250 research outputs found
The corruption of a republic
No full textEminent Indian psychoanalyst and social commentator Dr Ashis Nandy found himself in the middle of a controversy recently after he made a few remarks on corruption at a session entitled ‘The Republic of Ideas’ at the Jaipur literary festival, 24– 28 January 2013. Author and publisher of Tehelka magazine Tarun Tejpal spoke of corruption as an equalising force, to which Dr Nandy said:
Just a response to this part, very briefly. He’s not saying the most important part of the story, which will shock you and it will be a very undignified and, how should I put it, almost vulgar statement on my part. It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs (Other Backward Classes) and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes and as long as this is the case, the Indian republic will survive.
A journalist present at the panel took up this statement, which was later endlessly replayed on a 24-hour television news channel. Dalit organisations and activists protested against Dr Nandy. Not surprisingly, considering the upcoming elections in some key states, some politicians jumped into the fray and called for Dr Nandy’s arrest. In India anti-Dalit speech is punishable under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, and is a non-bailable offence. There were demonstrations and police complaints were filed against him in three different locations. Fearing physical harm and the possibility of imprisonment, Dr Nandy and his family went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of India did grant a stay order on the arrest warrants against him, but at the same time the Chief Justice of India told Dr Nandy’s lawyer ‘Whatever your intent, you can’t go on making statements. Tell your client he has no license to make such comments.’
The Indian social media and blogsphere exploded, with various arguments emerging on behalf of and against Dr Nandy. The most common complaint against Dr Nandy is that he was casteist, and that he had stereotyped Dalits. Such complaints came even from those defending him. A passionate critique by Anoop Kumar outlined Dalit oppression in India and accused specific media personalities of defending Dr Nandy instead of interrogating ‘upper caste anxieties’. There are blogs that, while disagreeing with Dr Nandy, argue for his right to express his opinion and to ‘be wrong’. There are those who argue that his remarks were made in humour, and lament the dearth of an understanding of wit, satire or irony.6 While the case seems to be closed after the Supreme Court judgment, there is still debate about whether this was a victory for freedom of speech or another instance of the way in which the upper castes in India can get away with any derogatory statement against the lower castes.
The freedom of speech argument is unsatisfying. The difference between ‘provocative speech that forces you to think’ and ‘provocative speech that is intended to hurt, denigrate or provoke’ is very context dependent. The intention of any speaker is not only difficult to prove, but also difficult to know. I would like to base my defence of Dr Nandy neither on his right to say what was on his mind, nor on his intention. Instead, I would suggest that his remarks should be understood through a discussion of corruption, and the way in which Dr Nandy uses the term.
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Shvetal Vyas is a PhD student in the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia
Trans/forming Cultures Annual Lecture: presented by Professor Ashis Nandy
No full textProfessor Nandy has had a long and prolific career illuminating an extraordinary number of subjects. He lists his research interests as: "political psychology, mass violence, cultures and politics of knowledge, utopias and visions", but he has also written on the history of science and technology, the nature of the post-colonial state, alternatives to "development", alternate politics, the role of religion in society and the game of cricket in India. His works have been translated into Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Polish, Russian and Spanish (not to mention most of the languages of the Indian subcontinent).
See the TfC website for more details of his publications and his recent visit here.
