‘I had imagined the world differently’: Anil Ramdas and the convolution of a postcolonising Europe

In a world in which English is the hegemonic global language, we often forget that the world is a multi-lingual place where intellectual debates and writing are conducted in many other languages. This is also the case for debates on multiculturalism, which tend to be framed within particular national contexts. This chapter will discuss the discursive peculiarities of Dutch multiculturalism through the life and work of Anil Ramdas, a brilliant thinker, journalist and essayist of Hindustani Surinamese descent who became a highly respected, prize-winning public intellectual in the Netherlands in the 1990s, arguably a time when the embrace of a cosmopolitan multiculturalism was at its height in Dutch culture and society. His death by suicide in 2012 on his 54th birthday can be seen as a sign that his hopeful optimism about Western society's capacity for postcolonial transformation had turned into despair as the 21st century brought the War on Terror, the rise of a white-nationalist extreme right, and a general hostility towards asylum seekers and refugees. Through a reading of his work and its shifting reception in the Netherlands, the chapter will point to some of the complex and contradictory realities of multicultural European societies today, embroiled as they are in the unfinished business of coming to terms with the implications of large-scale postcolonial immigration and the difficult task of cultural decolonialisation.