Sunday, February 3, 2013

India Today: Ritu Bhatia -Nandy deserves better

Ashis Nandy deserves better
Ritu Bhatia  New Delhi, February 3, 2013 http://indiatoday.intoday.in/

There is a beautiful story, a poignant one by the Swiss writer Frederich Durrenmatt it is about a detective. He is dying and his one dream is to convict a criminal, he has been hunting all his life. They meet each other and the criminal says "you can never convict me for a crime I have committed". To show his contempt for the law, he then pushes a man off a bridge. The policeman is stunned and then has the wits to reply that 'I will convict you for a crime you have not committed". Durrenmatt's novel Judge and the Hangman is a story of how he achieves this.

The Durrenmatt anecdote reminded me of the Nandy controversy. Here was a gadfly that the state and the radicals have never forgiven for the triumphant dissenter he has been. Oddly Nandy has grown in respectability with every controversy. As a friend observed feminists have not forgiven him for his writings on Sati, scientists have not forgotten his comments on the scientific temper document and the official Left has never forgotten that he has always questioned their intellectualist pretensions. When the Jaipur controversy on Dalits and corruption took place, there was a sense of vicarious justice. The Gadfly was going to get his "just" desserts.

Episode

The few letters issued in defence of Nandy appeared cautious and sounded more like good conduct certificates with caveats about his unorthodox and provocative style. They exuded a political correctness. Oddly the one Dalit present at the occasion, the usually vociferous Kancha Ilaiah was the most open about Nandy, cautioning against false accusations by observing that Nandy's was a bad statement made with good intentions. Contrast this sense of fairness with a well known TV anchor who seems to be playing both judge and hangman. TV anchors often become Kangaroo courts in pursuit of publicity. One is at least grateful that U.R. Ananthamurthy, the author issued a strong statement in Nandy's defence. Nandy must have missed the presence of his old friend D.R.Nagaraj, a major Dalit voice who might have brought balance and laughter to this dismal event.

The question is what was Nandy trying to do and how well did he do it. Nandy is always impatient with hypocrisy and especially the hypocrisy of the elite. He was critical of what one may call the corruption envy of the elite, which is noisy about the blatant corruption of Khoda and smug about its own welloiled nepotism. Probably reacting to the way scholarships and fellowships are nations. If Scott looked at the moral economy of resistance and even corruption as a form of resistance, Nandy examined the cognitive power of these groups, allowing them a certain ambiguity and paradox. This is not an elitist mindset that the CPM leader Brinda Karat attributes him. This is a creativity which goes beyond Marxist party categories which have been knowledge proof for decades. It is his critics who play the labeling game, freezing margins into stereotypes. Nandy on the other hand plays an enabling game with a full sense of irony. Nandy's writings while playful are clear; his conversation can leapfrog linear arguments. Sometimes it is almost as if he is talking to himself. But Nandy's style requires experimentation, of muddling through. It always remains a sensibility that has fought for the marginal but perpetually questioned the radicalism of middle class representatives. There is a pomposity to a lot of critique. I read one that drove to me tears at its sheer illiteracy.

One author compares Nandy's fall in the current controversy with Martin Heidegger's sinister Nazism, Michel Foucault's enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution or Hannah Arendt's bizarre celebration of the military prowess of the Israeli state. The pomposity and illiteracy of the comparison merits reference. It shows how far some of our academia will go to both misread and malign a leading intellectual. The writer presents it as a fable while the style turns it into a farcical representation of critique today. I was just imagining the process of interrogating Nandy. He has cheerfully admitted that he is ready for jail claiming prisons are great places to write books. In doing so he was claiming a genealogy of distinguished dissent going back to Thoreau, Gandhi, Gramsci and Nehru.

Issue

The question we must ask however is that while no one is above the law in a normative sense, can laws become so oppressive that they trigger a form of political correctness that eliminates parody, black humour and irony? Should our lives become a bleak search for uniformity and political correctness which has made intellectuals wary of entering the fray, of carrying on the debate, of going beyond Nandy in understanding the ironies of change? Nandy is one of the few public intellectuals left in India. He is a survivor at a time when public policy and public spaces have become shrinking spaces. Reflecting on the controversies his work generated, he told me impishly, the bureaucrats might hate me, but their children come and talk happily about my ideas. He felt a sense of hope and chuckled quietly about the fate of ideas. Nandy's comments at the Jaipur festival would have been translated into Hindi and then scrutinised by the police.

