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For Peer Review
The Critical Traditionalism of Ashis Nandy: Occidentalism
and the Dilemmas of Innocence
Journal:
Theory Culture & Society
Manuscript ID:
10-290-TCS
Manuscript Type:
TCS - Standard Article
Key Words:
Ashis Nandy, traditionalism, occidentalism, nativism
Abstract:
This article offers an analysis of the construction and deployment of
the ideas of ‘the West’ and ‘tradition’ in the social commentary of
Ashis Nandy. It argues that Nandy’s ‘critical’ defence of tradition
relies on occidentalist assumptions that represent tradition as a
paradoxical space of resistance and innocence. The first part of the
paper shows that Nandy’s nativist narratives of loss and his
suspicion of political ideologies place him both in and against some
of the central tendencies within post-colonial cultural politics. The
second section examines and illustrates the mutually defining
nature of occidentalism and traditionalism. It is shown that Nandy’s
stereotypes are clustered around images of the West, leaving the
positive, non-Westernised aspects of Indian culture as an ‘innocent’
category. Part three explores Nandy’s dilemmas further by
reference to his attempts to align tradition with reflexivity.
Theory Culture & Society
For Peer Review
0
The Critical Traditionalism of Ashis Nandy: Occidentalism and the Dilemmas
of Innocence
Abstract
This article offers an analysis of the construction and deployment of the ideas of ‘the
West’ and ‘tradition’ in the social commentary of Ashis Nandy. It argues that Nandy’s
‘critical’ defence of tradition relies on occidentalist assumptions that represent
tradition as a paradoxical space of resistance and innocence. The first part of the
paper shows that Nandy’s nativist narratives of loss and his suspicion of political
ideologies place him both in and against some of the central tendencies within post-
colonial cultural politics. The second section examines and illustrates the mutually
defining nature of occidentalism and traditionalism. It is shown that Nandy’s
stereotypes are clustered around images of the West, leaving the positive, non-
Westernised aspects of Indian culture as an ‘innocent’ category. Part three explores
Nandy’s dilemmas further by reference to his attempts to align tradition with
reflexivity.
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The Critical Traditionalism of Ashis Nandy: Occidentalism and the Dilemmas
of Innocence
the pathway to the future may be through aspects of our pasts.
(Nandy, 2002, 2)
Introduction
Ashis Nandy defines his project as ‘critical traditionalism’. His work has been focused
upon the re-evaluation and revaluation of traditional popular culture, especially those
aspects of it that appear to confront or, in some way, bypass, the rationalism and
authoritarianism that he locates in Western civilisation. This article seeks to
interrogate these ideas by offering an analysis of Nandy’s construction and
deployment of the ideas of ‘the West’ and ‘tradition’. It argues that these themes are
sites of dilemma and instability in Nandy’s output. More specifically, it is shown that
Nandy’s ‘critical’ defence of tradition relies on relies on occidentalist assumptions
that represent tradition as a paradoxical space of resistance and innocence.
For Vinay Lal, Nandy is ‘India's most formidable and controversial intellectual ... a
cultural and political critic without perhaps any equal in South Asia’ (Lal 2004). What
Miller calls ‘the scandal called Ashis Nandy’ (1998 303) has provided a wide-ranging
challenge to assumptions about the future and past of India, a challenge that has
established Nandy as not only a major public intellectual but also a source of, often
vituperative, controversy.1 For at least some of his critics, Nandy’s books and essays
1 The most high-profile recent controversy concerning Nandy occurred in 2008 when
the Ahmedabad police, in Gujarat, registered a First Information Report (FIR) against
him, paving the way for his arrest under a law preventing the promotion of ‘enmity
between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence,
language’. The FIR was prepared after the police received a complaint about a
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are at the centre of a reactionary ‘new consensus’ of anti-modernity and anti-
secularism (Baber 1996; 1998; 2002), which threatens the well-being of ordinary
Indians whilst claiming to speak on their behalf (see also Nanda 2003; 2005). Yet
even his critics usually concede that Nandy’s voice is a subtle one, that it pushes the
boundaries about how we think about the social role and anxieties of the reflexive
‘modern’ intellectual (see also, Chakrabarty 2002; Guneratne 1997).
Despite the importance of his work, Nandy’s voice has received relatively little
attention in Western social science or cultural theory. Hence, my choice to approach
the concept of ‘critical traditionalism’ through the work of its principle progenitor and
theorist (more specifically, Nandy’s writings over the last forty years) goes a small
way to correct a glaring omission. It does so by focusing on the paradoxes of
Nandy’s own critical sensibility. The argument that Nandy constructs ‘tradition’ by
way of an ‘othering’ of, supposedly, Westernised Indians, provides a necessary but
initial starting point for this discussion. Although much criticism of Nandy pursues
and concludes with this line of argument, it is equally necessary to engage Nandy’s
negotiation of ambivalences and uncertainties. For as Chakrabarty (2002 41) notes,
what is ‘truly interesting and powerful’ about Nandy’s work is his preparedness to
continuously open up, or at least make visible, the tensions that animate his project.
Nandy is fully aware that he is participating in processes of reification. He does not
apply inverted commas around ‘tradition’ and the ‘West’ but he, nevertheless, offers,
them as necessary myths, essentialisms that are strategic and yet also transcend
the instrumental, rationalist, language of strategy and intimate a new reverence for
the popular and what Nandy calls the ‘non-modern’ sources of human creativity.
