Distant Thunder

This article originally appeared in two parts, Part I under the above title on July 25, 2004, and PartII under the title A Climate of Opinion, on August 1, 2004 in The Telegraph of Calcutta.Reproduced here by permission of the author and the publication.

Back in Calcutta after a month in England, I found that a debate, or a publicdifference of opinion, between two Indian academics had gone all but stale. Its venue had been an unlikelyone, a national newsmagazine known as much for its secular credentials as it is for grading the schools,colleges, and restaurants of the nation somewhat arbitrarily: a cross between (to think in terms of the mediain the country I had just left behind) The Guardian and Time Out. That this erudite quarrel hadbeen conducted in these pages reminds us that there is still no highbrow journal of the ideas in our countrythat could claim to have a decent nationwide circulation. The academics in question were AshisNandy, a psychologist by training, a sort of cultural theorist/ sociologist by vocation, lately retiredfrom the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies in Delhi; and SanjaySubrahmanyam, who holds a chair in South Asian history at Oxford.

"Debate" is perhaps not the right word. Nandy had written an article in response to some remarks madeabout him in the same newsmagazine by the journalist KuldipNayar; Subrahmanyam had written a riposte; severalletters to the editor had followed, including one from Subrahmanyam. But Nandy, as far as I could tellfrom the back issues I consulted, had been silent after the appearance of his piece. I was struck by thisbusiness; public airings of intellectual differences by academics in India are rare. This is partly becausethe liberal intelligentsia in India has become, one suspects, such a complex orchestration, in the last twentyyears, of hierarchies and affiliations, of publications, papers, conferences, university chairs, committeeappointments — an orchestra playing a limited number of tunes, or limited variations on one tune — that todisturb your precise relationship to this arrangement is to pass into silence, or intellectual non-existence.When differences are infrequently thrashed out, their intellectual content too often is, you feel, a mask forterritorial anxieties. All in all, you conclude that, in the circles I’m referring to, there has beenrelatively little scope for genuine debate, criticism, and irreverence in the last two decades; theinteresting and even important intellectual developments have been swiftly translated into territorialidentities.

And so, an intervention — to use the fashionable academic term — by a historian as good and serious asSubrahmanyam in response to Ashis Nandy is both welcome and overdue; it creates a break, a rupture, in ourmonotonous observance of intellectual propriety. But, for a riposte that is so scathing and obviouslyoutspoken, I found Subrahmanyam’s article puzzlingly obscure in some ways, and unwittingly illuminating inothers. In the end, it seemed to reaffirm the difficulties of critical language and thinking, and the uniqueelusiveness of Nandy in our cultural landscape.

Very briefly, Subrahmanyam makes the following points in his piece: firstly, that Nandy is both wrong andguilty of repeating himself when he states his old objection to secularism — that it’s a concept that’sinadequate to the social and political experiences of our multiply-formed nation, a concept whose inadequacyis underlined by the fact that it is a Western import. (In his piece, Nandy had cited — as he has before —alternative grass-roots forms of tolerance and pluralism that had enabled most of the country’s population,who live as they do outside the major urban centres, to co-exist with each other despite differences inreligion. He pointed out that most riots actually occur in urban areas.)

Subrahmanyam angrily reminds us (and Nandy) that the European idea of the "secular" is quite differentfrom the Indian one: the "secular", in the West, is a space in which the church, or, simply, religion doesnot operate; in India, it is a space in which a multiplicity of religions co-habit with each other. In fact,"secularism", to all purposes, is an Indian coinage; it has had no long-standing usage in the West, and itdoes not have one there today. These are not particularly new insights — in fact, they’re becoming prettyvenerable themselves — but the context of this argument gives them a new charge; besides, it’sentertaining to witness these insights being employed to turn the tables on what Subrahmanyam calls Nandy’s"indigenist" rhetoric.

In the course of the article, Subrahmanyam pulls up Nandy for errors to do with European history in a fewgrand pronouncements the latter had made, and calls Nandy, as a consequence, "ignorant", "an innocent".A few errors made in a domain somewhat outside the writer’s natural one would probably have led to thecharge of recklessness being made against the culprit; "ignorance" suggests that Nandy is in a classroomwith a very exacting teacher. Subrahmanyam ends by identifying Nandy as a progeny of the "lachrymosetradition of the romantic underside of the so-called Bengal Renaissance"; and punctures Nandy’s self-imageof being someone who’s had recourse, in his thinking, to life-experiences outside the secular mainstream bysuggesting that, after the death of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, he is, indeed, our "last colonial thinker".

