Ashis Nandy

The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance

A significant aspect of the post-colonial structures of knowledge in the Third World is a peculiar form of imperialism of categories. Under such imperialism, a conceptual domain is sometimes hegemonized by a concept produced and honed in the West, hegemonized so effectively that the original domain vanishes from our awareness. Intellect and intelligence become IQ, the oral cultures become the cultures of the primitive, the oppressed become the proletariat, social change becomes development. After a while, people begin to forget that IQ is only a crude measure of intelligence and that one day someone else may think up another kind of index to assess the same thing; that social change did not begin with development, nor will it stop once the idea of development dies a natural or unnatural death. In this paper, I seek to provide a political preface to the recovery of a well-known domain of public concern in South Asia, ethnic and especially religious tolerance, from the hegemonic language of secularism popularized by Westernized intellectuals and middle classes exposed to the globally dominant language of the nation-state in this part of the world. This language, whatever may have been its positive contributions to humane governance and to religious tolerance in the past, increasingly has become a cover for the complicity of modern intellectuals and the modernizing middle classes of South Asia in the new forms of religious violence. These are the forms in which the state, the media and the ideologies of national security, development and modernity propagated by the modern intelligentsia and the middle classes play crucial roles. To provide the political preface I have promised, I have first to describe four trends which have become clearly visible in South Asia during this century, particularly after the Second World War.

The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves

This is Nandys most important collection of essays so far. The core of the volume consists of two ambitious, deeply probing essays, one on the early success of psycho-analysis in India, the other on the justice meted out by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the defeated Japanese. Both issues are viewed in the context of the psychology of dominance over subservient of defeated culture. The theme is explored further in the remaining essays, and subsumes topics ranging from mass culture and media, to political terrorism, the hold of modern medicine, and notably the conflict or split between the creative work of writers like Kipling, Rushdie, and H G Wells, and the political and social values they publicly and rationally profess. The book is marked by Nandys characteristically ebullient style, sharply perceptive insights, and confident engagement views.

Shamans, Savages and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent and the Future of Civilizations

We are living in a global civilization, even if it does not look to us sufficiently global. This civilization has certain features and ‘ground rules’ and those who want to consolidate, transcend or dismantle it, must first identify them. Foremost among the rules are a few laws of obedience which come in many guises, only two of which I shall touch on here. The first is the peculiarly narrow and specific form dissent has to take, to be audible or politically ‘non-cooptable’ in our times. The second is the strange inaudibility which Plagues those who, by design or by default, have become citizens of the dominant global culture. In the first section of this paper, k e shall discuss the former; in the second, the latter. I shall then suggest that the two can be conceptually collapsed and the Third World can be made to represent that collapsed category, but the reader need not accept that part of the story.

The Changing Popular Culture of Indian Food: Preliminary Notes

Culinary changes and modes of public dining are undergoing rapid changes in India and have begun to reflect some of the new strands in the culture of Indian politics. A national cuisine may not have emerged but some pan-Indian trends are visible. Even a rudimentary fast food culture is crystallising out of familiar regional preparations. Simultaneously, new concepts of what kind of food can be served on formal occasions and of cuisines that can or cannot provide effective restaurant fare are changing the relationships between different regional cuisines.

An Anti-Secularist Manifesto

Gandhi said he was secular. Yet, he thought poorly of those who wanted to keep religion and politics separate. Those who believed in such separation, he said, understood neither religion nor politics.

Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo

Amilcar Cabral, the African freedom fighter, spoke of the ‘permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people’ as the very core of colonialism. ‘To take up arms to dominate a people is’, he said, ‘to take arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize . . . its cultural life.’ Cabral also seemingly recognized the corollary of such an understanding: that the reaffirmation of cultural traditions could not but be the heart of all authentic anti-colonialism. In many ways, however, Cabral borrowed heavily from 19th century Europe’s world image. He could not be fully sensitive to the other reason why a theory of culture has to be the core of any theory of oppression in our times: a stress on culture reinstates the categories used by the victims; a stress on cultural traditions is a defiance of the modern idea of expertise, an idea which demands that even resistance be uncontaminated by the ‘inferior’ cognition or ‘unripe’ revolutionary consciousness of the oppressed. A stress on culture is a repudiation of the post-Renaissance European faith that only that dissent is true which is rational, sane, scientific, adult and expert-according to Europe’s concepts of rationality, sanity, science, adulthood and expertise.

The Beautiful, Expanding Future of Poverty: Popular Economics as a Psychological Defense

There is a basic distinction between poverty, which has always been with us, and destitution, which has become more pronounced only recently given the assault on traditional communities and their life–support system. Destitution is directly attributable to processes of development. This paper investigates the psychological structures with which the mainstream cultures of politics live, but especially the ego defense furnished by poverty alleviation (particularly “celebratory” accounts of the decline of poverty) to consolidating middle class consciousness. The presently trendy slogan of globalization can be read as the newest effort to disguise both the declining political clout of the historically disadvantaged and an interest in poverty.

Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood

There is nothing natural or inevitable about childhood. Cliifdhood is culturally defined and created; it, too, is a matter of human choice. There are as many childhoods as there are families and cultures, and the consciousness of childhood is as much a cultural datum as the patterns of child-rearing and the social rolc of the child. However, there are political and psychological forces which allow the concept of childhood and the perception of the child to be sharedanc! transmitted. And it is the political psychology of this shared concept and this transmission that I am concerned with in the following analysis.

The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age, and Ideology in British India

It is becoming more and more obvious that colonialism--as we have come to know it during the last two hundred years--cannot be identified with only economic gain and political power. In Manchuria, Japan consistently lost money, and for many years colonial Indochina, Algeria and Angola, instead of increasing the political power of France and Portugal, sapped it. This did not make Manchuria, Indochina, Algeria or Angola less important as colonies. Nor did it disprove the point that economic gain and political power are important motives in a colonial situation. It only showed that colonialism could be characterized by the search for economic and political advantage without concomitant real economic or political gains, and sometimes even with economic or political losses. This essay argues that the first differentia of colonialism is a state of mind in the colonizers and the colonized, a colonial consciousness which includes the sometimes unrealizable wish to make economic and political profits from the colonies, but other elements, too. The political economy of colonization is of course important, but the vulgarity and insanity of colonialism are principally expressed in the sphere of psychology. The following pages will explore some of these psychological contours of colonialism in the rulers and the ruled and try to define colonialism as a shared culture which may not always begin with the establishment of alien rule in a society and end with the departure of the alien rulers from the colony. The example I shall use will be that of India, where a colonial political economy began to operate seventy-five years before the full-blown ideology of British imperialism became dominant, and where thirty years after the formal ending of the raj, the ideology of colonialism is still triumphant in many sectors of life.

Motives, Modernity, and Entrepreneurial Competence

Summary A study of 67 entrepreneurs and 48 nonentrepreneurs from two subcultures showed that while n Achievement, n Power, efficacy, and overall modernity were positively correlated with entry into enterprise, a factor analytically derived scale of entrepreneurial competence correlated with only education and religious modernity. Need Affiliation showed no association with either entry or competence. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that the social and psychological skills required by entrepreneurial competence are different from those required by entry into entrepreneurial activity. The subcultural differences in correlates of competence were suggestive, but not significant.