The landscape of paradox Nandy opens before us is, at turns, frustrating and
illuminating, familiar and original, conservative and radical. This is, perhaps, nowhere
more evident than in Nandy’s attempts to define critical traditionalism. Nandy has
newspaper article by Nandy titled ‘Blame the middle class’. Following the
intervention of the Supreme Court the threat of arrest was lifted. See
http://ashisnandysolidarity.blogspot.com/
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talked about this idea as the sifting out of a socially critical content within the broader
field of tradition.
Critical traditionalism refers to the living traditions which include a theory of
oppression, overt and/or covert. No tradition is valid or useful for our times
unless it has, or can be made to have, an awareness of the nature of evil in
contemporary times. (2004 21)
This definition raises many questions: How are we to identify traditions that have the
potential for an ‘awareness’ of ‘evil’?; How can we defend such an instrumental
approach to tradition whilst rejecting modernity because of its instrumentalism? In
fact, having defined critical traditionalism, in his next sentence Nandy pull backs
from, or complicates, his own definition:
This is not an odd restatement of instrumentalism which dominates most
modern, secular theories of oppression … I am speaking of a more holistic or
comprehensive cognition of those at the receiving end of the present world.
(2004 22)
There are multiple ambitions in Nandy’s attempt to corral and speak for ‘tradition’.
Like much of Nandy’s work, his approach evades easy categorisation. It is,
nevertheless, clear that at the centre of his work sits a set of ideas about the West.
Nandy insists that to know ‘the living traditions of the non-western civilizations’ we
have to arrive at ‘a theory of the West’ (2004 22). Hence, his project is bound up with
what Hubel describes as Nandy’s ambition of ‘putting the West into an Indian
perspective’ (1996 536). Yet Nandy’s ‘theory of the West’ is a turbulent and
contradictory enterprise. The West is written off, then taken ownership of: it is the
‘intimate enemy’ (Nandy 1983) against which Indians must rid themselves, yet it
appears necessary to constantly evoke it and maintain its presence.
Paradoxes provide the thematic structure for this paper, which has three parts. The
first part offers a particular academic and political context for Nandy’s work. Nandy
may appear to have clear sympathies with the rise of what I term ‘postcolonial
nativism’. However, as we shall see, Nandy has an awkward relationship to many
postcolonial deployments of indigenism. His unembarrassed narrative of loss, and
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suspicion of political activism, suggest that he should be located both in and against
this body of literature. The second part examines and illustrates the mutually defining
nature of occidentalism and traditionalism in Nandy’s work. Nandy’s stereotypes
centre on the identification of the cultural and physical violence occasioned by
Westernisation in India. Yet his reliance on occidentalism generates incongruity. For
it places the burden of representation on the negative term, leaving the authentic and
non-Westernised aspects of Indian culture as an uncertain presence, a lightly drawn
receptacle for a heavy redemptive burden. In part three, a fuller picture of the
complexity of Nandy’s dilemmas is developed by looking at his alliance of critical
traditionalism with reflexivity. Reflexivity has been identified as a characteristic of
post-traditional societies. Indeed, it has been identified as a moment of emancipation
from tradition, especially if we define tradition as an unself-critical ‘formulaic notion of
truth’ (Giddens 1994 63). Yet, Nandy employs reflexivity in the defence of tradition.
The resultant intellectual space is in and against modernity and (as a result of
Nandy’s identification of modernity with the West) in and against the West. Indeed,
we find in Nandy’s work a demand that the project of critique be taken into a new,
post-reflexive, terrain that is reliant on an image of the ‘non-West’ as a site of
authenticity that transcends critical rationality. In the conclusion I contend that such
claims to ‘innocence’ should be as thoroughly interrogated as their modern counter-
parts. This argument is reinforced by reference to the fact that Nandy’s statements of
critical faith in Indian civilization arrive at a time when India is emerging as a global
power.
Scholarship on occidentalism continues to be organised around one of two
definitions of the term. First, there are those for whom occidentalism refers to ‘the
image the West has of itself when it subjects the “others” to Orientalism’ (Boaventura
Santos, 2009: 105; see also Venn, 2000; Coronil, 1996). A second, and larger, body
of work has emerged that represents occidentalism as referring to images of the
West produced from outside of the West (Carrier 1995; Aydin, 2007; Chen 1995:
Bonnett, 2004; Tate 2005). For Boaventura Santos the latter approach is to be
deprecated because it ‘carries the reciprocity trap: the idea that the ‘others’, as
victims of western stereotypes, have the same power ... to construct stereotypes of
the West’ (ibid). However, Boaventura Santos’s representation can be effectively
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challenged. The analysis of the interplay of ideas of modernity and the West in South
and East Asia that we find, for example, in Bonnett and Aydin (see also Friedman,
2009), is premised on an engagement with the presence and power of the West.
In fact, these two ‘definitions’ of occidentalism do not necessarily suggest different
conceptual approaches but rather two points of geographical focus. A more
fundamental distinction concerns the division between academic and popular
representations. The former - whether focused on the West or the non-West – tends
to reach for historical examples in order to connect occidentalism to other
sociological themes (such as modernity). It has also offered a broad view of
occidentalism, as the construction of a set of interconnected images, or stereotypes,
either positive or negative, that define and control the presence of the idea of the
West in narratives of identity. These remits have tended to steer the academic
debate away from a critical engagement with recent critics of Westernization. By
contrast, more popular engagements with occidentalism are largely engaged in
contemporary political questions. They have been organised around a definition of
occidentalism as ‘a cluster of images and ideas of the West in the minds of its haters’
(Margalit and Buruma 2002; see also Buruma and Margalit 2006; Hanson 2002).