At first glance, Subrahmanyam’s article falls within a recognizable tradition of polemical debunking: anenfant terrible attacking an older, establishment figure. However, more than once, Subrahmanyam’s tonechanges, and he begins to sound like an establishment voice, sanctioned by Oxbridge, educating a person who’sgot his PhD from a minor university. By the end of the piece, he comes to represent sound historical thinkingand knowledge, as well as rationality and logic, in contrast to Nandy’s whimsy, romanticism, and lack ofclear thinking. In other words, for a young polemicist attacking an older mandarin, Subrahmanyam begins tosound older and wiser than Nandy: an effect he may or may not have wanted to achieve.

His description of Nandy as an "innocent" — as, in effect, a childlike figure — is intriguing. Itreminds one of how dissenting figures in English cultural history — those who didn’t fit into mainstreamparadigms — were characterized as innocents, naturists, and muddled thinkers; were, in other words,exoticized and, to a certain extent, subalternized. The wide currency of the image of Blake sitting naked inhis garden comes to mind. So does Eliot’s condescension towards Blake as a Swedenborgian autodidact. D.H.Lawrence is another case in point; a sort of shaman-figure in English modernity, derided by Eliot, amongothers, of being "incapable of what is ordinarily known as thinking". That such simplifications wereclass-driven in England seems more or less clear now; one can’t help thinking, reading Eliot on Blake andLawrence, of those writers’ lower-middle-class and working-class origins, their imperfect (in Eliot’seyes) education.

Moreover, Subrahmanyam gives the impression — in the ironical asides, sometimes in scare quotes, aboutNandy being a "celebrated" and "great thinker" — that there is a general consensus about Nandy’siconic status, a status which he now proceeds to dismantle. This construction, though, is fraught withdifficulties. For, though its reputation has grown over the years, Nandy’s work doesn’t fit into any ofthe major social science discourses in this country: not even, despite certain resemblances, into thesubalternist one. He is too unrigorous, too dissonant, to inhabit their contours; he is fated to be a minorityvoice. Is there a place for such a voice in our community of liberal intellectuals?

Part II

Is there a place for a minority voice like Nandy’s in our community of liberalintellectuals — especially since we live in a context in which we’ve been ruled by a right-winggovernment, and may be in danger of being ruled by one in the future; when the forces of reason need to musterwhat energy and vigilance they can against the forces of darkness?

Subrahmanyam is right, after all, to point out (in his letterto the editor more than in his piece) that by rejecting "secularism" for being a Western import, Nandyrisks an "indigenist" rhetoric that might be too close for comfort to the fraudulently patrioticexhortations of the right-wing and of crackpot nativists. The charge that Nandy, as a critic of secularism andmodernity, might be an irresponsible, if unwitting, facilitator of the right wing, is not a new one; nor isthe charge made against Nandy alone. It has been levelled by Marxists against the subalternist historians too,in their capacity as critics of the European enlightenment; and it’s an argument that keeps resurfacing.

There is a question here, then, of what can be said and what can’t, and of the pitfalls of language. Forme, Nandy’s importance lies in his role as a critic of the post-Independence Indian middle class, a role hebegan to fashion for himself about 25 years ago, when there were few others to take a similar burden uponthemselves, except from positions located in larger political articulations like, say, Marxism. But byidentifying modernity too closely with the West, by adding the adjective "Westernized" to "Indian middleclass", he’s left himself open to the criticism of a loose, inadvertent romanticism of the indigenous.

I believe the problem arises from the darkness of our inherited language of self-definition, the tragicomiclanguage of nationalism, full of tricks and pitfalls. Nandy belongs to a generation for whom the "indigenous"was integral to an anti-colonial critique; it’s a term that has transformed itself, subtly, into becomingpart of the ammunition of the Hindu right wing. It’s the paradox of the language of our nationalism; that itcontained within it the seeds both of our secular middle class and its fundamentalist other, our pluralism andour intolerance. Subrahmanyam has inherited this language as well, and falls into one of its traps, lapsesinto its opacity, when, for instance, he authenticates secularism by calling it "Indian". On firstreading, there seems to be no reason to contest this. On second reading, you begin to wonder what he means by"Indian", and in what sense a historian can use the word in this absolute and possessive way. The word atonce gives historical specificity to, and takes it away from, Subrahmanyam’s argument; it raises as manyquestions as it answers. "India" is a nationalist construct, a secular construct, a right-wing one; as anidea and location, it is heterogeneous and conflicted in terms of class, region, and history. Which "India"is Subrahmanyam talking about?

