Pitfalls of hollow hope

The single, raw impulse at the origins of the 'political psychologist' Ashis Nandy's complex career has been the desire to recover indigenous systems of knowledge in Southasia that have perished under the onslaught of colonial modernity. From the very beginning, this undertaking has been one of excavation. One of Nandy's first books came out in 1980, entitled Alternative Sciences: Creativity and authenticity in two Indian scientists. This was an attempt to uncover the deepest cultural impulses of the two early scientists, Jagadis Chandra Bose and Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose work, on the surface, appeared to be thoroughly modern. Though Nandy convincingly demonstrated that the two were not blind imitators of the West, and indeed struggled to reconcile traditional paradigms with modern science, the two worlds remained incommensurable and their projects ended in failure and tragedy. The sympathetic reader is inevitably overwhelmed with a sense of loss and futility in reading this account; the old worldviews seem irretrievable, unable to withstand the pressures of modernity.

Conscious that by confining himself to digging he would remain a mere purveyor of nostalgia, over time Nandy developed an unsystematic but comprehensive critique of the worldview that originated in the European Enlightenment and was then assimilated, in myriad ways, by the non-West. This included all of history, science, the nation state, secularism and theories of progress. By exposing how catastrophic the introduction of these ideas had been to non-modern societies, he hoped to enable the recuperation of the 'non-modern'. And, if this could not work as a complete alternative, it could at least offer an opposition.