This agenda has been focused upon examples of ‘haters’ of the West and reflects
concerns about radical Islamist insurgency in the wake of 9/11.
This paper is, in part, premised on the idea that it may be useful to bring the interest
in the interplay and ambivalences of occidentalism, that we find in much of the
academic literature, to bear on a contemporary thinker who, whilst not being any kind
of ‘hater’ of the West (nor a religious believer), offers a high-profile instance of the
critique of Westernization. Engaging Nandy’s occidentalism will also help us respond
to Tate’s (2005) call for specific explorations of ‘popular representations of the
Occident’ (350) and Blunt and McEwan’s (2002) plea for empirically and
biographically focused approaches to the postcolonial imagination.
For Innocence: The Nativism of Ashis Nandy
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Recent years have witnessed the reanimation of the one of the central tropes of anti-
colonialism, nativism. The specific form of nativism that has come to the fore offers a
narrative of popular dissent that pits the West’s supposedly technocentric, rationalist
culture of modernity against the culture of ‘the people’ in a variety of majority world
locations. A well-known example is Walter Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs,
which draws most of its material from the Americas (Mignolo 2000). Mignolo calls for
the ‘restitution of Amerindian philosophy of life and conceptualization of society’
(302); a ‘symbolic restitution of the past in view of a better future’ (149). He suggests
that,
the organic intellectuals of the Amerindian social movements (as well as
Latino, Afro-American, and women) are precisely the primary agents of the
movement in which ‘barbarism’ appropriates the theoretical practices and
elaborated projects, engulfing and superseding the discourse of the civilizing
mission and its theoretical foundations. (299)
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) has pursued a similar argument in even more
trenchant terms, categorising ‘modern knowledge and modern law’ as irredeemably
oppressive and pitting them against ‘popular, lay, plebeian, peasant or indigenous
knowledges’.
As de Sousa Santos’s words imply, nativism (also sometimes called indigenism)
offers a popular politics of cultural difference. It is a political project that relies for its
authority on a construction of ‘the people’ as a repository of radical ambitions and
alternative forms of knowledge. Thus Nanda can write that,
The ‘people’ have acquired an unprecedented centrality in contemporary
social theory. Their ‘emancipation’ from the West as well as all institutions of
modern nation-states, even democratically elected, developmentalist states,
has become the cherished end of every post-colonial social project. (Nanda
2001 163)
However, Ashis Nandy is not easily placed alongside these challenges to Western
knowledge. There are two main points of difference between Nandy’s position and
postcolonial nativism. First, Nandy’s message is far more explicit in its references to
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a sense of loss and nostalgia. Second, Nandy distances himself from celebrations of
transgression and hybridity. In the remainder of this section I will develop these
distinctions in more detail before turning to a third difference, between Nandy’s
suspicion of progressivist ideologies and the insurgent sensibility that is often
prominent within postcolonial scholarship.
Despite the prominence given to the native past, postcolonial theory has been
characterized by a suspicion of traditionalism and nostalgia. Authenticity has been
represented as a ‘cult’ or a ‘myth’ across a broad range of postcolonial interventions.
Appiah notes that ‘its post like postmodernism’s, is also a post that challenges earlier
legitimizing narratives’ (1995 123). Indeed, David Scott rather acidly argues that
‘Postcolonial theorists have made a considerable name for themselves by criticizing
their predecessors, the anti-colonial nationalists, for their essentialism’ (2004 3).
Although Scott’s remark is unfair, it intimates a broader truth, which is that
postcolonialism has marked its distance from anti-colonialism through its
circumspect approach to narratives of authenticity. As this implies, postcolonialism
contains a dislocated relationship to ‘tradition’. The resultant mixture is often populist
yet omnivorously critical, nativist yet imaginatively and continuously insurgent. These
threads have sometimes been tied together into an affirmation of trangressive
hybridities, in which the native voice comes to invade or, in Mignolo’s terms ‘engulf’,
the West. Another example of this interweaving is Akhil Gupta’s account of the
hybrid modern-traditionalists of the Indian peasantry. The conception of postcolonial
development Gupta identifies is one of,
multivalent genealogies of modernity, at the limits of ‘The West’, where
incommensurable conceptions and ways of life implode into one another,
scattering, rather than fusing, into strangely contradictory yet eminently
‘sensible’ hybridities. (1998 238)
Gupta’s dense prose also reminds us that the intended audience for postcolonial
theory is largely academic. However, the difference with Nandy does not lie merely
in the fact that the latter is a public intellectual who avoids intellectual jargon.
Although, as we shall see, Nandy also has a problematic relationship to tradition, he
does not allow these difficulties to dilute his interest in the purity or, what he calls, the
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‘authentic innocence’ (1983 xii), of native cultural resources. For Nandy, cultural
recovery does not proceed through hybridity, ‘scattering’, or acts of engulfment, but
through the open admission of loss. ‘My intention’, he says,
is to reinstate the dignity and intellectual relevance of the everyday lives of
people and communities who live with and in traditions, reinvented or
otherwise. ... An understanding of loss will serve as a corrective to the easy
optimism of the currently dominant theories of progress. (2005 41)
Thus, whilst many postcolonial arguments represent deracination as a site of political
opportunity, Nandy’s project has been steadfastly antagonistic to cultural uprooting.
