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Ashis Nandy, radically conservative

January 26, 2013
by Saroj Giri
The approach of a few bad rotten apples what does it do? It says that the problem
lies outside, outside of the society in its routine, normal functioning. Left to itself our
society is fine society is not internally generating such elements, such bad apples.
The existence of such elements does not say anything about the internal constitution or
character of our society. They say only about how we must protect our society from
such elements an enormous task. A call is given: hang the rapists! After disowning
and hanging such elements, you are left with a mythic beautiful society.
Now Ashis Nandy does not agree with this few bad apples approach. Indeed, he
lambasts the urban, expensively-educated, modern Indians for whom these bad
apples are mostly found in rural India and in urban pockets like slums and ghettos,
which share some features of a village (Modernity has produced a brand of
mayhem, The Times of India, Jan 19, 2013). For Nandy, on the other hand, the
problem is in modern India: not a few bad apples but an entire swathe of anomic,
rootless violence looking for targets. And this derives from modernity, from the
pathologies of rationality and science so celebrated today. Hence violence today is in
the air in Indian cities. The republic of India has successfully and proudly joined the
mainstream culture of politics and its vision of civilisation.
Such a powerful indictment of modern India and yet Nandy does not really break
with a basic presupposition of modern India.
By calling it anomic, Nandy understands the new kinds of violence vis--vis a loss or
lack. They occur to substitute for the loss of primordial ties: community ties have
thinned and so on. They are the result of the loss of such bonds. Hence the suggested
way out of these pathologies of modernity is to fall back on these communities and
primordial ties. The problem is not in the communities, not in the bonds, not in those
very ties but in the anomic aberrations from them. Nandy replicates the good inside
versus the bad outside binary.
Now it is not that Nandy is valorizing some inside which is the good society, viz.,
traditional society, rural India and so on this is what some left critiques would make
you believe. No, Nandy is not doing that. He does far better than that. Nandy does not
say that sexual and caste violence does not happen in Bharat or does not happen in
rural India. In fact, he tells us about caste conflicts and sexual assaults on adivasi and
Dalit women, and he takes them seriously.
Actually, Nandys argument does not rest on the actual existence of a sociologically or
empirically given good society. Instead he works with an unavowed assumption of such
a society, a mythic society, For him, it is more about upholding the myth of a mythical
society and balance, which you can somehow continuously and asymptotically approach
and aspire to, always available to revert to, no matter how deeply immersed you are in
modernity and capitalism and all its horrors.
This is where we see that his identification of the pathologies of modernity as the
problem is geared towards suggesting a reversion to this mythic society and restoration
of some lost balance. Society is divided between some mythic society and a modernity
full of ailments and disorders. In this undifferentiated sea of pathologies and disorders,
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nobody is positively enjoying their power and domination and inscribing it in society,
through violence, old and new.
Hence no positively given structure or power relations or community ties can be
identified as the ground or source of violence which is all externalized like bad apples.
Thus rape does not tell us about the kind of society we are in. It tells us about the kind
of society we have displaced. Rape is a symptom of a loss, the brutal assertion of an
ailment.
There is nothing called power relations, male domination and surely not class relations
only pathologies, disorders, imbalance, loss. Nandys conception of a really non-
modern, heterogeoneous and benign society of multiple selves (in contrast to the
ideological community of modernity) is beside the point here. For it actually is directed
towards exonerating present day society from being culpable for violence, domination
and oppression for these latter are mere pathologies.
So all these horrors and violence only serve to call for restoring of some mythical
balance, community bonds not social transformation, not challenging and subverting
the internal power relations that constitute society. In fact it actively displaces the
question of social transformation and makes the latter appear to be complicit in
modernity. Those fighting against oppression can here be presented as those
reinforcing the structures of oppression!
Hence there is no idea of movement in Nandy. It is deeply pro-status quoist but not
by being conservative and against radical change but by treating both conservatives
and radicals as stuck in the quagmire of pathologies. There is nothing to choose
between Narendra Modi and the revolutionaries.
So the struggle for social transformation now gets presented as a fight between narrow
identities created by modernity. The rapists and feminists can both very well be treated
as perversions of modernity!
Whether this mythic society is a monolithic Indian values of Chetan Bhagat or one with
multiple selves and heterogeneity does not really make a difference. Bhagat warns the
young and aspirational India protesting against the rape and demanding womens
freedom that they should not forget certain values, they should not push too hard: It
is important to understand India first, he says an indication towards again our good
community ties and bonds that cannot be undermined (Open Letter to the Indian
Change Seekers, The Times of India, Jan 13, 2013).
Unlike in Nandy, in Bhagat community ties readily become straitjacketed Indian
values. These Indian values go so well with all the aggressive, growth-oriented,
security-centric, strong state approach all that Nandy otherwise stands against. But
for Bhagat too, as for Nandy, we have lost something in our society because of which
bad things (violence, rape) are taking place. Both for Nandy and for Bhagat there is
some India which we must understand first we cannot deviate from this India. Not
just that the solution to the problems today also lie in respecting this India.
Both Nandy and Bhagat refer the protestors to some mythic society. The moment
modern Indians become too active in protests against the rape, Bhagat finds them
demanding too much. He wants to wean them away from modernity and instead refer
them to Indian values. Similarly Nandy finds the whole of the protests to be implicated
in the same pathology of modernity, in the same culture of violence. Hence he offers
primordial ties, community bonds as the solution.
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So the idea seems to be that some kind of a prior if not primordial wholeness, balance
or harmony has been disturbed. And the protests should be about restoring this balance
not turning things upside down, no transformation.
Dont aim at liberation, dont look into the future. Or rather the future is about
removing the deadweight of modernity and releasing to life the apparent hidden
resources of yore perhaps reviving communal ties and bonds that are already there,
repressed, lacerated and homogenized under modern anomic life. Dont look into the
future, fall back not so much on the past as to some mythic element in the present
and contain any real change.
In this specific sense, it looks like even the proponents of unbridled market and strong
state can concur with Nandys defence of the multiple-selves community and
primordial ties. The formal structure and subjective effect of Nandys argument
therefore coheres with those of many expensively educated modern Indians.
Nandy refers to Adolf Eichmann how he could carry out mass murder without any
sense of complicity in it since he killed by pushing files the way many kill today by
clicking computer mice. Hence it was not radical evil but banal evil, almost exonerating
the lower level clerks from complicity with fascism. This is Hannah Arendts view which
Nandy approvingly refers to.
Arendt is clearly wrong here, as Slavoj Zizek has pointed out in his The Plague of
Fantasies. But Nandy gives a bad spin to Arendt, assuming that it is technology or
rather the distance created by technology or the social distance (from the crime and
victim?) created by modernity which is what leads to the new kinds of violence.
Something from outside, technology, is working through us and making us (the good
us of the mythic society) engage in violence.
Arendts banality of evil approach, or, in this case, the banality of rape would mean
that there is no positively existing power relation or domination which is brutally
inscribed or enacted in rape. Instead it becomes something like a desperate attempt at
loss-fulfillment by those who are themselves victims of the pathologies of science or
rationality an expression of what is not there, a loss, hence banal. Looked at this way,
all agency, all protests will look like merely repeating the pathologies of modernity or
the mere working out of techno-alienation.
Put it this way: Nandy is radical, he provokes and antagonizes the ruthless and
aggressive upper middle class hawks. He does this better than anybody else. But his
framework is deeply conservative.
5 Comments

