resource. Decolonial ecology reveals the importance of relational knowledge; at the same time, ecological claims should be tested through both empirical science and local observation. Thirteenth argument—border thinking. Actors located at borders navigate multiple legal, linguistic, cultural and epistemic regimes. Such experience can reveal the artificiality of categories, but border experience itself should not be romanticised as pure. Fourteenth argument—the pluriverse. Policy and design can accept multiple, locally negotiated futures rather than one universal development model. But plural futures are not exempt from questions of human rights, ecological limits and non- domination. Fifteenth argument—translation. Decolonial dialogue is impossible without translation, yet translation is not power-neutral. Which terms remain untranslated, which equivalents are created, and which language becomes the reference language are themselves part of epistemic politics. Sixteenth argument—institutional memory. Colonial archives, museums, censuses, surveys, maps and textbooks are not merely objects of the past; their categories can come alive again in the schemas of digital databases. Metadata has become a new site of decolonial questioning. Seventeenth argument—self-critique. Decolonial thought itself can become an authority. Which thinkers become canonical, which indigenous or local voices remain mere quotations, where funding comes from, and how the English-language academy circulates knowledge—these questions must be applied to the field itself. Eighteenth argument—reconstruction. The goal of colonial critique is not only dismantling. Without alternative institutions— multilingual scholarship, community archives, fair curricula, accountable AI, participatory research and land or ecological governance—decoloniality remains incomplete. Pūrvapakṣa Pūrvapakṣa 1: The concept of coloniality is too broad. If capitalism, racism, patriarchy, epistemology, nature, subjectivity, the state and technology are all said to be parts of coloniality, the concept appears to explain everything and in fact explains nothing in particular. Pūrvapakṣa 2: The modernity/coloniality thesis may underestimate the internal plurality of modernity. Class conflict, feminist struggle, abolitionism, socialist critique, religious dissent and anti-imperial thought within Europe are also parts of modern history. Pūrvapakṣa 3: Turning a Latin American genealogy into a global template risks creating a new intellectual universalism. Iberian conquest, Atlantic slavery, settler colonialism, British India, African indirect rule, Ottoman legacies and Nepal’s state formation have distinct histories. Pūrvapakṣa 4: Applying a framework centred on race to a hierarchy such as caste may erase caste’s religious, matrimonial, occupational, regional and political specificities. Pūrvapakṣa 5: “Epistemic disobedience” can turn into anti-expertise or anti-science rhetoric opposed to evidence-based disciplines. In vaccination, climate science, medicine or engineering, local standpoint alone is not sufficient. Pūrvapakṣa 6: Celebrating indigenous or local knowledge can conceal patriarchy, hierarchy, superstition, exclusion or ecological harm within a community. A tradition that has itself been oppressed can still oppress others. Pūrvapakṣa 7: Delinking is practically unclear. In a mutually dependent world of global science, the internet, trade, medicine, universities and law, from what exactly should one “delink”, to what extent and in what manner? Pūrvapakṣa 8: The vocabulary of decoloniality can become dense and self-referential; terms such as colonial matrix, pluriverse, border gnosis and re-existence can become marks of theoretical prestige rather than tools for empirical research. Pūrvapakṣa 9: Coloniality of being uses the language of ontology, but humiliation, violence, poverty, policing and health disparities may already have adequate sociological explanations; the explanatory gain from adding “being” is not always clear. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Pūrvapakṣa 10: Pluriversality may weaken shared normative standards. If every community possesses its own world, how can cross-community judgement address gender violence, child rights, caste discrimination or environmental externalities? Pūrvapakṣa 11: Decolonial feminism faces limitations of sources when reconstructing precolonial gender complexity. Colonial transformation may be accepted, but not every form of gender domination can be called a colonial invention. Pūrvapakṣa 12: Decolonial academia itself depends on elite universities, English-language publishing, global conferences and citation economies; its claim to stand “outside” may look like a performative contradiction. Pūrvapakṣa 13: Postcolonial theory has already done substantial work on discourse, hybridity, subalternity, nationalism and epistemic violence; decoloniality may be only a new terminology. Pūrvapakṣa 14: Excessive emphasis on colonial continuity may underestimate postcolonial agency. Independent states, social movements, constitutional reforms, local capitalism and internal political choices themselves produce new structures. Uttarapakṣa Uttarapakṣa 1: The criticism that the concept is too broad is valid; therefore “coloniality” should be used as a mechanism-specific label. Every claim should identify the classification, institution, historical continuity and material effect involved. Such discipline reduces conceptual inflation. Uttarapakṣa 2: The purpose of modernity/coloniality is not to deny every achievement of modernity but to examine the asymmetrical conditions under which those achievements arose. The language of rights was also used to criticise colonial rule; this dialectic should be included in the framework. Uttarapakṣa 3: The Latin American genealogy must not be hidden. Concept travel should operate as a comparative hypothesis, not as a claim of “the same history”. A South Asian case should revise the