A conversation and a confrontation

Sunday, May 28, 2006 Talking India with Ashis Nandy

The intellectual Ashis Nandy has written a series of excellent books on Indian nationalism, the Indian state, and Indian traditions, but perhaps nowhere is he as lucid and accessible as Talking India, a wide-ranging conversation with the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo.

It is to Jahanbegloo's credit that he has done his homework so well and set the scope of his questions so wide. Among the matters on which he questions Nandy are India's encounter with colonialism, on the spheres of the religious and the secular in India, on India-Pakistan relations, and on India's experience of six decades as a modern nation-state. Nandy's searching responses lay before the reader all kinds of unorthodox oppositions and parallels, and present surprising connections across disparate walks of life.

Amongst the most interesting lines of thought that emerge from Nandy's responses to Jahanbegloo's questions concerns the question of what India is. He makes a distinction between India as a three-thousand-year-old civilization, home to hundreds of diverse cultures, and India as a modern nation-state seeking a degree of unity among its citizens. Indian civilization, in Nandy's felicitous formulation, "can be considered to be simultaneously a conversation and a confrontation among cultures that are big and small, powerful and weak, known and obscure, high or low, respectable and disrespectable, lovable or despicable.

"But the Indian state is a much narrower and meaner entity, if not in conception then in spirit. It is not just the case, Nandy argues, that the Indian nation-state has modelled itself after the colonial state, and "consistently retained a touch of imperiousness". It is also that state-centric thinking among general citizens blinds us to civilizational links with our neighbouring countries, and makes us think of them instead as "small-time states" or pesky neighbours. The demands and passions of nationalism sit uneasily with older formations. "We share some of the most important markers of civilization with our neighbouring countries but we have to treat them as foreign countries and they have to treat us as foreigners," writes Nandy. "We have learnt…that nation-states must have unique national cultures. We are willing to radically alter our civilization to become proper nation-states."

And nowhere in South Asia is an example of a civilization torn into two by national borders more visible, of course, than in the case of India and Pakistan. In the course of Nandy's analysis of India-Pakistan relations since 1947 there appears a beautiful metaphor of an estranged couple...

Nandy argues that "secularism" today is imposed practically by degree; it is not part of the lived reality of Indian people, and in fact it expresses a kind of contempt for religion. In an essay published in 2004 in Outlook, "A Billion Gandhis", Nandy wrote: The concept of secularism emerged in a Europe torn by inter-religious strife, warfare and pogroms, when the resources for tolerance within traditions were depleted and looked exhausted. This has not happened in India, not even probably in most of South Asia. Chandrahas, 2:58 AM 2 Comments