Image credit: Flickr/ Oli Kember
Image credit: Flickr/ Oli Kember

Agent provocateur par excellence

Ashis Nandy’s new book explores Indian narcissism, patriotism and nationalism.

Rakesh Shukla has more than three decades of engagement with law, constitutional jurisprudence, human rights and justice, along with training and practice in psychodynamic therapy. Explorations in the interface of law, social movements for change, and psychoanalysis are the major areas of his work.

Image credit: Flickr/ Oli Kember
Image credit: Flickr/ Oli Kember

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.  

Courting controversy
Nandy's penchant for going out of his way to be provocative gets ample play in Regimes of Narcissism. Indicting the pursuit of happiness as a twentieth-century product of the Enlightenment, in the chapter 'Happiness' Nandy criticises the pursuit of happiness through the seeking of therapists and gurus. So far so good.  Then he goes on to remark that in some Indian texts the search for happiness is seen as slightly déclassé. According to Nandy, Valmiki's Ramayana tells us that the benefits of reading the epic are different for different castes: the Brahmins get knowledge, the martial Kshatriyas fame/glory, the business-minded Vaishyas money, and the 'lowly' Shudras get happiness. 

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. 

The politics of names
Today, the use of terms like bhangi and chamar (derogatory terms in Hindi for castes engaged in cleaning toilets and working with leather) is on shaky legal ground. The terms have the potential to hurt the sensibilities of the communities concerned.  Mahatma Gandhi's harijan (literally 'God's people') has given way to the more empowering dalit, preferred by the politicised movements of the erstwhile 'untouchables'. Similarly, some castes traditionally associated with cleaning and sweeping prefer the term Valmiki, tracing their lineage to the author of the Ramayana, a member of their community. In fact, on 2nd October 2013, Gandhi's birthday and usually an occasion for the announcement of welfare schemes, some Valmikis protested that many of them were educated but unemployed and that the government need not associate the community solely with sweeping and cleaning tasks. Use of the customary derogatory terms prolongs the association of the communities with the customary tasks, and has specifically been made into an offence under the SC/ST Act. 

 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. 

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