Nandy places himself in a lineage of anti-colonial Indian activists and intellectuals,
notably Tagore and Gandhi, for whom the cultural and psychological upheaval and
fragmentation of ‘the people’, especially when coalesced into the lonely crowds of
‘urban mass culture’ (Nandy 1995 200), is a destructive force. It is unsurprising,
therefore, that Nandy is also at odds with the idea that authentic Indian culture may
be identified with restless and rootless, postmodern, versions of cosmopolitanism.2
For Nandy migration and mobility not only accelerate deculturation and
Westernisation but they also occasion desperate and self-destructive attempts to
fabricate a sense of roots amongst the deracinated:
modern cosmopolitanism is grounded in this uprooting .. this massive
uprooting has produced a cultural psychology of exile that in turn has led to an
unending search for roots, on the one hand, and angry, sometimes self-
destructive, assertions of nationality and ethnicity on the other. (2003 96-7)
Nandy reinforces the point by noting that ‘the more doubtful one’s roots, the more
desperate one’s search for security in exclusion and in boundaries’ (2004 301).
Unlike many postcolonial theorists, Nandy acknowledges the interplay of nativism
and romanticism in his work. Indeed, this interplay may also be cast as part of his
2 For Nandy cosmopolitanism is integral to Indian tradition but has a different form to
Western cosmopolitanism. The latter is bureaucratic and shallow, it relies on
‘diversity that is permissible, legitimate, tamed’ whilst the former is a deeply rooted
‘[r]adical diversity [in which] you tolerate and live with people who challenge some of
the very basic axioms of your political life’ (Nandy 2009).
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inheritance from Tagore and Gandhi, a legacy that, in Nandy’s hands, does not
produce ‘creative unity’ (cf. Tagore 1922), but a necessary yearning for the authentic
and organic in Indian culture. Anticipating the charge of primitivism he writes,
Some Western thinkers, artists and writers have located the idea of loss in a
revitalised concept of primitivism. Thus, the pastoral becomes an infantile,
pre-rational utopia. The South has no obligation to accept the current global
hierarchy of scholars and their work; it can reassess Western thought. The
South may decide that the so-called Romantic is a valid stratagem to counter
the social evolutionary presumptions of urban-industrial society. (2005 42)
Nandy’s openness to a relocated romanticism may also be contrasted to one of the
non-nativist origin points for postcolonial studies in India, namely the attempts made
by the Subaltern Studies school of radical historians to re-write anti-colonial
resistance around previously marginalised class and gender locations. In
‘complicating the urge to recover the subject’ (Prakash 1994 1480), these studies
worked to deconstruct the absence of ‘subaltern’ voices in earlier histories. They also
developed a keen interest in the appropriation of the signs and symbols of ‘the
popular’ in Indian politics (see, for example, Guha 1984). This kind of, apparently
resolutely unromantic, project reinforces a third point of difference between Nandy’s
work and postcolonial studies, namely Nandy’s suspicious attitude to political
progressivism. From the post-Marxism of Subaltern Studies, to Robert Young’s
(2001) ‘tricontinentalist’ communism, to the less easily categorised but still vaguely
insurgent and left-wing politics found across other interventions, narratives of
revolution and politicization are widely privileged in postcolonial studies (for
discussion see Bonnett 2010; Scott 1999; 2004; Moore 2001). Nandy positions his
project firmly on the side of ‘the victims of history’ (2004 25). However, he does not
appear to find any natural, or easy, alliance between this standpoint and the left.
Indeed, many of Nandy’s battles have been with those on the left who he regards as
conspiring in the Westernisation of the culture of the people. Thus for Nandy ‘modern
oppression’ cannot be corrected through narratives of class struggle, mass
mobilization or upheaval. These are symptoms of the problem, not parts of the
answer.
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the resistance to modern oppression has to involve, in our part of the world,
some resistance to modernity, and to important aspects of the modern theories
of oppression. The resistance must deny in particular the connotative meanings
of concepts such as development, growth, science and technology, history and
revolution. (2004 22)
Tradition in the Mirror of the West
In this section I draw together Nandy’s visions of the West with his representation of
tradition and, more specifically, the project he calls ‘critical traditionalism’ (for other
uses of the term see Arrowsmith 1999; Lantz 2003). The mutually defining
stereotypes that Nandy constructs of the West and tradition are outlined. These
stereotypes are shown to frame and sustain the anti-secularist, anti-statist and
‘culturalist’ arguments that are central to Nandy’s output. However, we will also
encounter an interesting asymmetry, namely that whilst the problems of
Westernisation are detailed in intimate and lengthy fashion by Nandy, the content
and nature of tradition are offered in terms that are relatively distant and hazy. This
observation leads to another, namely that Nandy’s occidentalism undermines the
criticality of his critical traditionalism, turning it into a reifying and celebratory
narrative of the ‘non-West’.
The provocative nature of Nandy’s attempt to carve out a critical function for tradition
comes into sharper relief when contrasted with the widespread sociological
assumption that tradition is inherently anti-critical. Indeed, sociologies of modernity
have tended to assume that tradition can be defined as customs and practices which
sustain authority and maintain social stasis (for example, Weber, 2007). Contrasting
tradition with reflexivity, Giddens explains that the former ‘renders many things
external to human activity’, for ‘[f]ormulaic truth, coupled to the stabilizing influence of
ritual, takes an indefinite range of possibilities “out of play”’ (Giddens 1994 76). By
contrast, for Nandy, tradition, more specifically the traditions of ‘the people’, provides
a repertoire of resistance against Western cultural imposition. This is not an entirely
original approach. Many of the images of the West he works with have been to the
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fore, both inside and outside the West, for many decades, notably the notions that
the West is an authoritarian, massified, and rationalist civilisation (for discussion see
Bonnett 2004). The idea that the organic and humane culture of village India finds
itself pitted against the West also has a considerable pedigree (see, for example,
Hay 1970). Indeed, these occidentalist tropes are so firmly established that Nandy
rarely bothers to evidence them. In his few forays into the empirical depiction of the
supposedly alienated and inhuman nature of Western society Nandy can be
alarmingly casual.3 Nevertheless, there are three themes within Nandy’s
characterisation of the relationship between the West and critical traditionalism that
he has elaborated in innovative ways and which provide the core of his prolific
written output.
