Ashis Nandy has been described in a dualistic manner by author Christine Deftereos in her book on his persona, Ashis Nandy And The Cultural Politics of Selfhood. First, he is a political psychologist and second, an intellectual street fighter, who takes on both the politics of psychology and the psychology of politics with equal ease. In this process, it is not surprising that he rubs people the wrong way. While there has been a lot of psychoanalytic theory that goes into his thought process, the author focuses essentially on his writings on secularism and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, and its influence on the way politics is carried out in India. His critique of Indian secularism has produced intense controversy in the past and has proved to be a dynamic case to explore the relationship between the critique, method and the critic.
The book characterises the mode of dissent in Nandy’s work. He tends to be critical of secularism and feels that the imported content of the western ideal is not compatible with the existing home-grown concept of tolerance and social cohesion. His anti-secularism tirade cannot be taken as being just an anti-western ideology. He carefully demonstrates the processes of subjection and the making over of the ‘ideal’ secular subject within Indian politics. His detailing of the forewarning of the flaws of secularism can be juxtaposed with the ascent of Hindu fundamentalism in the nineties. For him, the claims of Indianness advanced by Hindu nationalists and the promise of unity and security that accompany their claims, foreclose the ambivalence and contradiction of Indian traditions, culture and identity. Nandy has argued that the clash between modernity and religious traditions in Asia and Africa emanates from four political responses to ethnicity. These are: Western man as the ideal, the westernised native, the zealot and the non-modern peripheral ethnic. The western man as the ideal political man is a familiar cultural archetype and central to the victory of western colonialism. The rational and secular mindset goes with progressive deals, which has been successful in the West. He becomes the reference point for us to follow and could be the ideal that we aspire to be. The westernised native, where the best example is Jawaharlal Nehru, internalises the imago of the western man, thus accepting the conditions of subjection. He is the non-believer in public and private, though Nehru was prone to the use of advice of astrologers at times, thus showing ambivalence. This native continues to work towards the consolidation of ontological security derived from the identification and subjection in service of the culture. The zealot could be Sikh, Muslim or the Hindu revivalist. In fact, he has argued that the rise of Hindu nationalism is intimately connected to the pathologies of secularism. This person has hatred for the westernised ethnic as having proverbially sold out to the western man. Further, the non-modern peripheral ethnic is the most significant subject type where Gandhi fits in, which could be a disruptive subject. The author also traces Nandy’s views on the rise of Hindutva ideology, which has been associated with the eruption of violence in the 1990s. He argues that this is not a sign of communal politics, but connected to a secular political culture; as such, violence has to be viewed from the point of view of being a part of a larger defensive force operating in politics around Indianness, national identity, national integration and democracy. For Nandy, the political seeds giving rise to these events had been planted earlier and have to be understood as continuing effects of distortions of a dominant secular ideology, altering cultural, social and political priorities. He is basically against both secularism and Hindutva, which he classifies as faulty ideologies. He, in fact, chastises the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi for playing on the epic serial Ramayana to reach out for votes. As a corollary, he links violence in Gujarat in 2002 to political machinations as seen by the localisation of such incidents to areas where the BJP did not have a stronghold. According to the author, Nandy confronts and traverses the dominant view that communal amity can only be safeguarded through a more aggressive pursuit and commitment to the ideology of secularism. He treats such fantasy structures as chimera and ruptures the existing meanings and assumptions. By rejecting the secular ideal, he explores features of Indian politics that are excluded from the discussion table. Now, critics do aver that Nandy and his work are based on beliefs that represent an intellectual basis of anti-secularism and anti-modernism in India. They believe that his work carries forward a threatening and disruptive quality, which moves toward what is called regressive traditionalism. These responses represent his ideas and identity within a particular ideological and intellectual framework. Some critics even say this only shows that he is leaning towards the Hindu right. The author emphasises that his commitment to psychoanalytic processes of revolt does not foreclose his commitment to maintaining the dynamism of these internal resources, which include societies or cultures of revolt. He feels that it is within these features of Indian tradition that a culture of revolt can be found. Deftereos does a fairly commendable job of daring to take on critically one of the most confrontational and incendiary of Indian political scientists and also presenting a balanced and intuitively agreeable assessment of the intellectual works of an anti-intellectual public thinker. The author has put forward the view that the approach taken by Nandy is geared toward the psychoanalytic mode. This mode of engagement is revealed in his capacity to generate critical analytic perspectives that expose and regenerate subjectivity, including his own. His psychoanalytic commitment comes out in all his writings, and argues the importance of this approach. She, therefore, argues that the purpose is not to offer a correct reading of Nandy’s position but to demonstrate how these responses fit in his methods. She best summarises his contribution as being an attempt—and a brave one, too, to discuss the tensions between the past and the present, tradition and modernity, public and private selves within a society; the recovery of selves, the politics of knowledge, formation of political cultures, the health of a democracy and the global culture of common sense. The book is definitely not for the common man, but the follower of politics or rather the psychology of politics as the discussion level is of an esoteric nature.
