5 Who is Afraid of Postcolonial Theory? Development, Accumulation and the Spectre of Outside Dhritiman Chakraborty Postcolonial theorists have spilled a great deal of ink tilting against windmills of their own creation. In so doing they have also given license to a massive resurgence of nativism and Orientalism. –Vivek Chibber, 2013: 77 Postcolonial societies require such a theory of the outside so as not to remain altogether outside Theory any more. It is the theory of foreclosure (in Lacan) that offers postcolonial theories a way of not remaining foreclosed in Theory any longer. –Anup Dhar, unpublished working paper, 2016 This chapter wants to argue why we need the theoretical rubric called ‘postcolonialism’ while talking of politics of resistance in India in particular and South Asia in general. In doing that it is guided by two kinds of critico-theoretical impulses: first the question of ‘difference’ which will be defined as an inalienable constitutive element of the political in a field overdetermined by heterogeneous socio-economic forces in relation to the global circuit of capital qua developmentalist regime in India, secondly this emphasis on ‘difference’ does not necessarily determine the object of its study as ‘heavily oriented towards culturalism’ (Chibber 2011), therefore placing political (as understood in the Marxian dialectic of class analysis) in a virtual cul de sac. On the contrary, this paper tries to re-engage with the question of class and surplus labour in the capitalist drive for accumulation in the South Asian context without