Unbearable Lightness of Being Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy Photo: Mohan Trivedi

There is a peculiar charm in Ashis Nandy’s arguments. Where does this charm come from? It originates at same point as all radical thinking begins with, which is upsetting the conventions. Ashis Nandy upturns the convention in which most Indian middle class, his ardent readers, so to say, are schooled. It is the schooling in the ideas of a colonial modernity. The upsetting is in another way soothing as well. It enables you to the play the dissident as well as can continue as a conformist by way of assuring you and me that we are basically decent but we were spoiled by colonialism. We are our own intimate enemy. Now you and I have room for maneuvering. And for the “original” thinker this is an opportunity to advance his anti-modern tirade against the Anglicization (his term for Globalization) tendencies of the homo-cultural terrain called the West.

What does Nandy tends to enable? Foremost, It disclaims the present order of civilization, it disrepute the urban middle class for their instinctual tendencies for defrauding the poor and marginalized, it de-legitimizes the claims of modern institutions for its animistic leniency for the western ways of life, it decries the west as a harbinger of mass violence on humanity on whatever the West claims as its superior contribution, it authorizes an imaginary tradition in India or more generally in South Asia that had nourished a tolerant and amicable ways of life and livelihood. The point of break from this happy and self-fulfilling tradition begins with the entry of colonialism.

What did colonialism do? It uprooted the people from the locale of civilization, it advanced people to another frontier of knowledge like in human anatomy, engineering. It standardized the conventions of justice by way of establishing uniform models and institutions for delivery of justice. It polarized the social process by way of organizing institutional mechanisms for popular participation and dissemination of ideas. The process of fragmentation that colonialism inaugurated continues unabated.

What is opposed to all of these? A picture-perfect tradition. You will get snap of this picture in whichever article Ashis Nandy writes. He calls it epic culture; A tradition that nurtured mutual interactions between communities. The ecology of this communitarian past was nourished by the waters of a Bakthi, an indigenous form of worship. The nation in this community-centered life world was merely an organized movement of people even without any particular directions as people move together in a pilgrimage. This ideal movement and cherishing views of tradition incompatible with disorderly past has an apostle. Mind you, it is not Ashish Nandy himself. He would never claim such a position. He would discredit himself by pointing out to the fact that it is in the same colonial crucible that his ideas were made. Sorry, I didn’t mention the name of the revered figure. Who else is the apostle other than M.K.Gandhi. A perfect attachment to a perfectionist tradition!

Let us imagine how a typical anti-modern (anti-west and anti-colonial) response would be an idea or a “thing” like modern sanitation. We must be very serious because what we deal with here is a very modern invention as well as a western import. The modern system of toiletry heralded a revolution in terms of sanitation and hygiene. It was an import from West and a vestige of colonialism. A typical anti-modern argument may construe this as an invasion of colonial modernity to be decried because from this angle perhaps it destroyed thousands of years of old sanitation system, the culture of hygiene that existed prior to the colonial period and it may argue as well that it rendered scavenging communities jobless. To disrepute the modern, the epochal moments from the tradition will be tracked back and in this case it would be the great bath and sanitation system from the great Harappan civilization.

What is neglected in this great profiling of an imaginary past as opposed to a tyrannical modernity is the human conditions that this tradition- bound life have brutally devastated. The feudal ruling class of the society made their life to be “reputably” pure by exporting all their impure excess to the toiling masses who were ‘bound” by a tradition to carry the excreta of the leisurely and priestly classes. The universalization of modern sanitation was also coeval with the larger struggle within the society for social justice and a decent life. This broader struggle for a greater independence and autonomy coincided with the war waged against the British rule. The struggle for democratic participations in decision making by the caste and communities hitherto marginalized from the process of executive power was actually and greatly supported by the institutions established by the British. The Westminster model of parliamentary participation, the judicial system where by the provision of all are equal before the law of the land is tremendous shift from the way justice was conceived or executed previously to it.

Now coming to his recent articles on election verdict and post-election future of Hindutva politics, we know that they have been major hits. Nandy has also acquired new devotees with the election results decoding. The admirers of his “original” thinking range from classicist among the classicists to typical of typical middle-class. Not a small thing for an anti-modern author. In the two articles (Tehelka), even as he repeats his well-nurtured (in fact, decades long nurturing- you see the same ideas in early 80s works of Nandy like Edge of Psycology, Intimate enemy to recent works like Time Treks and Time Warps) constructions of “epic culture”, a “uniform, homogenous and eternal West”, colonial modernity, Bismarckian Nation-State form, Savarkrian European substance, caricature of science as an instrument of invasion, he certainly enables a perspective to read the verdict and the ensuing changes. My attempt in the next post would be to see how he makes his established concepts operate in otherwise not-so-ground-breaking election results. I would argue that instead of de-coding, Ashis Nandy encrypted the result with some findings from a worn-out sub-discipline of psychology, namely, behaviouralism.