Knowledge is Power: A Critical Genealogy of Epistemic Power in Colonial and South Asian History
I want to begin today not with an argument, not with a theory, and not with a date. I want to begin with a phrase. Three words. Five syllables. "Knowledge is power." You have heard it before. You have probably said it yourself. Perhaps a teacher wrote it above a blackboard. Perhaps a parent offered it as consolation when you were struggling at school. Perhaps you have seen it printed on a motivational poster, stitched onto a tote bag, hashtagged across social media. It is one of those phrases so thoroughly absorbed into the furniture of modern life that we have stopped noticing it. And that, precisely, is the problem. Because a phrase that everyone agrees with and no one examines is not a truth. It is an ideology. It is a story about the world so thoroughly naturalised that it has stopped looking like a story at all. And when stories stop looking like stories — when they pass themselves off as simple, obvious facts — they bec...