http://www.transforming.cultures.uts.edu.au/news_events/ashis_nandy.htmlProfessor Ashis Nandy visited Australia as the guest of the UTS Key University Research Centre in Communication and Culture, Trans/forming Cultures. He presented the 2nd Annual Lecture entitled: "The Return of the Sacred, the Language of Religion and the Fear of Democracy in a Post-Secular World"Trans/forming Cultures, UTS
The Critical Traditionalism of Ashis Nandy: Occidentalism and the Dilemmas of Innocence
No full textThis article offers an analysis of the construction and deployment of the ideas of \u27the West\u27 and \u27tradition\u27 in the social commentary of Ashis Nandy. It argues that Nandy\u27s \u27critical\u27 defence of tradition is framed and animated by occidentalism and renders tradition into a paradoxical space of redemption and innocence. The first part of the paper shows that Nandy\u27s nativist narratives of loss and his suspicion of political ideologies place him both in and against post-colonial cultural politics. The second section examines and illustrates the mutually defining nature of occidentalism and traditionalism. It is shown that Nandy\u27s stereotypes of authentic Indian culture undermine the critical capabilities of his \u27critical traditionalism\u27. Part three explores Nandy\u27s dilemmas further by reference to his attempts to align tradition with reflexivity
Ashis Nandy, ed., The Secret Politics of Our Desires. Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema
No full textL’originalité de cet ouvrage consiste à envisager le cinéma comme un « analyste », c’est-à-dire un révélateur de la société indienne, et à puiser dans son réservoir populaire de scénarios et de « schémas sensori-moteurs » (Ashis Nandy) des outils pour renouveler l’approche traditionnelle du politique. L’auteur tient pour acquis que le cinéma en Inde a contribué, pendant plus d’un siècle, à façonner la conception qu’ont les classes moyennes du politique et de la société, mais « les sciences so..
Ashis Nandy e as vicissitudes do self: crítica, subjetividade e civilização indiana
No full textEste texto trata da obra de Ashis Nandy, um dos principais intelectuais indianos contemporâneos, psicólogo social, psicanalista, bem como cientista político, que busca desenvolver o que chamou de "tradicionalismo crítico". Sua discussão da personalidade e do indivíduo, dentro de uma concepção ampla da civilização da Índia, com a modernidade fazendo-se presente como ameaça explícita (e elemento implícito, mais ambiguamente), é crucial em vários sentidos - em particular teoricamente - para o entendimento da Índia e para uma teoria da civilização. A composição múltipla do self e suas relações tanto com a cultura índica quanto com a ocidental se destacam em sua discussão.This paper examines the work of Ashis Nandy, one of Indian's foremost contemporary intellectuals, a social psychologist, psychoanalyst and political scientist, responsible for developing what he calls a ‘critical traditionalism.' Adopting a broad conception of Indian civilization in which modernity poses an explicit threat (and, more ambiguously, an implicit element), Nandy's discussion of personality and the individual is crucial at various levels - in particular theoretical - to understanding India and developing a theory of civilization. One of the prominent features of his discussion is the multiple composition of the self and its relations to both Indian and Western civilizations
Contesting secularism: Ashis Nandy and the cultural politics of selfhood
No full text© 2009 Dr. Christine DeftereosThis dissertation establishes that the methods used to generate social and political criticism are just as important as the ideas expressed. This proposition is explored in both the ideas and methods of the Indian political psychologist Ashis Nandy. For over thirty-five years Nandy has contributed extensively to a number of debates within a global academic culture, and as a public intellectual in India. His critique of Indian secularism has produced intense controversy, and is a dynamic case to explore this relationship between critique and method, and by extension the identity of the critic. This case study also allows for an analysis, of what is widely accepted, as the confronting features of his critique. In radically questioning the ways in which the ideology of secularism operates in Indian political culture, and in defining concepts of Indianness, Nandy contests dominant political ideas and ideals. Further, he confronts the role these ideas and ideals play in foreclosing understandings of national identity, national integration and Indian democracy. I argue that this confrontation demonstrates a critical and psychoanalytic engagement with the constituting features of Indian political culture, and political identities. This case study also provides a context to consider the implications of this approach for understanding and representing the identity of the critic.