First, Nandy asserts the primacy of culture in the struggle between India and the
West. He argues that culture ‘is not only the language of resistance; it is itself
resistance’ (2003 156). This position relies on the idea that ‘culture ... lies primarily
with the people’ (2003 31). The struggle for culture is also a struggle between the
‘culture-oriented’ and the ‘statists’, or ‘official rationalists’:
The culture-oriented approach believes that when the lowest of the low in
India are exhorted to shed their ‘irrational’, ‘unscientific’, anti-developmental
traditions by the official rationalists, the exhortation is a hidden appeal to them
to soften their resistance to the oppressive features of the modern political
economy in India. (2003 25)
3 To take a typically stark example, in an essay on ‘the ideology of adulthood’ Nandy
offers the following statement: ‘The estimated 1000 children who die every year at
the hands of their parents in Britain ... are victims of meaninglessness’ (2004 427). It
is an assertion that assumes a readership predisposed to: a) believe almost any
shocking fact concerning the fallen nature of the West; b), tie such narratives to the
decline in faith and tradition (and with little incentive to find out that actual number of
British children who die in this way). Given the stability of the child murder rate in the
UK it will suffice to note that in 2005/6 the number of children under 16 killed by one
or both of their parents in England and Wales was 24 (see
http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb0207.pdf).
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The other two characteristic points of emphasis within Nandy’s critical traditionalism
are the idea that secularism is a destructive and alien import into South Asia and his
elaboration of the notion that the Indian middle classes provide the principal vector
for the destruction of traditional culture. I will illustrate these two points briefly before
turning to the dilemmas of critical traditionalism.
For Nandy religion must be distinguished from faith. The latter is an age-old, fluid
and non-rational manifestation of the human spirit. The former, by contrast, has
become akin to an ideology: it is a modern, Western creation that demands ‘well-
bounded, mutually exclusive religious identities’ (2002 66). Nandy thinks that ‘[i]f
faiths are in decline, they begin to search for ideologies linked to faiths, in an effort to
return to forms of a traditional moral community’ (2003 62). This position has led him
to the conviction that religious fundamentalism and religious violence are not merely
by-products of, but actively the fault of, modernization and Westernization. Hence
Nandy connects his belief that ‘the zealot is a semi-westernized, marginal Hindu’
(2003 55) to the notion that Westernizers fan the flames of religious violence.
Therefore, also, Nandy is led to describe the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran as a
pseudo-Muslim; he becomes ‘an Islamic Dracula’, with ‘little to do with Islamic
culture’ (2003 31). The idea that secularism and Westernisation are to blame for
‘communal’ violence in India (the best known examples being Muslim-Hindu conflict)
is supported by Nandy by reference to the political interests of the elite groups and
individuals who he accuses of orchestrating this kind of bloodshed. Thus he
observes that ‘most instances of communal violence are the work of people
motivated by entirely secular, political cost-calculations’ (2006 72). In one of Nandy’s
best known essays, ‘An Anti-secularist Manifesto’, which was first published in 1985,
he explains that,
Only a secular, scientific concept of another human aggregate or individual –
only total objectification – can sanction the cold-bloodedness and organization
which has recently come to characterize many riots. (2003 54)
In even more dramatic terms Nandy concludes that secularism ‘is definitionally
ethnophobic and frequently ethnocidal’ (2002 64). Nandy’s penchant for combative
prose is just as evident in his treatment of the group he blames for secularism and
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‘cold-bloodedness’ in India, the Westernised middle class. In The Intimate Enemy
Nandy (1983) suggests that this group suffers from a ‘pathology’ (84) that demands
that they ‘hide the real self’ (84). Their lack of authenticity also extends outwards, for,
according to Nandy, they are ‘trying hard to turn [India] into a second class imitation
of the modern west’ (2002 56). The damage this type of person does to India and to
themselves is approached and detailed from many different angles and across the
majority of Nandy’s recent essays. Of course, the definition of this figure relies on a
vision of a very different kind of Indian; the ordinary, genuine Indian. However,
Nandy’s relationship to this latter constituency is shot through with paradoxes and
tensions. As we shall now see, although Nandy’s critical traditionalism acts to
partially cohere some of these dilemmas, they still remain visible.
