In this context, Nandy, despite the limitations of his position, will continue to be a significant,provocative, and necessary figure. The idea that we can do without him simply because he’s been around for along time, or because we might have disagreements with him, doesn’t hold, I think; there are few enough ofhis kind as it is. As a sort of psychologist ayurved, he brings a touch of humour to the high-seriousness ofour historical deliberations; and it would be unfair to characterize him as principally a romantic "indigenist".He may be too eccentric, too much a minority voice, for us to call him, as Auden called Freud, quoting AlfredWhitehead, "a whole climate of opinion". But he is a more complex, and complicating, thinker than the oneSubrahmanyam portrays; for, if Nandy, as Subrahmanyam says, gives us a caricature of Europe, Subrahmanyamgives us a caricature of Nandy. Nandy the indigenist is also the Nandy who was one of the first Indiancommentators to take urban, "low", hybrid cultural forms like popular Hindi cinema seriously; he’s thesame Nandy who gave us that fascinating and influential account in The Intimate Enemy of Kipling’sself-loathing and creativity. This Nandy’s discussions of androgyny have, for a long time now, alerted us tothe deeply patriarchal nature of our "seriousness". This is the Nandy who critiques Satyajit Ray’sclassical, Bengal Renaissance sensibility in his art-house canon by turning to the filmmaker’s infantileuniverse, his children’s films. This Nandy is hardly an "innocent" or simple nativist; he’s anextraordinarily shrewd and cosmopolitan observer.