Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy – A Critique
Over the last 150 years the impact of the West
on eastern societies has been felt through political, cultural
and economical domination. Now the tide has begun to turn. Ashis
Nandy explores the ways in which the East resisted the West even
during the period of British rule in India. he sees how Gandhi
chose to mould opposition to the life – style, values and
psychology of imperialism.
The Intimate Enemy (1983) accounts for two
chronologically distinct types or genres of colonialism. The
first was relatively simple–minded in its focus on the physical
conquest of territories, whereas the second was more insidious
in its commitment to the conquest and occupation of minds,
selves, cultures. If the first bandit – mode of colonialism was
more violent, it was also transparent in its self – interest,
greed and capacity. By contrast, and somewhat more confusingly,
the second was pioneered by rationalists, modernists and
liberals who argued that imperialism was really the messianic
harbinger of civilization to the uncivilized world.
There are two colonialist ideologies on which colonialism stands
: (1) Gender where hyper–masculinity is privileged over
feminine, and (2) Adult, where adult is valorized over child or
old.
The idea of progress was used to justify the colonialism.
Childhood, in the West, was very modern category, almost as a
miniature adult. In the enlightenment period, childhood was
considered not only different from the adulthood but also
inferior to adulthood. Adult hood is the peak whereas the
post–adulthood is the period of decline. India, like old age,
has decaying civilization. Because India is old and decaying and
therefore the British rule is essential in India. The nations,
like Britain and France, are on the point of adulthood, have a
moral duty to look after the developed countries, (have) a
civilizing mission to bring back the civilization to its
original state, which is decaying.
In his bookThe Intimate Enemy Ashis Nandy adapts
Foucault's analysis of power to account for the particularly
deleterious consequences of the colonial encounter.
Nandy's psychological reading of the colonial encounter evokes
Hegel's paradigm of the master – slave relationship. There is an
intellectual choice to choose the oppressed instead of the
oppressor, because the oppressed considers the slave as "human"
whereas the oppressor sees the slave as "thing". The
self-refusing the other is itself "inhuman". The oppressor
cannot see the other as human and it reflects back as
objectified enemy.
The colonial ideology is a double – edged sword. In dehumanizing
the other you equally dehumanize yourself. Frantz Fanon
describes a police officer who, as he tortured the freedom
fighters in Algeria, became violent towards his own wife and
children. It becomes obvious that the officer had to do within
his family what he did to the freedom fighters. Colonialism as a
psychological process cannot but endorse the principle of
isomorphic oppression which restates for the era of the
psychological man the ancient wisdom implied in the New
Testament : 'Do not do unto others what you would that they do
not do unto you, lest you do unto yourself what you do unto
others.'
Fanon's work as Ania Loomba shows in her book Colonialism/
Postcolonialism, directly intervened in the legacy of racist
theories of biological and psychological development. It pushed
to its logical conclusion the view that 'modernization' led to
native madness by suggesting that it was not modernization per
se but colonialism that dislocated and distorted the colonised's
psyche. 'The colonized could not 'cope' with what was happening
because colonialism eroded his very subjectivity.
Aime Cesaire's Disclosure on Colonialism "indicate colonial
brutality in terms that are clearly inflected by Marxist
analysis of capitalism. Marx emphasized that under capitalism
money and commodities begin to stand in for human relations and
for human beings, objectifying them and robbing them of their
human essence. Similarly, Cesaire claims that colonialism not
only exploits but also dehumanizes and objectifies the colonized
subject, as it degrades the colonizer himself. He explains this
by a stark equation: colonization = thingification. (Loomba, p.
22)
Colonialism not only oppresses the colonized – but also degrades
the colonizer. Secular is a suggestion that colonizer is equally
degraded through colonialism. In Cesaire's words : "colonization
works to de-civilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true
'sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to burial
instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral
relativism" (Cesaire, p. 13)
The colonized and the colonizer were ruthlessly kept apart. The
colonizers were alienated not only from the native but also from
themselves. Because of alienation there was a disjuncture
between head and heart, between thinking and feeling. The old
and the healthy practice between thinking and feeling was broken
down and in place of that there is a new interaction between
thinking and feeling which is pathological in nature.
