The Hindu, January 31, 2013 Opinion » Lead
Death of irony in the age of media
Although Ashis Nandy has explained the context in which he made his
corruption remark, the furious pace of TV and Internet does not allow
space for a re-evaluation
As I watched the clip of Ashis Nandy, at the Jaipur Literature Festival,
belligerently asserting that most of the corruption in India was the
work of the Scheduled Castes (SC), the Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the
Other Backward Classes (OBCs), I thought to myself: “Okay, what is the
sly old fox up to this time?” It was obvious to me that the statement
was not meant to be taken literally but rather to make some other point.
And sure enough, a few minutes of trawling the web furnished me with an
adequate context. Having first pointed out that middle and upper class
India’s exclusionary and nepotistic practices have been thoroughly
normalised through a discourse of merit and just desserts, Mr. Nandy was
asserting that the “corruption” stick was now wielded exclusively when
lower castes and other marginalised groups engaged in practices similar
to what the twice-born had been doing for centuries. He welcomed such
corruption as to him, in a highly unequal and deeply hierarchical
society, corruption may be a form of upward mobility for the
disadvantaged. With characteristic flourish, Mr. Nandy declared that
lower caste corruption gave him faith in Indian democracy and its
future.
Irritating reminder
Over the last two years, as much of middle class India awoke to our
corrupt ways under Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and others, Mr. Nandy
has been an irritating reminder that (a) the middle class is itself one
of the primary beneficiaries of said corruption, (b) that so much of the
anti-corruption discourse and punishment are reserved for the lower
castes whereas upper caste beneficiaries escape unscathed, and (c)
middle class attention to corruption is a direct consequence of its
marginalisation as electoral politics based on universal franchise has
put it in its place.
As the media circus increased in hysteria, Mr. Nandy has been branded by
some as casteist and elitist; still others are demanding his arrest and
some have suggested he be tried for sedition. This rush to judging Mr.
Nandy has a familiar ring. For a long time now, he has been an
insightful critic of India’s much-vaunted secularism. His position is
distinct from the critique of pseudo-secularism made by the BJP or the
critique of the inadequacies of Congress secularism made by
left-liberals. In fact he noted that both communalists and secularists
in Indian politics shared a certain instrumental view of mobilising
religion to win votes: if the BJP campaigned on the threat to India’s
Hindu identity because of minorities, the Congress campaigned on its
allegedly singular ability to defend the minorities. In either case, a
bit of religious violence was a good thing to garner votes.
Mr. Nandy’s critique of the limits of secularism is best exemplified in a
marvellous essay he once wrote on Kochi (then Cochin) and its record of
hardly having any communal violence despite comprising sizeable
fractions of Hindus, Muslims and Christians. After some fieldwork in
Kochi, Mr. Nandy discovered that its communal harmony was not a result
of the belief in secularism amongst its residents. Far from it, as most
seemed quite unaware of its definition or content. Nearly every Hindu he
met “lovingly nurtured” the usual nasty stereotypes about Muslims and
vice versa, and people of all faiths heartily detested others of a
different faith. What then explained the harmony of the town? Mr.
Nandy’s explanation was typical: their tolerance for other faiths came
not from an ingestion of Nehruvian secularism (or what Mr. Nandy has
often called Indian modernity) but rather from their own lives as
practising believers. As Hindus, Muslims and Christians, each of them
entertained stereotypes of the other; but as believers, each of them
also understood and respected why and how the other could be religious
in their own way. It was this tolerance emanating from religious belief
that Mr. Nandy considered India’s salvation, not the thin and aseptic
secularism of the faithless that her western moderns professed.
Mr. Nandy often illustrated this insight with two observations: first,
the three great historical figures that Indians always point to as
paragons of tolerance — Ashoka, Akbar and Mohandas Gandhi — did not draw
upon secularism; rather they were deeply religious and unlikely to
argue for a strict separation of state and religion, or the divorce of
ethics from politics. And second, it was in cities, filled as they were
with the so-called moderns, that so much of India’s religious violence
was concentrated — not in villages, where people were deeply religious
and therefore naturally tolerant. Yet, these village Indians were hardly
acquainted with the letter and content of secularism. Mr. Nandy’s
position on secularism has been an unusual and insightful one — shared
with others such as T.N. Madan — but it has often led him to being
branded a closet Hindu fundamentalist (which is richly ironic as Mr.
