Journal of African Development

In this paper, the decolonial economic ideologies of Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar are evaluated as alternative theories of postcolonial development, and their intellectual legacies are placed in comparative African and Indian contexts. Although it seems that the vision of swadeshi evolved by Gandhi, which was based on decentralized, village production and the moralistic restraint of accumulation, and that of constitutional socialism as developed by Ambedkar, which is based on state-controlled industrialization and economic democracy, are incompatible, both intellectuals were fundamentally opposed to Western models of the development of capitalism and the structural dependency that they reproduced. By making comparative analysis of Ujamaa philosophy of Julius Nyerere and Pan-African socialism of Kwame Nkrumah, this paper exposes the intellectual project of decolonization of development that was shared by the postcolonial world, with the reclaiming of the policy space, centred non-western epistemologies, and economic systems that would build human dignity and substantive freedom rather than capital accumulation. The paper shows that the modern criticism of post development theory of development as a system of Western knowledge justifies the intuition of these mid-twentieth-century decolonial intellectuals which emphasizes the contradictions between the morally oriented economy and structural change, between the village and the state, which continue to plague development policy in the Global South. Its academic value is in the fact that it focuses on non-Western economic thinking as intellectual assets and not as historical oddities, and contributes to epistemological decolonization that is needed to envision development outside the power of the Northern hegemony