March 22, 1999
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RETURN
FROM EXILE Yesterday's Prophet Ashis Nandy's good past and bad present' theory is overdone. By Dipankar Gupta RETURN FROM EXILE
Perhaps there was always the restless prophet in him straining to come out. Looked at this way the title, Return from Exile, makes some sense. Or else the title, not to mention Nandy's face on the cover, might give the impression that this volume is about some dangerous anarchist come to spend the evening of his life by the Ganga. Return from Exile packs in three earlier publications of Nandy: Alternative Sciences, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism and The Savage Freud. This triptych omnibus is a great deal for Nandy devotees and infidels alike. It offers a representative sample of Nandy's works and bears out my earlier point about his intellectual transition. Prophet or academic, there is no doubt Nandy writes with a persuasive wit that is extremely engaging. His views have been widely discussed. They have aroused groupie fervour, cloistral orgasms and sceptical barbs. What more can an intellectual ask for. Alternative Sciences is about J.C. Bose and Srinivasa Ramanujam. This is probably Nandy's best known book and is certainly my favourite. Here Nandy still differentiates between religion and magic, science and technology, and also science and poetry. True he could have been more forceful but at least the points are there. These important distinctions are lost in the later works, for example in The Savage Freud. In Nandy's treatment of Bose and Ramanujam, scientific quests are not seen as pure emanations of technological and professional imperatives. Neither is it as if Vedanta or horoscopy made these two great scientists. Nandy is also aware of Newton's predilections towards alchemy, and of Keynes' appreciation of the "father" of gravity as the last great magician. By working in the tensions between scientific insights and normative structures of science, Nandy is able to provide a rich biography of these two great Indian scientists. Indeed, this is the book's strength. There is a perceptible change of gear when we progress to Nandy's other two contributions. In Illegitimacy of Nationalism he adopts a ventriloquist strategy and chooses to air his views through the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Nandy believes nationalism is wrong, but anti-imperialism is alright. There are enough quotes from Tagore to bolster this position. Tagore, at least in Nandy's readings, is a patriot but not a nationalist, whatever that distinction might mean. Tagore certainly has a right to his views, and so has Nandy, but two wrongs don't make a right. Even if one agrees with Nandy's exegesis on Tagore, why does one have to accept Tagore is always correct? After all it is possible to enjoy Ezra Pound's literature despite his fascism. If Nandy's tendency to romanticise the past was somewhat inchoate in Alternative Sciences it is full blown in The Savage Freud. His arguments here proceed by way of dyadic oppositions. Traditional medicine was humane and modern medicine is merciless; traditional science had built in correctives, but modern science is aggressively domineering; in tradition there was respect for plurality, but modern societies are self-consciously homogenising. There is no doubt that modern medicine has many problems. But this does not absolve the egregious practices of the many charlatans of traditional medicine. Even today people by the thousands are robbed and die needlessly at the hands of traditional healers. Modern societies may breed fascists, but traditional ones had their share of Chengiz Khans. To pit modern versus traditional in this sense immediately directs attention away from serious sociological issues. Polemics now take over and this is where prophets do very well. And so also do a host of wannabes who wannado, but without any hard work or disciplinary grid. Interestingly, Nandy who is so dismissive of western influence always chooses subjects who are "Presidency" intellectuals properly certified by the occidental world. All the heroes in his books, from Ramanujam to Satyajit Ray, belong to this genre. It is also interesting that Nandy should accept western psychological paradigms quite uncritically in his writings. This often has rather sensational, if not salacious, results. Thus Ramanujam is a "phallic woman" and this is probably what attracted his hopelessly homosexual English mentor, G.H. Hardy, to him. Or that Ramanujam's pacifism and opposition to the war concealed a femininity, perhaps even a latent homosexuality. Or that Bose's stuttering was an outcome of his hostile and sadistic tendencies. But surely these are carping criticisms. A prophet can hardly be upbraided for being inconsistent. It is the vision and the larger picture that are more important. Nandy is able to convey these by the handfuls. Only dull academics, with narrow modernist perspectives, will remain sceptical. This is what ultimately separates prophets from lowly reviewers. |
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Somewhere between 1981 and 1988, when
nobody was actually looking, Ashis Nandy became a prophet. When he published his
Alternative Sciences he was still a psychologist relying largely on his training to extend
the normal horizons of the discipline. But by 1988 his reliance on psychology, and indeed
on all known disciplines, receded. In its place came a prophetic vision of what India used
to be and what it should become again. 
