Pedagogies of Decentring: Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra, Storytelling and the Contestation of Occidental Authority in International Law

The debate on the decolonization of international law scholarship is gaining increased traction in the academic community. The stories of colonial inequalities, domination, violence, patriarchy, racism and oppression have been conveniently eliminated in mainstream international law curricula as nugatory diegeses. There is undoubtedly an alternative subaltern history and theory of international law. If epistemology delves into the question of how knowledge is conceived, along with what and whose knowledge is valid, this article uses the TWAIL pedagogy to locate Arthas´āstra as a site for challenging and rewriting the occidental scholarship of international legal theory. The author expresses his limitations of not being formally trained in European legal theory but has used critical legal studies pedagogy to deconstruct the same. The author does not claim to lay down any definitive account of the structure of the international law curriculum but believes that the issues discussed in this article expose a larger problem of how the international law curriculum is designed in India.