new ideas | Phillip Darby

THE ALTERNATIVE HORIZONS
OF ASHIS NANDY

You might well ask who is Ashis Nandy? And why should his thinking matter to Australians? What relevance has this Indian pundit to our concerns? For those not familiar with the man or his work, he is an original and vigorously independent thinker, with a taste for the unorthodox. He is best known for his writing on colonialism but in recent years he has come to be acknowledged as one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies. He is also India’s foremost public intellectual. He is greatly respected across the subcontinent, tagged as a romantic by some, occasionally savagely dismissed. A Bengali Christian, Nandy grew up in Calcutta and the culture and the past of that city were the most formative influences upon him. For many years he has lived in Delhi, based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. His formal training was in psychology, which continues to deeply mark his thinking. But his work and lively interests have taken him into so many diverse knowledge fields that it is impossible to pigeon-hole him. In his wistful manner, he recently observed to me “I am whatever people think I am”.
    Leaving aside the politics of cricket, Australia hardly features in Nandy’s writing. Nonetheless his work speaks to many of the issues that face us. And it does so in a very productive way, by challenging received understandings of ourselves and our orientations to the outside world. First, however, some remarks about Australia’s approach to India, and to Asia generally, that will help set the context for our discussion.
    Of late, India has been making headlines in the press. Not in the news sections, but in the business pages and educational supplements. It is a sign of the times that interest is decidedly instrumental. The dramatic increase in the Indian middle classes (what counts here is their spending power), plus the favourable long-term growth prospects of the Indian economy have belatedly caught the attention of Australian investors and policy-makers. So also universities have become eager participants in the competition for fee-paying Indian students. It is a sad reflection on our society that the politics that now appear to matter are about economic deregulation, taxation ‘reform’ and restrictive labour laws.
    There was a time when Australia’s concern with India was not so narrowly directed – at least within universities and in more progressive sections of government and the community. For perhaps two decades after India’s independence the sub-continent was taken seriously. Jawaharlal Nehru commanded respect. The Indian model of political and economic change was held up as an alternative to that of China. The Colombo Plan was seen as a significant initiative. No doubt Australia’s concern with India owed much to the imperial legacy as well as to the insecurities of the Cold War era. Still India registered on Australia’s global map and Indian studies held a respectable place in universities. The best undergraduate course I took at Melbourne University was a year-long subject on Indian politics and culture, taught brilliantly if in a rather absolutist fashion by Hugo Wolfson. But then with the Vietnam War, the rise of the south-east Asian ‘tigers’ and the allure of the China market, Australia’s centre of gravity shifted eastward.
    In the larger scale of things, the ebb and flow of Australia’s concern with India is of less consequence than the underlying nature of Australia’s engagement with Asia. Vin D’Cruz and William Steele have taken ambivalence as being at the heart of Australia’s approach to Asia and they bring out the insecurity deriving from the fear of invasion and the original theft of land. All this is very much to the point, but ambivalence suggests more openness and fluidity than has been apparent. I prefer to think in terms of a deeply entrenched colonial mindset. A large part of the problem of Australia’s relationship with Asia resides in the categories of thought and the way of life that privilege the European experience, the Western tradition and Euro-American approaches to modernity. Thus it is that local knowledge, often embedded in the culture rather than in texts, is played down, that the analysis of Asia’s ‘problems’ and what is to be done about them is generated from the outside, and that cultural difference, if it is acknowledged at all, mostly works to enhance Western ways of proceeding. Universities, canons and scholarly conventions have much to answer for in this regard.
    We are now becoming aware of the partiality of the story that has been told about political and economic change in Asia, not only in Australia, but in most of the developed world. It is not by accident that Asia has been rendered up in terms that accord with Western models and, very often, Western interests as well. The difficulty of doing otherwise is surely underlined by the early work of that remarkable and much loved Indonesianist, the late Herb Feith, who, despite his egalitarianism and commitment to change, favoured the Westernised, secular, rational elite in the building of a modern Indonesia. In the words of a recent critic, “Feith’s work reveals his preference for good government over ‘politics’ and for the ‘administrators’ as the practitioners of good government”.
    Much remains to be done in the way of exposing how approaches to Asia are skewed to privilege Western categories: how politics is so constituted as to exclude subordinate people, the frequency with which approaches to ethnic and communal violence in non-European societies are tied to backwardness, the way in which understandings of the role and nature of the state proceed on the basis of Euro-American norms. By challenging such thinking, scholarly analyses can contribute to the processes of change in Asia and help ordinary people escape from being pawns in power politics or forced to live according to other people’s designs. At the same time, such work will reflect back on our understanding of our own society. By looking elsewhere, at what is happening in other societies, we may get new insights into politics at home.
    No-one could give better leads in these matters than Ashis Nandy. His work provides a critique of colonial categories in the boldest of terms and across many different registers. He takes as his basic reference point the fluidity of pre-modern south Asian traditions and the damage that has been done by the insertion of a secular, violent modernity. His sense of loss leads him to identify with the defeated, to find in their suffering pointers to the possibility of more humane futures. Nandy has therefore refused to be confined within the academy. He has made a point of connecting with broader constituencies through newspaper articles and radio interviews, developing close relations with activists and being involved with centres of alternative thinking and research, not only in India, but in neighbouring countries as well. He has never shown the slightest interest in professional prizes in Europe or North America and he is firm that in the first instance his books be published in India.
