'Decolonise education!' This exhortation has travelled far and wide -- in the Global North and Global South, in formally independent former colonies and settler colonial societies. As such voices grow, we might ask: What does decolonising education entail? How should this be undertaken? And, importantly, who decides on the terms by which such an undertaking should be guided and by what authorities? If this line of questioning appears abstract or tentative in the face of a struggle many take to be of utmost urgency, then what this essay hopes to offer is clarity and tangibility to this caution. With present day India as an example, I sketch out ambivalences in the way decolonial theory has travelled. I then counterpose decolonial theory with the decolonial thought of two exemplars: the cultural critic Edward Said, whose work provides a clear argument for 'secular criticism' against recourse to any quasi-religious or nativist orthodoxy that purports to stand beyond the complicated entanglements of human history; and the Bengali writer and educational leader Rabindranath Tagore who, under the pall of British imperialism and amidst an ascendant chauvinistic Indian nationalism in the early-twentieth century, embodied such a secular criticism in his approach to decolonising education.