To give a sense of the empirical content of Nandy’s critical traditionalism we may
turn to his essays on sati. Although one of his critics, Zaheer Baber (1998 38) refers
to ‘The sociology of Sati’, from 1987, as Nandy’s ‘now infamous article’ on sati, his
views found fuller expression in his, earlier, historical essays on the topic (in Nandy
2004) and under the title ‘Sati in Kali Yuga’ (in Nandy 1995; also Nandy 1988; 1994:
within Hindu scripture, ‘Kali Yuga’ is a spiritual dark age). At the centre of the pieces
published from 1987 is Nandy’s attempt to understand the death of Roop Kanwar, a
17 year old widow who, following the traditional practice of sati, was burnt to death in
a village in Rajasthan in 1987 on the pyre of her husband (it remains unclear
whether her death was voluntary). Nandy wishes to distinguish sati as an ‘event’
from sati as a ‘system or practice’. The latter represents a cultural imaginary that
Nandy asks us to respect, along with ‘the simple faith of the pilgrims’ that Kanwar’s
death inspired. The former, by contrast, is an act of exploitation and cruelty,
represented by ‘the actions of the organizers of the event, who profited from it’ (1995
41). This contrast is also to the fore in Nandy’s pitting of ‘sati as profit versus sati as
a spectacle’ (Nandy 1994). Nandy castes modern sati as a response to deracination
and bewilderment, noting that, during the nineteenth century, it was ‘popular in
groups made psychologically marginal by their exposure to western impact’ (2004
40). He extends this observation to Kanwar’s death which, he says, was a,
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desperate attempt to retain through sati something of the religious world-view
in an increasingly desacralized, secular world ... [sati] reaffirms, even in a
bizarre, violent and perverted fashion, respect for self-sacrifice in a culture in
which increasingly there is no scope for self-sacrifice. (1987)
Nandy’s has returned repeatedly to the contrast between the meaninglessness of
Westernised forms of life and the meaningful death, especially as symbolised by,
and found in, traditional India. In interview he remarks that, once,
[w]hen people died or killed for their king and country, death at least had
some kind of meaning. Such death granted minimum dignity to the victims, to
the people who were sacrificed. Now, it is more a matter of bureaucratized,
industrialized violence. (2006 111)
These examples re-emphasize the point that when Nandy talks about culture as
resistance he is not speaking of an instrumental, leftist or activist politics. It is rather
in the paradigmatic difference, the incomparability and incompatibility, between what
he regards as spiritual popular culture and Western, rationalist and elite culture that
he finds the location of opposition.
Nandy’s essays on sati provide one of the more controversial expressions of this
thesis (for criticism see Baber 1996; 2002; Loomba 1993; cf. Spivak 1988). They
have been greeted with some guardedness, even by those thinkers who are
otherwise sympathetic to his provocative spirit. Thus, for example, Dipesh
Chakrabarty (2002) finds Nandy’s thoughts on sati revealing precisely because he
considers Nandy’s attempt to distinguish between the spectacle or system of
tradition and tradition as an event questionable. Chakrabarty pointedly notes that,
rather than develop this contrast, Nandy’s account turns towards a series of reductio
ad absurdum rhetorical attacks on legal attempts to ban the ‘glorification’ of sati (see
Nandy, 1995). Chakrabarty suggests that because Nandy,
does not explicitly confront the issue that the past has produced at this point
in his problematic – how to combine a respectful attitude toward tradition with
the search for the principles with which to build a more just society – the
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dilemma breaks out into a plethora of practical, policy-related questions.
(Chakrabarty 2002 44)
Hence, Chakrabarty concludes that Nandy’s wish to turn the past against the
present, to employ and deploy the ‘non-West’ for critical ends, not only ‘breaks out’
but ‘breaks down’ (2002 43).
Nandy’s ‘problematic’ is made more intractable by that fact that, whilst he portrays
the violence and authoritarianism of Westernisation in fulsome terms, his evocations
of tradition have a somewhat uncertain and distant quality. Indeed, it is, in part, his
broad-brush approach to tradition that ensures that occidentalism sits at the centre of
his work. The point is reinforced by considering a further set of Nandy’s images of
the damage done by secularism. In his essay ‘The twilight of certitudes’ (in Nandy
2003), Nandy goes into considerable detail on the violence of modern religious
nationalism. However, when he turns to describe traditional communities of faith, his
representations become cloudier:
secularism was introduced ... to subvert and discredit the traditional concepts
of inter-religious tolerance that had allowed the thousands of communities
living in the subcontinent to co-survive in neighbourliness ... Often there were
violent clashes among communities, as is likely in any ‘mixed neighbourhood’.
But the violence never involved such aggregates or generic categories as
Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Tamils or Sinhalas. Conflicts were localized and
sectored, and were almost invariably seen as cutting across religious
boundaries, for such boundaries were mostly fuzzy. (2003 68-69)
Nandy’s critique relies on the anachronistic and circular argument that the historical
absence of the battling ‘aggregates or generic categories’ that distinguish modern
India implies that the past was more harmonious (see also Baber, 1998). However, it
also demonstrates that, whilst tradition is a key symbolic site for Nandy, his
relationship to tradition is instrumental and romantic. We see this pattern again in
Nandy’s contention that, in comparison with their occidentalised compatriots,
ordinary, faithful, Indians ‘resist’, or, in some way, are removed from modern
violence. ‘[T]he huge majority of the citizens’, he claims, ‘[w]hen the chips are down,
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they resist religious and ethnic violence’ (2002 8). Nandy’s vision of the innocent
native turns on his insistence that ‘traditional India’ is inherently adaptive and tolerant
(2002 79). Yet this endorsement is asserted rather than evidenced and, hence, has a
gestural quality.