Whether or not there are local forms of pluralism, as Nandy claims there are, it’s increasingly clearthat secularism, as an ongoing creation of our post-Independence middle class, is indispensable to our livesand polity. But it’s also important to have a critic like Nandy around, because every useful ideal, from themoment it comes into being, also becomes a piety, and secularism is no exception: it’s the job of a robust,self-critical intelligentsia to recognize the fact. Why is secularism at once a serious responsibility, acrucial ideal, and, not infrequently, a hollow piety among our middle classes? It’s because our middleclasses, after Independence, did not emphasize the need for transparency and accountability in its own publicand private practices, and the importance of equality as a realizable ideal, as much as it has emphasizedsecularism; it’s when those who speak of secularism are also seen to benefit from, and perpetuate, their ownadvantages as members of an educated elite that it — secularism — begins to sound like a hollow moraldogma.

Our educated elite may, at least in substantial part, be secular, but it is also deeply hierarchical, bothin its internal composition and in relation to those who don’t belong to it. You cannot blame the waning ofsecularism on the fanatic alone — it cannot flourish in a climate that has been so increasingly inimical toegalitarian impulses, a climate in which the "enlightened" classes are so reluctant to acknowledge theirown complicity in pursuing a path of self-promotion and self-interest through nepotism and compromise.

Subrahmanyam says secularism is an Indian invention; but it has an approximate counterpart in Britain’s"multiculturalism". I think "multiculturalism" has worked quite successfully in Britain in the last 20years partly because the old class-structures were weakened, especially in Thatcherite, free-market England.In India, around the same time, a new "secular" ruling class began to form, after the death of IndiraGandhi, around Rajiv Gandhi, in Delhi. This class has on occasion made secularism part of it civilizingmission, its pre-destined, quasi-imperial role in India.

I’m not saying we can do without the values this class claims to represent; I’d rather have my historytextbooks written by Romila Thapar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam than by someone favoured by the politicaldispensation recently thrown out of power. But this class, to survive, to be credible, must be open toself-enquiry; its civilizing mission is not enough to justify it absolutely. We’re in a situation today whenalmost all criticism of this class risks being interpreted as having a right-wing provenance. This isunfortunate, because it imposes a kind of moral censorship upon us that’s comparable to the one that Israelimposes upon the world, where every protest against it becomes a form of anti-Semitism. Our secular middleclass can’t become a kind of metaphorical Israel, defined by a constant sense of beleaguerment and moralrighteousness, ignoring its own forms of oppression and infatuation with power. You cannot preach secularismon the one hand; and be socially discriminatory, exclusivist, and unegalitarian on the other.

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.

The subject of Ray brings me to Subrahmanyam’s conclusion, where he situates Nandy in the "lachrymosetradition of the romantic underside of the so-called Bengal Renaissance". I find this formulation obscure;it’s as if Subrahmanyam, the careful historian, had given in to a subterranean agitatedness. Nandy’srelationship to the Renaissance is anything but conventional or, for that matter, lachrymose; here is a manwhose principal interest in Tagore is his politics and his critique of nationalism, and who has little timefor the affective domain of his poetry and songs. The leap made from here to comparing Nandy to NiradChaudhuri, making him the latter’s successor as our "last colonial thinker", is breathtaking. No twopeople could be more different; one, a Christian, fascinated by local, ecstatic forms of worship, the other,Brahmo-influenced, acutely embarrassed by them; the one resenting and resisting the ways in which he’s beenformed by Empire, the other celebrating it. Explaining away the bewilderingly unexpected ways in which twopeople are shaped by similar historical lineages by using the word "romantic" of one of them is hardlyenough; if anything, these two figures attest to the utter heterogeneity of the legacy of that so-calledRenaissance. The only thing the two have in common is the fact that they’re Bengali.