Agent provocateur par excellence
A drive through any of the glitzy new satellite townships of Delhi means experiencing the in-your-face corporatisation of India. Transnational corporations make their presence felt in everything from luxury brands to health care. Yet in these same neighbourhoods, some hospitals are named after their doctors/owners. 'Kailash' and 'Bharadwaj' hospitals proclaim their owners' status in huge neon signs. Such self-promotion would have been frowned upon in an earlier era; the hospital might have been named after the owner's grandfather or father, in line with the tradition of classical musicians referring to their Guru first and themselves as humble disciples later. Is what might be called 'healthy' or 'balanced' narcissism in Indian society changing?
Explaining the transformation of the self in the present era of flux is Ashis Nandy, one of the most original and provocative thinkers of his time. In Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair Nandy writes, "These essays are about an India that is no longer the country on which I have written for something like four decades…the mythos on which modern India built its self-definition is under severe stress." Nandy explains that narcissism is not just plain self-centredness, but has as its underside incapacitating self-doubts and feelings of inferiority. This in turn, he continues, leads to an overdone investment-in-self to cover up for these doubts and the gnawing absence of self-esteem. Nandy illustrates the notion by referring to Antilla, the billion dollar residence built by tycoon Mukesh Ambani in Mumbai as "a desperate affirmation that one has survived".
Yet, this seeming aggrandisement goes along with darker processes of despair. Nandy refers to the implosion of mighty empires following the collapse of the underlying mythos. The note of utter despair carries on, describing the "succumbing to despair" and self-destruction of a resilient and confident peasantry and the suicide of farmers in Punjab, the state made prosperous by the Green Revolution.
Fortunately, the remarks in the book seem to have gone unnoticed by the general public. If they had been voiced at an event attended by the media they could have led to a spate of First Information Reports against Nandy, as happened at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in January 2013, when some individuals and communities felt hurt and humiliated by his words regarding corruption among dalits, adivasis, and OBCs, and used the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (SC/ST Act) against him. Following his remarks at the JLF, the Supreme Court of India stepped in and stayed the arrest of 76-year-old Nandy in four FIRs lodged in four different states. In his defence Nandy asserted that the remarks were pulled out of context and distorted, and the matter rests with the courts.
In a similar vein, Nandy states in this book that a recurrent theme in the testimonies of survivors/victims of the 1984 Delhi Sikh massacre was one of casteism. Victims said "they got us beaten up and killed by the Bhangis(Untouchables)". Critiquing the reports on the massacre for omitting this theme, Nandy looks upon it as reflective of a way of thinking in which "the 'strange', politically incorrect categories of those at the receiving end of a social order are an embarrassment and must be quickly forgotten, presumably for the benefit of the victims themselves", in this case the Sikhs.
In his essay 'Humiliation', Nandy criticises the renunciation in the United States of the term 'Negro', then 'Black', in favour of 'African-American'. Remarking that 'Whites' have not given up the term 'White', Nandy considers the renaming by the 'Blacks' as admission that memories of slavery and racism are more shameful for blacks than for whites. The essay carries the logic further with postulations such as "unless the humiliated collaborate by feeling humiliated, you cannot humiliate them", and comes dangerously close to victimising the victim. Nandy seems to underplay the role of structures of power and domination in society with an extraordinarily disproportionate focus on the factor of the subjective perceptions of the individual victim/survivor. In his view, regardless of structures which oppress the marginalised on basis of categories like caste, class, race and gender, the process would not be complete without collaboration by the victim. Perhaps in reaction to the iron clad laws of the objective historical materialism of Marxism, the pendulum seems to swing to the other end in Nandy's formulations.