Epistemicide and Colonial Knowledge: a Contrapuntal Reading of Nair Historiography in South India

Colonial power in South Asia operated not only through territorial administration but also through the systematic codification of indigenous societies into Western epistemic categories. This article investigates the historiographical construction of the Nair community in Kerala, South India, specifically focusing on the matrilineal institutions of marumakkathayam and sambandham. Situating the study within debates on colonial epistemology and postcolonial theory, the article analyses how ethnographic and historical narratives emplot Nair social institutions within Eurocentric interpretive frameworks. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s concept of epistemicide, Bernard Cohn’s theorisation of colonial forms of knowledge and Edward Said’s method of contrapuntal reading, the article traces how imperial discourse framed indigenous social practices into reductive binaries of “oppressor” and “oppressed”. The study advances debates in decolonial historiography by exposing the narrative structures through which colonial knowledge systems produced and perpetuated epistemicide. This contributes to the ongoing efforts to decolonize the study of South Asian communities.