ASHIS NANDY: THE ENGAGED INTELLECT
In an interview with Ramin Jahanbegloo and Ananya Vajpeyi, the editors of the excellent Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent, Nandy ruminates on the role of the intellectual. If, he says, “you are an intellectual as opposed to an academic, you are automatically sensitive to public life... it is your job to look at the world and comment on it.” He learned the necessity of public engagement, of writing for a wider audience during the Emergency. “[E]ither you write when the chips are down,” he says, “or you don’t write at all. What is the point of your political psychology if you cannot comment on the Emergency when it faces you right here and you are sitting in the belly of the beast?”
It’s an attitude, an openness, that has frequently got Nandy into trouble. In 2013 he tried, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, to argue—clumsily, it must be admitted—that corruption among Dalits and OBCs was a social equaliser, a way, in an inequitable, iniquitous system, to share in wealth and power. It was misunderstood to mean that Dalits and OBCs were the most corrupt or at least the most conspicuously corrupt and so began the caterwauls of offence, the cacophonous soundtrack to practically every public discussion in India. Nandy was threatened with arrest. Lawsuits were filed. Five years earlier he had observed that the Gujarati middle class was “mired in its inane versions of communalism and parochialism”. Prophetically, he despaired that development “now justifies amorality, abridgement of freedom, and collapse of social ethics”. Once more, the howls began. Lawsuits were filed. And the Gujarat model became India’s model.
When Jahanbegloo asks Nandy if there is anything in a fulfilling career and, judging from this volume, a life filled with affection and vivacious conversations that leaves him “unsatisfied”, he responds: “I am deeply saddened that I am leaving behind for my children and grandchildren a world where graciousness, compassion, and empathy are in short supply and there is diminishing respect for the marginalised and the cornered.” Nandy is, as Carnatic singer T.M. Krishna recognises, an artist as much as an academic—he has that artist’s ability to inhabit, Krishna writes, “a dispassionate yet impassioned state of being.” Creative and profoundly empathetic, Nandy is concerned, as the Columbia University professor Lydia Liu notes in her essay, with “a self troubled by neurosis and haunted by the past”. What Nandy is most suspicious of, what he saw Gandhi as an antidote to, is the “hyper-masculinity” that characterised the European colonial powers and that has been internalised by their former subjects.
Savarkar, Nandy has said, like Jinnah, was secular, an irreligious man who believed in the European model of the nation-state. In his essay, the Gandhian scholar Tridip Suhrud writes about how Gandhi became Nandy’s “primary interlocutor to both comprehend and challenge the world of hypermasculinity”. Unfortunately, Suhrud concludes, despite Nandy’s “faith in the creativity of individuals and groupts to resist”, both he and Nandy “now knew with a deep, corrosive sadness the Gujarati word for hyper-masculinity. It is Chhappan Inch Ni Chhaati”. Cornel West, in an endorsement emblazoned across the cover, calls Nandy the “Frantz Fanon of our time!” If this seems like overstatement, it is more a reflection of our coarsened culture than any slight to Nandy.
Nandy was suspicious of, and saw Gandhi as an antidote to, the hyper-masculinity of colonial powers their former subjects internalised