    Yet Nandy has not cut himself off from the West. He is well versed in Western theory and history and, like his mentor Gandhi, he draws from the Western traditions what he needs to develop an alternative politics. Despite his deep attachment to south Asia and his sense of affinity with formerly colonised peoples in other parts of the world, he is attentive to the possibilities of creative change within dominant collectivities.
    In what is probably his most influential work, The Intimate Enemy, Nandy develops the theme that the experience of colonisation damaged the coloniser even more than the colonised. Modern oppression, he declares, is not an encounter between the self and the enemy: it is a battle between the de-humanised self and the objectified enemy. Directing his attention to gender and sexuality (at a time when neither was the subject of much academic enquiry), Nandy drives home his argument by reference to the lives of individuals whom he presents as emblematic of their societies. The colonising experience elevated hyper-masculine values and downgraded those aspects of British political culture that were tender, humane and associated with the feminine. This was the tragedy of Rudyard Kipling. He lived and died fighting his Indian self – “a softer, more creative and happier self”. Gandhi, on the other hand, searched for the other culture of the metropole that might provide self-fulfilment for Britain and salvation for India. Borrowing his non-violence, not from the sacred texts of India, but from the Sermon on the Mount, he wanted to liberate the British as much as he wanted to liberate Indians.
    As Nandy tells it, then, the white sahib turns out to be not a conspiratorial dedicated oppressor but a self-destructive co-victim, caught in the hinges of history. It is much the same with his latter-day successors. One must therefore think in broader terms than simply attempting to raise an ex-colonial collectivity. Nandy is concerned to build on the civilisational perspectives of the defeated. It is his view that man-made suffering “has given the Third World both its name and its uniqueness”. But in endeavouring to give voice to the Third World, Nandy insists that one cannot stop there. The Third World must become, he argues, a collective representation of victims everywhere. The experience of co-suffering has the potential to bring the major civilisations of the world closer together, but in a way quite different from the ‘one world’ concept promoted in the nineteenth century and underlying so much Western thinking today.
    From time to time, Nandy has presented his work as explorations in the politics of awareness. His concern has been to find in everyday life and in ordinariness sources and clues to human potentialities. He is fond of quoting a friend who told him that Bangalore’s auto-rickshaw drivers are probably more cosmopolitan than the well-educated middle-class residents of that city. It was his friend’s view that as we become more educated we learn to handle diversity better, but actually in our day-to-day life our capacity to converse with other cultures and people diminishes. That is to say, we lose our access to the multiple worlds in which people all around us live.
    I think it can be said that unlike many contemporary scholars, Nandy is less interested in theorising the everyday than in using it; drawing from it a sense of hope about pluralism, diverse loyalties and an acceptance of difference that doesn’t preclude affinities and familiarities. For him, how people live is the stuff of politics. It needs to be reckoned as knowledge, a category that cannot be restricted to what is set out in print and has gone through a process of supposed validation. As Nandy sees it, established knowledge systems serve to underwrite the power of the West and work against alternative ways of thinking and experimentation. This goes hand in hand with his rejection of disciplinary boundaries and his rather cavalier approach to many scholarly conventions. It is not uncommon for Nandy to develop his argument by observing “I seem to remember so and so saying”, meaning that if they didn’t, someone should have.
    Fundamental to Nandy’s concern with the politics of awareness is an engagement with the past. In his understanding, the past is a resource for rethinking the present and imagining alternative futures. People have very different ways of arriving at their past and history is only one of them. (At the risk of overstating Nandy’s position, history, for non-European peoples, becomes a way of remembering a Western past.) The dominance of the historical mode is coterminous with the advent of the nation-state, the elevation of the secular and the scientific, and the commitment to the idea of progress. Hence, history becomes a tool of the powerful and memories that cannot be historicised are discarded or marginalised. In Nandy’s view, postcolonial critics have made a start in addressing the problem but they have fallen short. What is needed are alternatives to history, not alternative histories. In the interests of diversity, Nandy privileges myths over history and insists that at times “it is important not to remember the past, objectively, clearly, or in its entirety”.
    Nandy’s critique of history stands as a contribution to the debates about the historical imagination and the politics of historicism. It might be said, of course, that the situation in Australia is different from the context in which Nandy writes: our problem is how much is forgotten or repressed about the dispossession of and violence against Indigenous people. But the nub of Nandy’s argument is that it is the privileging of history and the reliance on certain kinds of sources that is responsible for what is told and what is not told. It is instructive here to contrast Keith Windschuttle’s approach with that of a senior Australian judge who told me recently of how moved he had been by an elderly Aboriginal woman speaking of an experience she had suffered, in the very place in the outback where the event had occurred. The judge added that if urban Australians could hear the woman telling her story, they could never think as they do. It is also worth noting that Nandy’s approach shares some ground with that of Paul Carter in his remarkable volume The Road to Botany Bay.
