Ashis Nandy

Works

• 1983The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism

  Colonialism lives on in the minds of both sides: it imposed ideas of masculinity, adulthood and history on the British as well, and Gandhi’s politics drew on traditions that refused these hierarchies.

• 1994The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self

  Tagore’s rejection of nationalism, read alongside his novels: patriotism can resist colonialism without copying the Western nation-state.

Position

“The Intimate Enemy” (1983) argued that colonialism is above all a state of mind that binds both rulers and ruled. British colonial culture equated power with masculinity and treated the colonised as childlike or effeminate; it damaged the British as well, by suppressing the softer, feminine and childlike sides of their own culture. Resistance that simply reversed these hierarchies remained within them, whereas Gandhi’s politics drew on Indian traditions in which androgyny and nonviolence were sources of strength. In later work Nandy extended this critique to the nation-state and to secularism imposed by the state, which in his view could deepen religious violence, and he argued that everyday religious traditions often contained their own forms of tolerance. His study of Tagore read the poet’s rejection of nationalism as an alternative anti-colonial politics, and “The Savage Freud” examined the encounter between psychoanalysis and Indian culture. His defence of tradition has been criticised, especially his essay on the sati of Roop Kanwar in 1987, which feminist scholars saw as an apology for a violent practice; Nandy rejected this reading.

Life & context

Ashis Nandy was born on 13 May 1937 in Bhagalpur, Bihar, into a Bengali Christian family. He briefly studied medicine, then sociology, and took a doctorate in clinical psychology at Gujarat University in Ahmedabad. In 1965 he joined the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, which he later directed and with which he has been associated ever since. His early work dealt with the psychology of creativity and of science, including studies of the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. From the 1980s he became known as a critic of colonialism, the nation-state, secularism as state ideology and the ideology of development. He has written on cricket, film, the city and the partition of India. In 2007 he received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize. In 2008 the Gujarat police registered a case against him over a newspaper article on the anti-Muslim violence of 2002; the Supreme Court stayed the proceedings.

Further main works

• Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (1980)
• At the Edge of Psychology (1980)
• The Tao of Cricket (1989)
• The Savage Freud and Other Essays (1995)
• An Ambiguous Journey to the City (2001)