5 Responses to Ashis Nandy, radically conservative

1. Savita Singh Says:

January 27th, 2013 at 12:54

well analysed. Nandy still has western notion of how violence gets created,
sustains itself and targets its victims. That is why in Indian case, in practical
terms he misses his own points.

2. Sabitha TP Says:
January 30th, 2013 at 02:15
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Mohan Bhagwat, and not Chetan Bhagat as the essay says, surely?! A good
sharp analysis, a way to start engaging with Nandy with critical seriousness, so
sorely lacking otherwise.

3. Smriti suman Says:

January 31st, 2013 at 12:16

Dear sir,
Good that you have criticized both,one who always criticize the phenomena from
the inside perspective of modernity and another who always give refrence of
some so called Indian value.We need this sort of criticism of these inactive
intellectual.but sir my point is, sometimes these critical intellectualism or radical
conservatism help those or propoblatise those, who blv in nontransformable
revolutionism, it means traditional activist.Thus i think some time to keep
protest alive we need these sort of criticism.

4. Amya Says:
February 7th, 2013 at 06:35

Well said. A strong need to analyze the whole is required. Protests and the so
called activism today has limited itself to individual events and incidents leading
to a strengthening of the existing structure that led to these occurrences in the
first place. Unless the foundation of this structure is not fondled with,this
superficial activism will only keep layering on and eventually multiply such
events of injustice.

5. KS Subramanian Says:
March 3rd, 2013 at 12:31

I have learnt much from this analysis which places Nandy in perspective. Nandy
can be a confusing thinker for the ordinary reader! I would like to read Giri on
Nandys observations at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Thanks.