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This is the importance of being Ashis Nandy, a maverick thinker and a public intellectual. He has traversed a vast cartography of disciplines in his five-decade-long career, ranging from psychoanalysis to sociology, from political theory to cultural studies. No wonder, it is so difficult to pigeon-hole his writing, a fact that the author of the book under review constantly rues. Unlike most of the Indian scholars and intellectuals, who have been trained abroad, Nandy is entirely "homegrown," as Vinay Lal puts it. It’s another matter that he has taught at virtually every international university one can possibly think of. Though comparisons are odious, Nandy’s awe-inspiring career graph and monumental output vaguely remind us of the French philosopher, Roland Barthes.
The book is neatly divided into three parts, viz., "The Pathologies of Secularism", "Symptomatic Responses: Reading the Politics of Blame" and "Critical Interventions: Towards the Psychotherapeutic". These parts have further been subdivided into six chapters, apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion. In her Introduction, Christine deals with several issues such as Nandy’s position as a cultural critic, multiple selves of the critic, psychoanalytic reading of self and society and, finally, the structure of the book. Christine’s main argument is that Nandy’s anti-secularism is not merely anti-West or anti-modern, but "an attempt to confront the ideals, projections and distortions that the ideology of secularism produces" in the complex "processes of subjection". This she establishes by focusing on Nandy’s critique of secularism, which started with his famous essay An Anti-Secularist Manifesto (1985), and several other related writings. She further moves towards the "pathologies of secularism", which according to her, begin to emerge in Nandy’ work, when he seeks to assess the contested claims of secularism up against those of Hindu nationalists. Nandy has tried to argue that the rise of Hindu nationalism is a byproduct of "complexities of human subjectivity" and "ambivalences and contradictions" of Indian political culture. While developing her argument, Christine also attends to the "horror and fascination" with which Nandy’s anti-secular thinking was largely received within academic and public debates on secularism. She emphasises that Nandy’s effort in these debates was mainly to destabilise the existing boundaries and reposition them, as far as it was possible. Finally, Christine returns to Nandy’s notion of "post-secular awareness," which he exemplified in course of his several critical engagements, with a remarkable degree of self-reflexivity. It is here that the confrontation between Nandy’s psychoanalysis and democratic pluralism actually takes place. In the concluding chapters, she returns to a critique of Nandy’s earlier works such as The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (1983) and a large variety of his newspaper articles. By doing so, she manages to establish her point that Nandy constantly ruptures and re-negotiates the "idea of India" by playing around with "national fantasies". An extremely readable book, otherwise, this one is likely to have a very special appeal for those who have been tracking Ashis Nandy’s work for long.
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popularly
A social theorist by
training, Christine Deftereos has already explored the points of
intersection between contemporary social and political criticism,
psychoanalytic theory and the politics of selfhood in some of her
earlier works. It was but natural for her to turn to Ashis Nandy for a
fuller understanding of some of these theoretical issues. The result
is this exceedingly well-written book on Nandy’s life-long
engagement with cultural politics of selfhood, a work that is
expository and scholarly at the same time.