The book characterises the mode of dissent in Nandy’s work. He tends to be critical of secularism and feels that the imported content of the western ideal is not compatible with the existing home-grown concept of tolerance and social cohesion. His anti-secularism tirade cannot be taken as being just an anti-western ideology. He carefully demonstrates the processes of subjection and the making over of the ‘ideal’ secular subject within Indian politics. His detailing of the forewarning of the flaws of secularism can be juxtaposed with the ascent of Hindu fundamentalism in the nineties. For him, the claims of Indianness advanced by Hindu nationalists and the promise of unity and security that accompany their claims, foreclose the ambivalence and contradiction of Indian traditions, culture and identity. Nandy has argued that the clash between modernity and religious traditions in Asia and Africa emanates from four political responses to ethnicity. These are: Western man as the ideal, the westernised native, the zealot and the non-modern peripheral ethnic. The western man as the ideal political man is a familiar cultural archetype and central to the victory of western colonialism. The rational and secular mindset goes with progressive deals, which has been successful in the West. He becomes the reference point for us to follow and could be the ideal that we aspire to be. The westernised native, where the best example is Jawaharlal Nehru, internalises the imago of the western man, thus accepting the conditions of subjection. He is the non-believer in public and private, though Nehru was prone to the use of advice of astrologers at times, thus showing ambivalence. This native continues to work towards the consolidation of ontological security derived from the identification and subjection in service of the culture. The zealot could be Sikh, Muslim or the Hindu revivalist. In fact, he has argued that the rise of Hindu nationalism is intimately connected to the pathologies of secularism. This person has hatred for the westernised ethnic as having proverbially sold out to the western man. Further, the non-modern peripheral ethnic is the most significant subject type where Gandhi fits in, which could be a disruptive subject. The author also traces Nandy’s views on the rise of Hindutva ideology, which has been associated with the eruption of violence in the 1990s. He argues that this is not a sign of communal politics, but connected to a secular political culture; as such, violence has to be viewed from the point of view of being a part of a larger defensive force operating in politics around Indianness, national identity, national integration and democracy. For Nandy, the political seeds giving rise to these events had been planted earlier and have to be understood as continuing effects of distortions of a dominant secular ideology, altering cultural, social and political priorities. He is basically against both secularism and Hindutva, which he classifies as faulty ideologies. He, in fact, chastises the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi for playing on the epic serial Ramayana to reach out for votes. As a corollary, he links violence in Gujarat in 2002 to political machinations as seen by the localisation of such incidents to areas where the BJP did not have a stronghold. According to the author, Nandy confronts and traverses the dominant view that communal amity can only be safeguarded through a more aggressive pursuit and commitment to the ideology of secularism. He treats such fantasy structures as chimera and ruptures the existing meanings and assumptions. By rejecting the secular ideal, he explores features of Indian politics that are excluded from the discussion table. Now, critics do aver that Nandy and his work are based on beliefs that represent an intellectual basis of anti-secularism and anti-modernism in India. They believe that his work carries forward a threatening and disruptive quality, which moves toward what is called regressive traditionalism. These responses represent his ideas and identity within a particular ideological and intellectual framework. Some critics even say this only shows that he is leaning towards the Hindu right. The author emphasises that his commitment to psychoanalytic processes of revolt does not foreclose his commitment to maintaining the dynamism of these internal resources, which include societies or cultures of revolt. He feels that it is within these features of Indian tradition that a culture of revolt can be found. Deftereos does a fairly commendable job of daring to take on critically one of the most confrontational and incendiary of Indian political scientists and also presenting a balanced and intuitively agreeable assessment of the intellectual works of an anti-intellectual public thinker. The author has put forward the view that the approach taken by Nandy is geared toward the psychoanalytic mode. This mode of engagement is revealed in his capacity to generate critical analytic perspectives that expose and regenerate subjectivity, including his own. His psychoanalytic commitment comes out in all his writings, and argues the importance of this approach. She, therefore, argues that the purpose is not to offer a correct reading of Nandy’s position but to demonstrate how these responses fit in his methods. She best summarises his contribution as being an attempt—and a brave one, too, to discuss the tensions between the past and the present, tradition and modernity, public and private selves within a society; the recovery of selves, the politics of knowledge, formation of political cultures, the health of a democracy and the global culture of common sense. The book is definitely not for the common man, but the follower of politics or rather the psychology of politics as the discussion level is of an esoteric nature.
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