Ashis Nandy and Gurcharan Das discuss the Mahabharata (in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3; total ~25 mins). Via Shunya’s Notes
Tag Archive for 'Ashis Nandy'
An open letter to the unlikely woman whose tenacity in staying the course has changed the contours of Indian politics. Tarun J Tejpal in Tehelka:
Dear Mrs Sonia Gandhi,
We all know the cliché that India moves on faith. We love our gods, and it is at their feet that we place all our successes and failures. It is in this department that those who oppose you – and perhaps even some of those who support you – will assert that you have an unfair advantage. Through marriage and masquerade you have acquired all the gods Indian politicians have, while also possessing one you brought along from your faraway home all those aeons ago.
Since we do not oppose you, we are happy that you have an extra god. As you know, India has so many gods only because it has so many problems. (Yes, there are men on the far left and far right who think god is the problem, to be banished or to be rescued – but let these men not detain us, since they’ve failed to detain the electorate.) So we are glad that you have an extra god. One more is always handy. Our gods are playful, multi-faced, philosophical. Often their moralities are slippery to grasp, sheathed as they are in the complexities of karma and dharma, moksha and maya. The one you bring along, the extra one, is more cut and dried. Quite clear about right and wrong, good and bad, sin and virtue, charity and compassion. We – who do not oppose you – welcome that. Amid the material excesses born of our religious abstractions, a little bit of clarity is not a bad thing. More
Also from the latest issue of Tehelka whose focus is the recent elections in India.
The hour of the untamed cosmopolitan
Bred on radical diversity and an epic culture, the voter makes a reckoning of Narendra Modi, Prakash Karat, Mayawati and the politics of excess. By Ashis Nandy, social scientist
After almost two decades, in many ways, the election of 2009 was a normal election. No overriding consideration drove the voting across the country. Diverse configurations in diverse places determined the fate of different candidates and parties. Different regions had different logic even within a given state. Still, underlying the diversity there were some common themes.
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First, I think people were looking for ways to lower the temperature of politics. High-pitched politics has reigned in our polity for nearly 15 years now. My suspicion is people were a bit tired of this. For example, the past two elections showed that in Uttar Pradesh, only one percent of the electorate was interested in Ram Janmabhoomi. The BJP probably played down the issue this year because their internal assessment showed the same thing. Except in West Bengal, nowhere did the election involve an emotional arousal of the kind we have come to routinely expect.
There are reasons for this. In our society, we live with radical diversities – diversity that is not based on tamed forms of difference. The US is a perfect example of tamed diversity. You get every kind of food and dress and cultural activity in America. You think you are very cosmopolitan if you can distinguish Huaiyang food from Schezwan food, or South Korean ballet from Beijing opera, or Ming dynasty china from Han dynasty china in a museum. This is diversity that is permissible, legitimate, tamed. More:
The vanquished in the rear-view mirror
For the BJP to survive as a national party and for it to remain politically relevant, it will need new leaders. By Swapan Dasgupta, political commentator
Among the more fascinating features of an Indian election is the fact that the writing on the wall isn’t apparent till after the event. This was as true in 1971 and 1984 as it was last week when the electronic voting machines revealed a clear mandate in favour of the Congress-led UPA. If the BJP didn’t expect to be mauled in two successive elections, the Congress never imagined the electorate would give it a firm thumbs up after five years of indifferent governance. But while the winner can afford the luxury of post-facto smugness, the loser suffers grievously from the hangover of miscalculated triumphalism.
It is natural for the defeated to get into a tizzy over what went wrong. It is also customary for the vanquished to focus less on what the other side did right and more on what it did wrong. Wisdom in hindsight, convulsions and recriminations are the inevitable consequence of political defeat. It happens in all democracies. More:
Can India Inc’s emphatic approval of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi extend to the political realm? Saba Naqvi in Outook.
Some captains of Indian industry recently let the nation know (on the eve of a general election) that in Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi they have spotted a leader of great ability, a man who should be the next prime minister. This is not the first time industrialists have sung paeans to Modi. It’s almost an annual ritual in Modi’s Gujarat. Every January, NRIs and industrialists collect for the Vibrant Gujarat meet and speak of the genius of the Man.