concept through local archives and categories. Uttarapakṣa 4: Once caste-race equivalence is rejected, relational comparison remains possible: hereditary classification, labour segmentation, endogamy, stigma, state enumeration and barriers to mobility can be compared for similarities and differences through evidence. Uttarapakṣa 5: Epistemic disobedience is not opposition to science. Its use is to test monopolies of authority; in validating claims, experiment, replication, statistical reasoning and expert scrutiny retain their full importance wherever appropriate. Uttarapakṣa 6: Local knowledge requires “critical inclusion”. Ecological observation, medicinal practice, oral history and craft knowledge should be documented, tested, compared and incorporated within rights-respecting frameworks. The origin of a tradition is not a substitute for evidence. Uttarapakṣa 7: Delinking should be understood not as isolation but as changing the terms of dependency. Local-language research infrastructure, open data, regional citation networks, community governance and diversified curricula can coexist with global exchange. Uttarapakṣa 8: The criterion for vocabulary should be operational clarity. If one invokes a “colonial matrix”, one should specify the field, actors, rules, incentives, archive, categories and outcomes. Theory must demand empirical specification. Uttarapakṣa 9: Coloniality of being has value when it shows the relation between structural deprivation and dehumanising recognition. Ontological language should not replace empirical harm; it should articulate its lived moral dimension. Uttarapakṣa 10: A pluriverse is not moral anarchy. Parallel Philosophy combines plural social worlds with shared foundations of minimal non-domination, bodily integrity, evidence-sensitive public reason and equal dignity. Uttarapakṣa 11: The strongest form of decolonial feminism does not say “colonialism created all gender hierarchy”; it asks historically how colonial rule reclassified, intensified or transformed existing gender forms. Uttarapakṣa 12: The institutional contradiction of decolonial academia should become a reason for self-critique. Citation diversity, funding for translation, ethics of co-authorship, community compensation, open access and local-language publication can reduce the gap. Uttarapakṣa 13: Postcolonial and decolonial thought should not be treated as competing brands. The Said–Spivak–Bhabha– Subaltern tradition offers deep analysis of representation and subjectivity; the Quijano–Mignolo–Lugones–Walsh tradition emphasises the longue durée of coloniality and praxis. Dialogue between them is more fruitful. Uttarapakṣa 14: Postcolonial agency must be recognised. Calling something a “colonial legacy” does not absolve present rulers, institutions, caste elites, corporations or citizens of responsibility. Present power remains answerable for present decisions. Indian Dialogue The first precaution in applying decolonial thought in India is not to paste the Latin American racial genealogy of coloniality onto caste. Caste has precolonial histories; colonial enumeration, modern politics, reservation, endogamy and labour relations constitute distinct layers. B. R. Ambedkar is a decisive interlocutor for decolonial discussion because he does not allow internal hierarchy to disappear into the shadow of colonialism. Without caste annihilation, the celebration of “indigenous knowledge” remains incomplete and can sometimes become unjust. The educational project of Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule raises questions of Brahmanical monopoly over knowledge, caste- gender exclusion and schooling. Whether or not this tradition is labelled “decolonial” is a later genealogical issue; its importance as an independent Indian current of epistemic democratisation is clear. Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement criticises tradition, religion, caste authority and gender hierarchy. This example shows that decolonisation does not necessarily mean a “return to tradition”; at times, a radical critique of local domination is more necessary. Gandhi’s questions concerning swaraj, language, village life, modern civilisation and epistemic autonomy can serve as sources for decolonial dialogue, but they must be read together with his disagreements with Ambedkar on caste, gender, technology and political economy. Subaltern Studies criticises colonial archives and elite historiography; decoloniality can connect this to questions of the world- system, coloniality of knowledge and modernity. Yet the empirical discipline of South Asian historiography must be preserved. The question of Adivasi or indigenous knowledge is connected to land, forest, biodiversity, customary governance and spiritual relations. Recognition is necessary; so are attention to community diversity, internal dissent, women’s rights and scientific or ecological assessment. Colonial censuses classified caste, tribe, religion and language, and the effects of these classifications on later political life deserve study. But the linear conclusion that “the census created caste” would erase local prehistories. Colonial institutional inheritances such as the Indian Penal Code, evidence law, land settlements, bureaucracy, police and district administration should be examined case by case for postcolonial transformation. Continuity, adaptation and rupture are all possible. English provides access to global knowledge, but it can also produce linguistic hierarchy in higher education. The solution is not merely to remove English but to build high-quality multilingual scholarship, terminology, translation, peer review and digital tools. The revival of Indian knowledge systems can be a decolonial project if it adopts text-critical scholarship, manuscript provenance, historical dating, debate and contemporary testing. “It is ancient, therefore it is true” is not decoloniality; it is merely a transfer of authority. Ayurveda, local medicine and traditional ecological knowledge should be studied with respect, but health claims concerning safety and efficacy are not exempt from empirical criteria. Cognitive justice and patient safety are not opposites. