PORTRAITS OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN INTELLECTUALS: ASHIS NANDY
Ashis Nandy was born in British India in 1937. He is a clinical psychologist whose writing has covered a wide variety of topics in political psychology. Since his life spans the entire course of the postcolonial era, it is not surprising that he has grappled with Indian identity in his work, sometimes engaging in psychological diagnosis to shed light on political matters. The best-known example is when he extensively studied Narendar Modi, then a little-known functionary, and concluded that he had an authoritarian personality, meriting the category of “fascist” in every respect.
Nandy’s presence in India has been large. A pioneer of Indian social criticism, much of his work centers on the Indian middle classes, the people who support Hindu nationalism, take pride in India’s possession of nuclear weapons, and want India to follow the path of the West in order to build an efficient, wealthy, and powerful nation-state. Nandy’s message to them is that they should not be so quick to let go of an older way of life with its broader and more tolerant outlook. Most of all, Nandy has been a highly visible public intellectual, an independent voice, not afraid to take controversial positions and to dissent from intellectually fashionable stances.
Modern Indians, according to Nandy, have deeply imbibed a Western view of their place in world history as well as 19th-century ideas of the nation-state. In The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), he points out that notions of nationalism, progress, rationality, secularism, and even of a desirable society have taken on a Western aura as modern Indians have lost their cultural memories, becoming strangers to vital aspects of their own past. His critique of the viability of secularism, economic progress, and state worship is harsh, and he believes India’s premodern past has an important future role.
Nandy has called himself a “critical traditionalist.” His view of the traditional world is that it is not opposed to modernity but actually goes beyond it in important respects. He sees this world as more at home with diversity and flexible identities than the India of today; in its receptiveness to plural realities, it is postmodern. In Nandy’s view, although modernity has brought Indians more individual freedom, it has also increased their need for stability, cultural continuity, and psychological security. Hindu nationalist demagogues meet this need through ethnic chauvinist, nationalist, and populist appeals that offer a sense of community based on Hindu cultural identity. But their masculine politics, strongman rule, and program of permanent economic progress leads to environmental destruction and the further erosion of community. The end result is atomized individuals organized as a mass under the banner of the state.
Like Dipesh Chakrabarty, the postcolonial theorist, Nandy is critical of modernists who believe that Western liberal philosophy is a great advance over what has prevailed in other parts of the world. He scorns the idea that liberalism fully supersedes traditional outlooks. On the other hand, in his view, traditional approaches to society and politics should not be given a free pass just because they are “authentic.”
Nandy’s suggestion is to revive the agricultural economy. In addition, there should be a return to the traditional Indian notion that a person is not only a member of one community, but rather part of communities that range from the largest one, the nation, to the smallest one, the different caste groups, while in-between are the intermediate ones of region, language group, religious group, and sect. Hinduism was compatible with multiple identities and allegiances until the 1920s when Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of Hindu nationalism, took over the Western idea of the nation-state and politicized the Hindu religion.
Nandy believes that the Shaheen Bagh protests against the new citizenship law led by Muslim women were treated harshly by the BJP government because they appealed to the rule of law and the Constitution to uphold their vision of a diverse political community. The BJP wants to stimulate nationalism on both sides to produce greater ethnic conflict in order to win votes. Riots with gangster-type violence increase public support for a strong state and assist national mobilization on the basis of Hindu identity. The business elites and a large sector of the middle class now support the strong state and its development model. But it is unsustainable in the long run so Nandy foresees an eventual return to the visions of Gandhi and Tagore. He believes that the politics of love would be vastly more persuasive if a selfless leader of the caliber of Gandhi or J.P. Narayan appeared.
Chakrabarty admires Nandy’s perspective which he sees as showing respect toward the past without being trapped by it. Nandy has rightly recognized that every culture has a dark or pathological side; in India the practice of sati (widow self-immolation) is a clear example. He also effectively criticizes the modern revolutionary who wants to efface what has come before in the name of a rational society. Such an abrupt break with the past produces alienation.
According to Chakrabarty, what we can do with our limited sense of autonomy is live practically, giving neither tradition nor rational utopias our full allegiance. However, he questions Nandy’s unwillingness to fully reject sati and doesn’t believe that such a rejection must lead to alienation. On this matter, Chakrabarty is more critical than traditionalist, aligning with other postcolonial theorists who identify with the left. This disagreement between Chakrabarty and Nandy shows how difficult it is to determine the right balance between what needs to be preserved and what ought to be let go of, and to build a philosophy that goes beyond both the radical rejection of the past and the uncritical acceptance of it.
By confronting this issue honestly and with great insight, Nandy points us toward Gandhi, not Hindu nationalism, as a way out of India’s postcolonial dilemmas.