The critical function of Nandy’s contrast between the boundary dependent identities
of the West and the fluid and plural selves that can be found in traditional culture is
clear. However, in a society marked by spectacular levels of inequality, the related
implication that critical traditionalism must apply the sharpest edge of its criticism
outwards, against what is not traditional, but not necessarily inwards, towards
traditions themselves, carries considerable political baggage. The lack of
consideration Nandy gives to breaking down the use-value of different traditions for
different groups, or to the notion that modernisation has a variety of advocates (for
example, amongst outcaste and lower caste groups as well as amongst the middle
classes), implies that Nandy is not uncomfortable with discriminatory traditions, such
as caste. Indeed, Nandy has gone beyond the conventional defence of caste, as
providing social bases for change and activism, to offer caste as an Indian success
story. In a revealing reflection of the critical point of critical traditionalism Nandy
concurs with the view, associated with the historian of India, Ananda
Coomaraswamy, that ‘the untouchables in traditional India were better off than the
proletariat in the industrial societies’ (2004 298). The critical thrust of this remark
strikes two ways: against the West but also against the claim of outcaste groups to
be oppressed. Nandy goes on to offer a demographic argument in support of caste:
I think at this point in time the caste system is doing a rather good job in
Indian democracy because the lower castes have taken better advantage of
the democratic process than the less numerous upper castes. (2006 89)
Thus caste is legitimised by being given a democratic momentum. Yet, like many of
Nandy’s other commentaries on the content of tradition, there is curious thinness to
this defence. It rushes to protect, to judge and to provoke. Yet we can also read such
statements as containing an emotional logic of uncertainty: the exaggerated defence,
the dramatic ‘turning of the tables’ on the assumptions of, supposedly dominant,
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secular Indians; these tropes have a staged quality which hint at Nandy’s difficult
relationship to his own nostalgic and occidentalist myths.
Reflexive Traditionalism?
I am not a product of village India. Nor am I a believer. I’m a child of the
modern age. I have not landed from Mars. I feel comfortable with critical
rationality; my writings are proof of that. (2006 back cover)
Who is Ashis Nandy? What does Ashis Nandy want? The answers may appear
obvious from the earlier sections of this essay. He is a critical intellectual who wants
what is not Westernised and what is faithful and tolerant to emerge from under the
shadow of the cynical and violent power of the West. But we have also seen that
Nandy’s attitude to tradition is a distant one, he evokes it as a sign of protest but not
as something experienced and complex. For Nandy the West is the ‘intimate enemy’
and Indian tradition is the authentic self. But he does not speak from the standpoint
of tradition but from somewhere else; the place of the critical and reflexive
intellectual, the place of creative alienation. In this section I look at how Nandy
negotiates and, in part resolves, these ambivalent locations.
Nandy’s portraits of the West and of India are not innocent statements but useful
constructs. ‘I wanted’, he explains in interview,
to rediscover tradition as an antonym of modernity and use it as a resource for
resistance and for alternative visions of a desirable society ... there is a clear
political edge to the idea of tradition ... I am aware that these traditions are in
recession everywhere. (2006 62)
These remarks help us re-orientate our view of Nandy. They enable us to bring his
anti-colonial concerns alongside his debt to the critical and redemptive nostalgia of
the Frankfurt School.
The idea of tradition in my work is thus a form of negation, in Herbert
Marcuse’s sense ... Empirically speaking, modernity and tradition here are
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clearly not in opposition ... However, at an ideal-typical level, I have tried to
protect the idea of an adversarial relationship between the two. (2006 59)
Nandy develops and clarifies this argument in the following passage, from his essay
‘Cultural frames of transformation’:
Is there an Indian tradition with a built-in theory of oppression? The question
is irrelevant. The real issue is: can we construct a tradition which will yield a
native theory of oppression? (in Nandy 2004 23)
Nandy’s apparently instrumental use of tradition as a tool to apply against the
present sits awkwardly alongside a commitment to the non-rational and the non-
political in Indian civilization. It appears Nandy both disbelieves and believes his
culturalist myths of India. He wishes to find a way to shape these themes, to employ
and deploy them, but also to recognise them and understand their power. What
results may be presented as a negotiation of a crisis of meaningfulness; a crisis in
which ‘the people’ are always central and always distant and in which political reason
is both evoked and denied. In the following passage Nandy appears to offer this site
of dilemma as a necessary ‘slum of politics’,4 a place in which conflict can never be
easily or neatly resolved:
you have to learn how to handle these sentiments, passions, and beliefs of
the people. The less transient part of these sentiments, passions, and beliefs
is what I call tradition, because it is a structuration of these sentiments,
passions and beliefs, or at least a substantial part of it. The concept of
tradition gives you practical, democratic entry into this part of the democratic
process, which can be called the dark side of democracy. (2006 72-73)
However, we can also read Nandy’s creation of a mythic realm of tradition as a
necessary moment of resolution. For, despite his evocation of the chaotic and
compromised ‘slum of politics’, Nandy is also seeking to find his way out of, and
beyond, the familiar conflict between tradition and modernity. His image of authentic
India as a site of openness, and a place beyond politics, captures and contains both
aspirations. It is also a place beyond history, beyond what the ‘historically minded,
4 The phrase is from a remark, cited with approval by Nandy, of Arnold Toynbee on
the death of Gandhi: ‘henceforth mankind would ask its prophets, “Are you willing to
live in the slum of politics”’ (Nandy 2006 75).
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westernized’ (1995 53) can grasp, and into a non-historical realm. Thus, Nandy’s
assertion of geography - of the location of culture - provincalises history and
challenges its epistemology.
The importance for Nandy of authentic Indian culture being outside, or beyond the
scope of, history is also reflected in his insistence that the latter has failed to
recognise the conditions of its own production. Nandy argues that history lacks the
‘radical self-reflexivity’ to grasp the non-historical nature of Indian culture (2003 95).