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ In curriculum decolonisation, merely adding more Indian thinkers is insufficient. Comparison should be symmetrical: Indian traditions should also be taught through their dissent, contradictions, caste and gender exclusions, empirical strengths and conceptual sophistication. From a decolonial perspective, constitutional democracy is not merely a colonial inheritance. The Constitution is a complex synthesis of anti-colonial struggle, social justice, Ambedkarite critique, rights, federalism and modern institutional learning. The Indian formula is: “Criticise colonial power; criticise indigenous power as well. Examine foreign knowledge; examine local knowledge as well. Liberation comes not from double standards but from equal critical criteria.” Mithila’s Parallel Perspective The first rule of decolonial analysis in Mithila is to recognise the plurality of the region. North Bihar under British India and Nepal’s Tarai/Madhesh did not share the same colonial trajectory; cultural connection does not prove identity of historical state experience. Colonial district boundaries and cultural Mithila are not the same thing. When historians make maps, administrative units, linguistic regions, ritual networks, river-based geography, migration zones and present political boundaries should be shown as distinct layers. Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, including its classification of Maithili among the Bihari languages, is an important source. Its linguistic documentation should be valued while its colonial classificatory context, terminology and effects on later language politics are read critically. The question of colonial knowledge production in Mithila can be examined through the interrelations among pañjī genealogies, Sanskrit scholarship, vernacular print, local schools, district gazetteers, revenue surveys and ethnography. Local knowledge was not merely a passive object of the state archive; local informants, paṇḍits, clerks, landlords, teachers and writers could also be co-producers. Pañjī should not be romanticised simply by calling it a decolonial source. It can be a valuable corpus for genealogy and history, but it is also an institution of caste, marriage regulation, archival selectivity and social hierarchy. It should be read both as a source and as a form of social power. The modern history of Maithili standardisation, script choice, print technology, school education and recognition is tied to multilingual relations of power. Questions of Tirhuta, Devanagari and Latin digital encoding are part of contemporary epistemic infrastructure. Local oral traditions, songs, narratives, wedding songs, memories of labour, flood memories and migrant narratives are alternative archival sources. But the date of performance, performer, context of collection, variant, genre and corroboration should be recorded. Mithila’s scholarly identity is harmed by claims such as “all theories existed here before the West”. Genuine decolonial confidence rests on precise texts, chronology, arguments and comparison, not on claims of priority. Navya-Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya, Dharmaśāstra, literature, folk knowledge and modern Maithili thought should not be dissolved into a single “indigenous worldview”. Preserving their internal disputes, methods and historical specificities is itself a form of epistemic justice. Local hierarchies of caste and gender should not be externalised as merely problems of coloniality. If evidence of internal domination appears in marriage, labour, education, land, ritual status and access to language, its independent historical responsibility must be recognised. In studying floods, rivers, embankments, migration and agrarian distress, expert hydrology, local flood memory, administrative data, satellite imagery and oral testimony can be used together. This is a decolonial-compatible example of multi-evidential rationalism. The India–Nepal border is a lived space of family, language, marriage, pilgrimage, trade and labour movement; at the same time, citizenship, customs, policing and welfare regimes create real differences between states. “Border thinking” can be a heuristic for reading this complexity, not an identity slogan. A digital archive such as Videha can make local-language knowledge searchable and public. Decolonial digital practice requires provenance, version history, OCR quality, script support, accessibility, open metadata and long-term preservation. If an AI system treats Maithili as a low-resource language and produces faulty translations, hallucinated history or Hindi-biased output, this can be an instance of contemporary epistemic inequality. The answer requires not only critique of the model but also clean corpora, benchmarks, community review and transparent evaluation. Mithila’s parallel formula is: “Mithila may be a methodological homeland; it is not a monopoly on truth. Respect for local knowledge grows, rather than diminishes, through critical testing.” Contemporary Applications AI training corpora inherit global linguistic inequalities. An English-heavy dataset is not a neutral sample of world knowledge. Multilingual corpora, provenance, dialect coverage and community-governed data can become practical measures for decolonial AI. An LLM may prefer a “standard language” and treat a local dialect or script as an error. Evaluation of language technology should not rely only on dominant standards; variation-aware benchmarks are necessary. Search ranking can make heavily cited Western sources appear more authoritative while local-language scholarship remains less discoverable. Better indexing, metadata translation, citation-graph diversity and regional repositories can improve epistemic