Much criticism of Nandy and his work is based on beliefs that he represents the intellectual basis of anti-secularism and anti-modernism in India. According to these accounts Nandy carries forward a threatening and disruptive quality. This is evident, it is claimed, in his calls to return to a regressive traditionalism. These responses represent his ideas and his identity within a particular ideological and intellectual framework. This takes place though, at the expense of engaging with the methods operating in his work. The focus on the disruptive and threatening features of Nandy and his work creates a series of over-determined responses that undermine recognition of his psychoanalytic approach. I argue that the location of agitation and fascination for critics is in Nandy’s willingness to confront accepted identities, meanings, fantasies, projections and ideals operating in politics, and in working through the complexities of subjectivity. This aptitude for working with external and internal processes, at the border between culture and psyche is where the psychoanalytic focus of his work is located. The psychoanalytic focus, in working with and working through the complexities of human subjectivity, produces a confronting self-reflexivity that can disarm critics. Nandy’s psychoanalytic reading of secularism is the starting point for theorising and characterising the method, or mode of critique operating across his work more broadly.
This dissertation argues that Nandy’s approach or method is characterised by a psychoanalytic mode. The psychoanalytic mode of engagement is illustrated in his capacity to generate critical analytic perspectives that rupture and regenerate subjectivity, including his own. This dissertation demonstrates Nandy’s psychoanalytic commitment, and argues the importance of this approach. Therefore, this reading of Nandy and the methods that are employed to develop this inquiry, build a case for the importance of psychoanalytic concepts, as a necessary interpretive mode for social and political criticism
The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia
No full textThe relationship between religion and nationalism is explored in this paper which takes Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as its core focus of analysis. Given the incomplete process of nation-building in the case of India and the intrinsic challenge of how to cultivate a nationalism when the sense of a nation and nationality is lacking, Nandy discusses Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva and the use of religion as a vehicle of nation-building. This, despite Savarkar’s being a non-believer. Nandy explores parallels with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whose project of nation and state-building is also seen in terms of political categories that were drawn from the Western experience and ideal of the Westphalian state. Exploring the love-hate relationship with Savarkar that is prevalent in contemporary India, Nandy probes the concerted attempt to demonise Savarkar and asks whether this is yet another means by which a young nation seeks to exorcise its past
The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism : Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia
No full textThe relationship between religion and nationalism is explored in this paper which takes Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as its core focus of analysis. Given the incomplete process of nation-building in the case of India and the intrinsic challenge of how to cultivate a nationalism when the sense of a nation and nationality is lacking, Nandy discusses Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva and the use of religion as a vehicle of nation-building. This, despite Savarkar’s being a non-believer. Nandy explores parallels with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whose project of nation and state-building is also seen in terms of political categories that were drawn from the Western experience and ideal of the Westphalian state. Exploring the love-hate relationship with Savarkar that is prevalent in contemporary India, Nandy probes the concerted attempt to demonise Savarkar and asks whether this is yet another means by which a young nation seeks to exorcise its past
Time warps silent and evasive pasts in Indian politics and religion
No full textA discussion of how the large, amorphous and impersonal Indian state has affected the everyday lives of its citizens since Independence in 1947. It focuses on how the multiple nature of psychological identity in the sub-continent - personal, spiritual, sexual and political - was affected by the imposition of a stridently secular ethos by the country's political, educational and cultural elites. This, argues Ashis Nandy, explains much of the dislocation evident in contemporary Indian society, a by-product of which has been a renewed search for certainty manifested in the appeal of Hindu and Islamic "fundamentalisms". Further dislocation is being wrought by the harsh introduction of India to the global economy, with its concomitant creation of new ideals of prosperity and social and personal "development" which are often at variance with traditional precepts. Such dislocation has also precipitated a crisis in how Indians view their past and their present (the "Time Warps" of the book's title), the more so in a society where unhistoricised pasts - myths, legends, epics and unofficial memories - predominate and where clues to the future lie scattered in diverse pasts created by human ingenuity. India retains its knowledge that refuses to die - comprising non-conventional systems of healing, non-formal modes of education, deviant theories of ethnic or communal violence and amity, and so on. Many who live with these alternatives are in constant dialogue with their pasts, not defensively, but as a way of accessing their own tacit knowledge. This volume is a plea for the retention of indigenous systems of knowledge and experience in the face of the juggernaut of globalization and its drive for cultural and economic homogeneity
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