I believe there are charges against him filed at five separate police stations. I am imagining the questions, the detailed ethnographic examination. At one level it could be routine, at another it could have a touch of Alice and Kafka. I can imagine him arguing in his labored Hindi, trying to capture nuances, injecting humour into a ritual of clerks. It is a pity that he has to be subject to this. One wonders about the fate of public intellectuals when political correctness and intellectual caution rules the day. Nandy and the struggles for intellectual justice deserve more. The writer is a social science nomad awarded in Delhi, Nandy exposed this process by claiming the elite sees nothing wrong in its reciprocities of nepotism while condemning the general decline of honesty among Dalits and OBCs.

Nandy recognised this latter trend as a sociological fact contending corruption is blatant among OBCs, Dalits and increasingly scheduled tribes. He was not attributing essentialism to Dalit corruption. In fact corruption, he claimed, signified agency, a sense of the rules of the game and the ability to manipulate them. What others saw as the noise of Dalit corruption, Nandy would designate ironically as a welcome music. Corruption is seen as a political bureaucratic skill which new elites must learn to survive in the system. What Nandy constructed as agency was read as a genetic or an in born quality. He was implying that electoral democracy is a circulation of corruptions and as a result, becomes an ironic form of distributive justice. The argument is systemic, though in Nandy's presentation, the emphasis is on the performative aspects of corruption. This is the argument that critics like Arvind Kejriwal did not understand or chose not to in their rush to enter the fray.

Criticism

I must add that text has to be understood within context. Nandy is a truly subaltern writer who focuses on the imagination of marginals. Like James Scott the Yale social scientist, he has understood the voices of the weak and explored them as imagi-nations. If Scott looked at the moral economy of resistance and even corruption as a form of resistance, Nandy examined the cognitive power of these groups, allowing them a certain ambiguity and paradox. This is not an elitist mindset that the CPM leader Brinda Karat attributes him. This is a creativity which goes beyond Marxist party categories which have been knowledge proof for decades

It is his critics who play the labeling game, freezing margins into stereotypes. Nandy on the other hand plays an enabling game with a full sense of irony. Nandy's writings while playful are clear; his conversation can leapfrog linear arguments. Sometimes it is almost as if he is talking to himself. But Nandy's style requires experimentation, of muddling through. It always remains a sensibility that has fought for the marginal but perpetually questioned the radicalism of middle class representatives.

There is a pomposity to a lot of critique. I read one that drove to me tears at its sheer illiteracy. One author compares Nandy's fall in the current controversy with Martin Heidegger's sinister Nazism, Michel Foucault's enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution or Hannah Arendt's bizarre celebration of the military prowess of the Israeli state. The pomposity and illiteracy of the comparison merits reference. It shows how far some of our academia will go to both misread and malign a leading intellectual. The writer presents it as a fable while the style turns it into a farcical representation of critique today.

I was just imagining the process of interrogating Nandy. He has cheerfully admitted that he is ready for jail claiming prisons are great places to write books. In doing so he was claiming a genealogy of distinguished dissent going back to Thoreau, Gandhi, Gramsci and Nehru.

Issue The question we must ask however is that while no one is above the law in a normative sense, can laws become so oppressive that they trigger a form of political correctness that eliminates parody, black humour and irony? Should our lives become a bleak search for uniformity and political correctness which has made intellectuals wary of entering the fray, of carrying on the debate, of going beyond Nandy in understanding the ironies of change?

Nandy is one of the few public intellectuals left in India. He is a survivor at a time when public policy and public spaces have become shrinking spaces. Reflecting on the controversies his work generated, he told me impishly, the bureaucrats might hate me, but their children come and talk happily about my ideas. He felt a sense of hope and chuckled quietly about the fate of ideas.

Nandy's comments at the Jaipur festival would have been translated into Hindi and then scrutinised by the police. I believe there are charges against him filed at five separate police stations. I am imagining the questions, the detailed ethnographic examination. At one level it could be routine, at another it could have a touch of Alice and Kafka. I can imagine him arguing in his labored Hindi, trying to capture nuances, injecting humour into a ritual of clerks. It is a pity that he has to be subject to this. One wonders about the fate of public intellectuals when political correctness and intellectual caution rules the day. Nandy and the struggles for intellectual justice deserve more

- The writer is a social science nomad

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