Nandy is a Christian, a Brahmo, by birth).
The ‘sati’ controversy
Mr. Nandy has been labelled an anti-feminist/ male chauvinist as well.
Many years ago, after a spate of modern day ‘satis’— including the
highly visible one of Roop Kanwar in Rajasthan — there was a huge debate
and lines were drawn along secular versus communal, traditional versus
modern, and superstition versus rational. Mr. Nandy waded in with
typical counter-intuition. He pointed out that many latter-day instances
of ‘sati’ occurred not amongst traditional rural families but among
those moving up a ladder of modernisation and urban employment. He noted
that both the so-called secular and communal parties sought to make
political capital out of the event, and indeed both were quite
comfortable in the deification of Roop Kanwar if they thought it could
bring in votes. In that context, Mr. Nandy remarked there was a time in
the mythical past when ‘sati’ as an institution said something about
honour and valour, and used that to contrast the instrumental and highly
modern ways in which ‘sati’ had come to be commodified in post-colonial
India. Outrage followed. Mr. Nandy was seen by some feminists as
justifying the practice of ‘sati’ and calling for a return to the purity
of feudal times.
For those of us who understand Mr. Nandy to be a constant gadfly there
is a method in his seeming madness. By exposing the conceits of the
moderns he revalorises the traditional and the village. By showing the
complicity of the seculars and the communalists in religious violence,
he shows how religion has been instrumentalised by all. Both the
secularist and the communalist share a deep contempt for the believer
(whom Mr. Nandy often describes as both poor and rural in most
instances). Many of us also have serious reservations about some of his
pet beliefs. Mr. Nandy’s village is closer to the idyllic idealisation
of Gandhi and far from the cesspool of superstition and intrigue of Dr.
B.R. Ambedkar. He can often seem romantic in his idealisation of the
pre- or non-modern, and some of his broad-brush generalisations can be
wonderfully free of any empirical specifics. His distinction between
pre-modern ‘religion-as-faith’ and a modern ‘religion-as-ideology’ seems
too simplistic. And on and on. But which social commentator or
scientist, especially one who writes on such large and explosive issues,
is free from such critique?
Vastly different mediascape
What is going on with the current brouhaha, however, seems a bit
distinctive. Firstly, it occurred on live TV and in a mediascape vastly
different from the ones that surrounded ‘sati’ or the debate over
secularism. In this era of the sound-bite playing on an endless loop,
and a public saturated by electronic media that pervades the remotest
village, the time and space for nuance and distinction seems
breathlessly short. Mr. Nandy has explained, as have others, the context
in which he made the comment about the SCs, the STs and the OBCs being
the most corrupt.
But for those who have rushed to either make political capital out of
this ‘insult,’ or just cannot see the irony in the comment, there has
been literally neither the time nor the space to conduct a
re-evaluation. Positions are instantaneously taken, expressed in public,
and then spread like wildfire — making it all the harder to retract.
And so the spectacle goes on.
As I ponder over my inability to convince others to see it my way, and
they struggle to understand how I could be so obtuse as to miss (to
them) Mr. Nandy’s obvious casteism, one thing becomes very clear: it is
precisely because neither of us can convince the other of the truth that
it is so important to let both of us speak our minds freely. The last
word, as always, has to be left to our premier pundit of provocation:
Mr. Nandy avers that having been for so long a defender of the lower
castes, it would be entirely apt if he were to go to jail for a comment
he made on their behalf. While that may appeal to Mr. Nandy’s always
over-developed sense of the tragic-comic, it would also represent the
descent of our politics into the ludicrous.
(Sankaran Krishna is professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. Email: Krishna@hawaii.edu)
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