This allows him to indigenise reflexivity and, hence, to take ownership of a
supposedly Western intellectual form and, at the same time, to seal off ‘Indian
culture’ from the acids of critical enquiry. Yet this argument demands that Nandy
misrepresents the capabilities of the historical imagination:
There is one thing the historical consciousness cannot do ... it cannot admit
that the historical consciousness itself can be demystified or unmasked and
that an element of self-destructiveness could be introduced into that
consciousness to make it more humane and less impersonal ... Why have
historians till now not seriously tried to critique the idea of history itself? (2003
90-91)
Nandy’s claim about what ‘the historical consciousness cannot do’ is a surprising
one. Not only is the idea that historical time is a social construction a familiar part of
the study of history but it has occasioned many critiques of the Eurocentric
assumption that there are peoples who remain without, or outside of, history.
Nevertheless, for Nandy this is a necessary thesis. For by translating critical
reflexivity into a traditional, non-modern, form, he is able to help resolve and cohere
the dilemma of the modern/non-modern, critical/traditional intellectual.
Nandy’s geography of reflexivity is a challenge to the arrogance of the West.
However, it appears that this same geography – when rendered into an occidentalist
‘othering’ of rationalism – also allows Nandy to curtail reflexivity by rendering
tradition into a space beyond critique. This intriguing dynamic - with its simultaneous
opening and closing of critique - may be captured under the term ‘reflexive
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traditionalism’. Reflexive traditionalism contributes a challenging geographical
dimension to the theory of reflexivity, notably the theory of reflexive modernisation
associated with Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994). More specifically, it challenges the
anchoring of reflexivity in a specifically European experience both because we find in
Nandy a different locale for this process and because Nandy’s reflexivity is
constituted through a mutually constituting imaginative geography of occident and
India. Although Beck and Giddens emphasise that reflexive modernisation is ‘marked
by the rediscovery of tradition as well as its dissolution’ (Beck 1994 185), their
argument offers a passive role for nostalgia: tradition can be ‘rediscovered’ but it is
not considered to be capable of becoming a central critical force (see also,
Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992). By contrast, Nandy’s work suggests how tradition
can be fashioned into a provocation that questions the purpose and parameters of
reflexivity and demands that ‘post-traditionalism’ defend and define its limits.
However, while Nandy’s traditionalism may offer new insights into the politics of
reflexive modernization, the critical flow also works in the other direction. For not only
does Giddens, in particular, place the invention of tradition at the heart of his portrait
of modern reflexivity, he provides a highly relevant portrait of the empty symbolism
that can accompany modern uses of tradition. Anxious moderns return to tradition
but they cannot recreate it, he argues, instead they produce ‘tradition without
traditionalism: repetition that stands in the way of autonomy rather than fostering it’
(1994 70). As we have seen, Nandy’s use of tradition closes down as many critical
pathways as it opens. It hankers after tradition but it is alienation from it, a dislocation
that is resolved into nostalgia and occidentalism.
Conclusion
Critical traditionalism is an attractive, provocative and paradoxical concept. Although
Ashis Nandy is its most ardent and sophisticated progenitor, it is likely to appeal to a
variety of projects and movements. In exploring Nandy’s development and use of
the concept, this article has identified dilemmas that are likely to remain pertinent for
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others who wish to combine a claim on the critical imagination with the assertion of
tradition.
We have seen that Nandy’s vision of authentic ‘cultural India’ is of a site of challenge
and resistance. But it is also a curiously blank realm, a space of ‘ideal types’ that is
also a realm of unfathomable faith, of the unknowable and, occasionally, the
indefensible that must be defended. Nandy provides us with an ambivalent portrait of
the non-modern, non-Western world-view: it is the unreadable that is read as
‘resistance’, it comes from a place that is no place (a ‘utopia’), and from a time
outside of time. It is an unstable vision, creative and transgressive but alienated from
its own myths. In creating this sealed off space of redemption Nandy fences off his
own ‘critical traditionalism’ from a fuller and more self-critical acknowledgment of its
dependency on occidentalism and nostalgia. The sense of loss that animates
Nandy’s project is unmatched for its rawness and emotional honesty. Yet, in seeking
flight from modernity, this sensibility is taking wing from its own conditions of
production and affecting an innocence that is neither plausible nor sustainable (for
further discussion, see Bonnett, 2010).
However, paradox and instability do not necessarily imply a lack of political potential.
Indeed, we may be reminded of another paradoxical way of engaging and re-valuing
tradition, namely political conservatism. In many of its classic formulations modern
conservatism emphasises timelessness over history, intuition over rationalism and
tradition over change. Yet it has also been in the vanguard of change, securing the
authority of new forms of social power. Thus whilst Edmund Burke allied his vision of
‘wisdom without reflection, and above it’ (1910 31) to an anti-revolutionary creed, his
name was later put into service as a founding father of a Conservatism that
sanctioned capitalist upheaval. Despite his own intent, Nandy’s anti-revolutionary
defence of India’s cultural resources may be equally available for political mutation
and deployment. Nandy hopes that India will ‘not become a proxy-West, successfully
beating the West at its own game’ (2006 back cover). But if, as many believe, India’s
is already ‘beating the West’, and its place as a world power is relatively secure, then
a form of ‘critical traditionalism’ that stereotypes and disparages history, rationalism
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and the West, in order to assert the country’s cultural eminence, takes on both
economic and geo-political dimensions (see also Nanda, 2009). In an era of multiple
globalizations the uses and abuses of ‘Indian tradition’ are matters of global interest.
Although Nandy is India’s most prominent critic of modern power, his romance of
Indian innocence may be too innocent of its own relationship to power and India’s
changing international role.
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