visibility. When a digital humanities project imports colonial maps or census categories, historical classifications can harden into computational truth. Database schemas should therefore record the origin of categories, date ranges, uncertainty and fields for contested labels. When museum digitisation makes an object’s image available without its colonial acquisition history, provenance disappears. Collection history, ownership claims, community perspectives and repatriation status should form part of the metadata. Health AI may underperform for local populations when training data are demographically or geographically unbalanced. Here the decolonial concern is an evidence-based fairness audit, not opposition to medicine. In climate adaptation, integrating satellite models with local ecological knowledge can be useful, but local claims should not receive romantic immunity. Predictions, historical observation and community experience should be triangulated. A practical rubric for “decolonising the syllabus” in education is: diversify the geography of sources; include women, Dalit, Adivasi and regional thinkers; provide excerpts in original languages; teach criticism of canonical texts; and base learning outcomes on methodological comparison. In research ethics, communities can be participants not merely as data sources but in framing research questions, interpretation, authorship, benefit-sharing and archive access. At the same time, academic independence and the right to dissent must remain protected. Heritage tourism can commodify local culture and manufacture an “authentic tradition”. Decolonial heritage management should attend simultaneously to living communities, historical change, conservation science and labour rights. Algorithmic content moderation may misclassify minority-language speech when abuse detectors are built around dominant languages. Local annotators, appeals, context-sensitive models and transparent reporting of errors are necessary. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Machine translation can flatten a cultural concept into a single dominant equivalent. Glossaries, multiple translation options, retention of untranslated terms with explanation, and human review can reduce epistemic flattening. Government data categories such as “household head”, “tribe”, “mother tongue” and “informal worker” help shape social reality. Category design therefore requires participatory review and periodic revision. Open science offers a decolonial opportunity by reducing paywalls and increasing data access, but infrastructure costs, language barriers and compute inequality can create new hierarchies. Openness is not the same as equal capacity. In university partnerships, treating a Global South institution merely as a partner for field access or data collection reproduces unequal knowledge relations. Symmetry is needed in budgets, authorship, principal-investigator roles, data ownership and agenda-setting. The contemporary formula is: “Decolonising knowledge does not mean deleting data; it means showing provenance, equalising access, building local capacity and applying the same standards to all claims.” Chapter Conclusion The transition from postcolonial thought to decoloniality is not merely a move away from discourse back to material power; it is an attempt to connect representation, world-system, race, labour, being, gender, nature and knowledge within a complex matrix. Quijano’s coloniality of power establishes an important distinction between the formal end of colonialism and the persistence of patterns of domination. Yet its Latin American genealogy must remain explicit. The modernity/coloniality thesis challenges triumphalist narratives of modern progress, but it does not license the dismissal of every achievement of modern science, rights or democratic institutions. Critique must remain differentiated. Mignolo’s border thinking and epistemic disobedience offer useful language against epistemic monopoly; in their strongest form they are not anti-evidence but a disciplined inclusion of plural sources and knowers. Maldonado-Torres exposes the ontological dimension of dignity, while Lugones brings gender and sexuality to the centre of coloniality analysis. These extensions also reveal the limits of the original framework. The Pūrvapakṣas show that decoloniality can fall into conceptual inflation, romantic nativism, relativism, vague praxis and blindness to internal domination. Such criticism should not be treated as external hostility to the field but as necessary self- critique. In the Indian context, equations such as race = caste are unacceptable. Ambedkar, Phule, Savitribai, Periyar, Gandhi, Subaltern Studies, Adivasi knowledge and constitutional experience possess their own genealogies; there should be dialogue, not merger. In Mithila, colonial archives, language surveys, pañjī genealogies, vernacular print, flood memory, the India–Nepal border and digital language infrastructure can become concrete sites for decolonial inquiry. The dignity of local knowledge and evidential standards are not enemies. The multi-evidential rationalism of Parallel Philosophy responds to this tension: sources are multiple; their weights are context-sensitive; criteria are public and self-correcting. In the age of AI, questions of coloniality can reappear in corpora, metadata, ranking, OCR, benchmarks, language coverage, compute access and model governance. Digital decoloniality requires technical specification, not merely slogans. The combined formula of this chapter is: “To decolonise does not mean to remove the West; it means to remove monopolies of knowledge, expose historical hierarchies, strengthen local capacity and place every claim before critical standards.” In the chapters ahead, Parallel Philosophy will incorporate this insight into a wider project of post-deconstructive reconstruction: examine power, examine location, examine evidence, examine internal hierarchy, and then rebuild institutions.