Indeed, the projection of Modi as a national icon is part of an ongoing political project, supported strongly by business that seeks to eventually instal him at the pivot of Indian politics. The transformation of the pracharak to a man who casually strides with the captains of industry is in itself a story. At the superficial level, it is about sartorial change. But it’s also about his mastery of media and image projection. From a hated figure, he has managed to clothe himself in positive hues.
Also in Outlook, R.K. Misra looks at Modi’s style of governance. Click here for that story.
The Prospect/Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s top 100 “public intellectuals” — “the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time” — has nine from this part of the world.
The criteria to make the list, says FP, could not be more simple: Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.
India:
1: Historian Ramachandra Guha
2: Political psychologist Ashis Nandy
3: Environmentalist Sunita Narain
4: Economist-Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen
5: Journalist author Fareed Zakaria
6: Novelist Salman Rushdie
7: San Diego-based neuroscientist VS Ramachandran
Pakistan: Lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan
Bangladesh: Microfinance guru Mohammed Yunus
China has four.
Click here for the full list, to vote your selection or to add a candidate.
In the Washington Post, Rama Lakshmi on an ambitious 10-year project that seeks to chronicle the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan
Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.
At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh’s family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.
“None of the women protested, nobody wept,” Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. “All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book.”
On Gandhi’s death anniversary today: Rev Jesse Jackson visits India and there is quite a bit of introspection on the legacy of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his relevance to the world today.
First, historian and author (India After Gandhi) Ramachandra Guha argues in the Hindustan Times that Gandhi cannot be understood without the context of his faith and religious belief but it was a faith that was of vital assistance in promoting peace and harmony between people who worship different Gods, or no God at all:
Many years ago, I had an argument with the philosopher Ramchandra (Ramu) Gandhi about his grandfather’s faith. I had always admired the Mahatma, but my secular-socialist self sought to rid him of the spiritual baggage which seemed unnecessary to his broader message. Could we not follow Gandhi in his empathy for the poor and his insistence on non-violence while rejecting the religious idiom in which these ideas were cloaked? Ramu Gandhi argued that the attempt to secularise Gandhi was both mistaken and misleading. If you take the Mahatma’s faith out of him, he told me, then Gandhi would not be the Mahatma. His religious beliefs were central to his political and social philosophy – in this respect, the man was the message.
In the Times of India, political psychologist Ashis Nandy analyses the ‘fear of Gandhi’ and the middle-class antipathy towards him that has only become stronger in the global knowledge industry:
On the 60th year of the murder of Mohandas Gandhi, we must recognise the ambivalence towards him in India’s modernising middle classes. Gandhi was not killed by British imperialism or Muslim fanatics, but by middle-class Hindu nationalists committed to conventional concepts of statecraft, progress and diplomacy. He was not killed by a lunatic, as Nehru alleged, but by one who represented ‘normality’ and ’sanity’.
The middle-class antipathy to Gandhi cuts across ideologies. During one of her earlier tenures, Mayawati precipitated a first-class public controversy by attacking Gandhi. But she was only joining a long line of distinguished critics of Gandhi, stretching from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the classical liberal turned Muslim nationalist, to Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. New, aggressive critics of Gandhi are now being thrown up by the knights of globalisation in India.
And, finally, political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express argues that Gandhi achieved more in death than in his life, which in the 1940s had become marginal to the new forms of Indian politics:
Gandhi’s gloriously original and inventive life continues to be extraordinarily fascinating. But his assassination remains shrouded in embarrassed silence. At the Indira Gandhi memorial, visitors are subjected to the details of her assassination. Gandhi, on the other hand is memorialised, but not primarily through Birla House, a monument that still does not have its rightful place in the historical itineraries of Delhi. There is a simple story we have told about the assassination: Gandhi was killed by a fanatic representing the fringes of society, and that is that. But for a life whose every gesture was overloaded with meaning, the interpretive silence over Gandhi’s assassination itself begs for interpretation. Was it the enormity of that crime that silences us? Or was it its marginality? Were the perpetrators distant from us? Or was there a wider complicity, if not with the assassination itself, with the sentiments that fuelled it? The question, ‘Why was Gandhi killed’, is an easy one to answer only if we deliberately shut ourselves to the complex political realities of the time.
