Guest post by MEERA ASHAR http://kafila.org/
January 30, 2013
January 30, 2013
Ashis Nandy has been called, rather,
accused of being, many things—sociologist, historian, political
theorist, public intellectual, philosopher, psychoanalyst, leftist,
centrist, right wing, Dalit, Christian, Brahmanical, casteist (he
describes himself, more poetically, as an intellectual street fighter
and reason buster)—but ‘politically correct’ has never been one of them.
This time, Nandy’s political
incorrectness has cost him more than before. As in the past, he has been
attacked by politicians and the popular media for presenting his
analysis of social phenomena—for doing his job well. The response of the
Indian intelligentsia to Nandy’s threatened arrest by the right wing
government of Gujarat in 2008 was markedly different from the response
now. The difference this time, of course, is that Nandy has not offended
the right people. He is seen to have betrayed the marginalized. This
time, he has been unfashionably politically incorrect. The similarity
between the two episodes is the ‘freedom of speech’ brigade, which has
dutifully stood by Nandy. But I shall turn to them later.
Nandy’s abandoning of political correctness, perhaps the second-most malignant epidemic of the modern age after ‘bullshit’,
is not just an act of impudence or foolhardiness. Sympathetic students
and avid readers of Nandy’s writing have often been heard asking, “but
why does he have to say these things in this manner; why does he make
jokes like this?” It is as though we have assumed that Nandy’s ideas can
be repackaged into a politically appropriate, academically gratifying,
sanitized format, preferably footnotable. (Many have actually succeeded
in achieving that—and rendering him redundant in the process.)
At a time when academics presume that
their role is to perpetuate more and more politically correct research
(“score one more for the underdogest of the underdog”), Nandy’s work,
while challenging old dogmas and hierarchies, cannot be recast into a
bite-size snack. There is no ‘Understand Nandy in 3 Simple Steps’…or
even 5. Perhaps this is why he has been critiqued almost equally by
ideologues of all hues. For example, his brilliant essay on humiliation
baffled many. What could he possibly mean when he argues that for
humiliation to occur, both the perpetrator and the humiliated need to
share the same symbolic world. Humiliation cannot be completed unless
this cognitive circuit is complete and another’s categories are
violently imposed upon one. A potent identity marker, humiliation can
have “creative possibilities”; it can “crystalize new forms of political
awareness”. “He makes these statements, and then we have to unpack them
for days,” one of my bright students once said of him. But this is a
far cry from inane questions such as: Is he justifying humiliation? Is
he blaming the humiliated? Is he forgiving the perpetrator? Nandy does
not give us new and improved answers; he compels us to question our own
questions.
The reactions to Nandy’s exposition on
corruption (which has strangely been relegated to the status of
‘remarks’) betray once again the intellectual laziness that pervades
society. At the crudest level, Nandy’s words were taken out of context.
No surprises here. Blame the media: 24×7 news bites, running the same
half-sentence over and over again, uproar, more reruns of the sentence
fragment. You get the picture. And indeed, there were people who are
either just waiting to pick a fight, be offended, outraged, protest… a
familiar routine. Some shook their head in dismay and said this was a
reflection of the attitudes of a casteist society. Brinda Karat called
him elitist and Mayawati and the rest wanted him arrested. No one paused
even to hear the end of the sentence that began, “It is a fact that
most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the Scheduled Castes, and
increasingly the Scheduled Tribes….” This was met with a collective
chant of ‘FOUL’. “And as long as this is the case,” Nandy had continued,
with his characteristic aphorismic charm, “the Indian Republic will
survive.” Of course, Nandy’s point was that the discourse of corruption
victimizes the marginalized, while the elite get away with it. He was
making the argument that the elite have subtle age-old mechanisms of
manipulating power, which the marginalized lack. His use of West Bengal
as an example of the least corrupt state but also the state that has
kept the SCs/ST and OBCs from getting close to power makes that amply
clear.
Of course, this was not all he intended
to say. When Nandy said that his co-panelist, the eminent philosopher
Richard Sorabji, and he can be corrupt in more subtle ways, by offering
scholarships and jobs to kith and kin, he was not simply saying that corruption is everywhere.
Nor was he merely stating that the elite get away with it. He was
asking us to rethink the category of corruption. Why do certain things
not look like corruption? “We congratulate ourselves for promoting
talent,” Nandy said of the ‘corruption’ that the elite may engage in.
Before we jump in and claim to have solved the paradox by categorizing
this as hypocrisy, let us pause to think what Nandy could have been
saying. Do we even have a theory of corruption? Or are we blindly waving
around a baton against it. It will not do to only say, “corruption is
everywhere, let’s strike it, or strike against it,” depending on our
chosen mode of ‘participation’ in politics. We have recently seen how
that did not turn out too well for the Anna Hazare movement.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing here is
the defense that Nandy’s compatriots, students and fellow social
scientists have offered: freedom of speech. Indeed, as our society
becomes more and more intolerant, there is a need to hold on tight to
our right and ability to express dissent. But that is hardly the end of
our task. Far from it. Neither is it enough merely to assert that
Nandy’s heart is in the right place. (Indeed it is.) Can our
intellectual response to a sophisticated argument, and the furor it
created, be: “But he has always spoken for the marginalized”? Is this
the only validation an intellectual work needs: that it should speak for
the marginalized? If this is the only stipulation for scholarly work,
we may as well be lobotomized.
It is no surprise that, where multiple
academic and scholarly careers have been built primarily on polished
bleeding-heart stories, a ‘gadfly’s’ annoying and persistent demand that
we be intellectually honest and willing to challenge the very
categories of our analysis has not always been welcomed. His work, even
if presented as “paradoxes, aphorisms, ironies, jokes and riddles”
strikes at the very foundation of the business of knowledge production.
Nandy’s analysis reveals not just the vacuity of the concept of
corruption, but also the intellectual indolence that we all revel in.
Nandy has often been called a gadfly. Ironically, this reminds me of
another friendly neighbourhood gadfly, Socrates, who was asked to drink
hemlock for ‘corrupting’ the youth.
Meera Ashar teaches at the College of
Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University and can be
contacted at meera.ashar@anu.edu.au
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