Description

About the Book:

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 Governors have been replaced by algorithms.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.

About The Author:

Dr. Nishant Das is a behavioural data scientist and innovation researcher who writes at the intersection of technology, psychology, and society. Trained as a nuclear engineer at McMaster University, Canada, and holding a Ph.D. in Behavioural Finance from IESE Business School, Barcelona, with a visiting research stint at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, his work bridges scientific rigor with human insight.

Dr. Das has spent over a decade advising governments and organizations in the Middle East on the application of AI, machine learning, and innovation systems to real-world decision-making. His academic and professional interests converge on a central inquiry: how human behaviour, cognition, and culture shape technology, and how technology in turn reshapes human behaviour, cognition, and culture.

Through his writing and research, Dr. Das explores how nations and individuals can reclaim agency in an era dominated by data-driven power structures. Is India Being Colonised Again? is his first major work for a general audience, synthesizing history, behavioural science, and innovation theory to challenge readers to rethink what sovereignty means in the information age.