Recently, the plea to decolonize the university (or curriculum) has been an organizing theme for conferences, special issues of journals and talk series in the academy. Although energetic discussions around the role of the academy in post-colonial societies are gaining currency, gerontology’s reluctance to engage critically with the emancipatory politics of decolonization is surprising. In fact, a quick search of gerontology-related journals reveals that while scholars do assert the significance of adopting a cultural frame to appreciate local particularities and meaning-making, an attempt to decenter the pedagogical tradition remains stifled. For example, the precarious positionalities and histories of sexual, racial, and caste minorities remain outside mainstream gerontological education even in post-colonial societies. India is no exception. Indian gerontological tradition, while empirically robust, remains ahistorical and theoretically mute, especially in challenging the “certainties of Eurocentric models” (Lamb, 2013). Additionally, scholars have noted how the decolonization discourse itself is often caught between the binaries of the Global South versus the Global North or between the high-income countries and low-income countries (see Contractor & Dasgupta, 2022), neglecting the axes of power that sustain local hierarchies (e.g. the caste system in India that predates colonialism). How does Indian gerontological scholarship (and pedagogical traditions) benefit from recognizing the local intersectionalities if we were to rethink the decolonization project?