     Interlocking with Nandy’s claim that history exhausts the idea of the past is his rejection of developmentalism because it forecloses on the future. Visions of the future have become the monopoly of the powerful and non-European peoples must now submit to the design of others. Their own experience and cultures are pushed aside; social engineering increasingly takes the place of critical thinking. In its broad outline, the story is a familiar one but it is told from a different standpoint. Not Daniel Bell’s “end of ideology” or Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, but a reconceptualisation of the political that constricts human choices. Nandy takes us back to imperialism and argues that its most enduring legacy is developmentalism, which has established itself as one of the few universals of our time. He shows how the idea of progress expressed itself in Anglicisation, Westernisation and reform movements of various kinds, before being recast as modernisation and most recently globalisation.
    At the centre of it all has been the faith in development, powerfully supported by the belief in modern science and technology. In a rich mosaic of work, Nandy tells of how such thinking has insinuated itself into organised politics. The scientific study of poverty has come to be more important than poverty itself. One by one, the societies that seemingly have done well with development have grown more authoritarian, and ethnic and religious tensions have intensified. The allure of the city is such that the imagination of the village has lost its hold on the Indian self. In such ways, terrorism becomes part of the everyday culture of politics.
    One does not need to accept all of Nandy’s arguments to see their importance to critical debate in Australia. Development, I would argue, plays a crucial part in underwriting Australia’s approach to Asia. It is, however, seldom presented or seen in such terms, which helps to explain why there is so little bite in public discussion. In large measure, development has been evacuated of its political content. Instrumental rationality has come to be substituted in its stead. More and more, aid agencies have been neutered by their dependence on government contracts and grants. The recent attacks by the Institute of Public Affairs against the political activism of non-governmental organisations may work to make matters worse. The university scene is not much better. Casting around for money spinners because of government cutbacks, the temptation is to teach what the market requires, which is applied not critical knowledge. Reflecting on some of the postgraduate courses targeting the NGO sector, the risk is that students will be well schooled in project management but much less equipped to ask searching questions about development itself.
    Yet development is too important a subject to be shielded from public scrutiny by a sense of self-satisfaction and the appeal of bipartisanship. It was through the prospect of whole societies being remade that the figure of the West resplendent was fashioned. For a decade and a half, development has served as a conduit for the promotion (or imposition) of democratisation, civil society and the idea of social capital – all of which are more problematic than is customarily thought. Deprived of the ideology of development, I would assert, contemporary neo-liberalism could never have become a global phenomenon.
    This leads us to consider Nandy’s approach to dissent, which knots together so much of his writing. The dedication in Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias encapsulates where he stands: “For those who dare to defy the given models of defiance”. As Nandy presents it, institutionalised oppression is a process intent on destroying the basis of all dissenting visions of a more just world. Running through his writing is the idea that dominance is secured through ever more sophisticated means of acculturation. These produce not merely the models of conformity but also the models of dissent. Thus the sting is drawn from dissent. It is co-opted, domesticated, more readily controlled. Nandy reflects on the way such processes work within Western societies – and he confesses his earlier disappointments – but it is their externalisation to non-European societies that is his main concern. The colonial archive provides him with rich material to flesh out his arguments. He shows how the turn to violence and the emphasis on masculine values on the part of subject peoples fell within the terms of engagement laid down by the dominant, whereas non-violence represented a challenge to the imperial self and thereby to the structure of imperial power. It was the same with respect to the politics of nationalism, secularism and state formation. The role of the intellectual, according to Nandy, is to work against the grain and thus to challenge the conventional wisdom.
    Readers of Overland will need little prompting to appreciate the significance of Nandy’s arguments to the corralled nature of political dissent in Australia. Few will question that party politics have been increasingly characterised by closure. While the political leadership has been censured on the ethics of some of the key issues of Australia’s external involvement, it is notable that public intellectuals seldom venture into the waters of deep dissent. Even in the matter of asylum seekers and would-be refugees, the argument has mostly been about giving a more caring face to existing approaches rather than questioning the territorial basis of the present world order. Our imaginings appear to be cramped by the complacency of the culture and the liberal tradition. In the arena of Indigenous rights and responsibilities, Noel Pearson has been sharply critical of what he calls the “progressivist” positions of left-leaning, liberally minded people. My friend, Marcia Langton, has recently asserted that we are living in a “culture that has no comprehension of otherness beyond the romantic”. In her experience, it’s simply not possible to speak to white liberals about the everyday issues of decolonisation or even postcolonialism. “There is an epistemological and an ontological gap between the academy and the actual lives of Indigenous people.” This is precisely Nandy’s point made in an Australian context. Drawing on different source material Langton and Nandy make common cause in challenging the knowledge industry, the cultural consensus and the in-house nature of much contemporary dissent.

Phillip Darby teaches international relations at the University of Melbourne and is Director of the independent Institute of Postcolonial Studies. He has twice brought Ashis Nandy to Australia as Distinguished Fellow of the Institute.

Overland 179–winter 2005, pp.53–57