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by Nishant Das (Author)
Is India Being Colonised Again? draws a direct parallel between India's historical subjugation and its present dependence on imported technologies. Where the British, backed by technological innovation and commercial ambition, once arrived on Indian shores by ship, the West now returns in digital form through the silicon chip.
The book traces parallels between the colonial past and the digital present, from Company Raj to Platform Raj, from resource extraction to data extraction. It shows how trade was once used to build asymmetrical leverage that enabled empire, and how similar patterns of dependency today grant external powers influence over India's commercial ecosystem, national infrastructure, and even its cognitive and psychological landscape.
Shifting the lens from colonial symbols to colonial processes, the book reinterprets India's colonial history through the lenses of data science, behavioural psychology, and system design. Moving beyond infrastructure and material extraction, it examines how colonial systems reshaped identity, behaviour, and mindset, and how those patterns continue to echo in the digital age.
Building on this analysis, the book turns to a reckoning with the present, asking whether technological dependence in the era of platforms, standards, and artificial intelligence is giving rise to a new form of colonisation. It explores a form of control that operates through architecture rather than authority, and consent rather than coercion. Trade routes have become data routes. Governors have been replaced by algorithms. Control no longer announces itself. It embeds.
The book concludes by examining the structural conditions that enable technological dependence to persist and deepen, and the implications this holds for autonomy, innovation, and national agency. Rather than offering easy solutions, it asks difficult questions about what independence means in a world where control is increasingly exercised through systems rather than force.
Written for readers interested in political economy, technology studies, post-colonial analysis, and the future of innovation in India, this book challenges comfortable narratives and asks an unsettling question. Has the architecture of empire disappeared, or has it simply changed form?