How Indian men and women are measured – Various Indian
responses to the Western ideology:
Hyper–masculinity is a pride code. Colonialism displaces the
"Equality, Fraternity and Justice" trend with the idea of
cultural (West) superiority i.e. the hyper – masculinity. In
Britain the feminine parts such as 'speculation', 'interaction'
and 'caring' are taken away from the public sphere and in place
of that we find 'achievement', 'competition', and 'success'. The
aggressive masculine power takes over in the public sphere. In
India it is brought to the surface about the hyper–masculinity
of Kshatriya in colonial consciousness. In Anglo superiority and
Kshatriya superiority, hyper–masculinity is at the center.
The modern logic to justify the colonialism came from the
adulthood and not from the childhood. It is the logic of
hyper–masculine, the societal norm of the 19th century. This
hyper– masculinity became an ideal or norm through which the
colonized society is found 'lacking". The word "lack" is used
with the context of Phallus, a pronoun by which women define
them. When Britain measures the men of India and finds them
"lacking", they are said to have feminized the men of India. In
the pre–modern Indian society, the binary was manliness –
womanliness, but colonialism and hyper–masculinity supplant this
binary into man–eunuch.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt, in his Meghnadvadh Kavya, shows the
transformation of Ravan's evil into heroic is the colonial
product of hyper–masculinity. Technologies, science and
secularism are the parameters of development. On the slope of
progress, Rama is shown less developed, religious, traditional
and agricultural – based king, whereas Ravana is shown as
developed, secular, and modern.
Dayanand Sarasvati insists upon the valorization of Kshatriya.
The traditional valorization of the Brahmin is given to
Kshatriya because of the colonial ideal of hyper – masculinity.
His idea to reform Hinduism on the basis of the vedic past is
the same way the colonial government thinks of herself.
Dutt, Bankim and Dayananda all work with the idea of progress.
Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar works with the idea of change instead
of the idea of progress. He does not defend an ideal society.
Rather he defends contemporary Hinduism by thinking that the
contemporary has to change through its own resources. He is a
critic of the colonial understanding of Hinduism. He does not
believe in exogenous reform of Hinduism. He rejects this notion
with endogenous criticism.
The critique of hyper – masculinity:
It is collaboration between post–colonialism and feminism, which
presents the possibility of a combined offensive against the
aggressive myth of both imperial and nationalist masculinity.
Fanon's exploration, in Black Skin, White Masks, of the sexual
economy underpinning the colonial encounter in Algeria leads him
to conclude that the colonized black man is the 'real' Other for
the colonizing white man. Several critics and historians have
extended this analysis to the Indian context to argue that
colonial masculinity defined itself with reference to the
alleged effeminacy of Indian men. It is easy to colonize India
because it lacks real men. Hyper–masculinity is the
unquestionable dominance of European men at home and abroad. As
Nandy writes:
Colonialism, too, was congruent with the existing Western
sexual stereotypes and the philosophy of life, which they
represented. It produced a cultural consensus in which
political and socio – economic dominance symbolized the
dominance of men and masculinity over women and femininity
(Nandy 1983, p.4)
The discourse of colonial masculinity was thoroughly
internalized by wide sections of the nationalist movement. Some
nationalists responded by lamenting their own emasculation,
others by protesting it.
Nandy elides the story of Indian nationalism's derivative
masculinity to tell an altogether different story about
dissident androgyny. The Intimate Enemy theorizes the emergence
of protest against the colonial cult of masculinity, both within
the Indian national movement and also on the fringes of 19th
century British society. Nandy's analysis reclaims diverse
figures like Gandhi and Oscar Wilde. Gandhi as Nandy shows us,
repudiated the nationalist appeal to maleness on two fronts –
first, through his systematic critique of male sexuality, and
second, through his self–conscious aspiration for bisexuality or
the desire to become 'God's eunuch'. In other words Gandhi
replaces the colonial ideology (Purushtva > naritva >
klibatva) into two possibilities:
1. Androgyny > masculine or feminine According to Gandhi,
self is bisexual. For him, androgyny is a balance between
masculine and feminine, which is superior to the masculine or
the feminine along. It is a critique of the British valorization
of masculinity.
2. Naritva > purushatva > Kapurusatva Gandhi talks about
the process of becoming an ideal human. For him, the essence of
'naritva' is magical. When a man, at the level of everyday,
overcomes his cowardice by drawing upon his feminine self he
gets the tremendous power of feminine cosmos.
In the West the feminine power is created by sexuality whereas
in India, it is material. Gandhi representing the traditional
Hindu notion that women can be uncontrollably powerful and more
maternal than the conjugal. This celebration of the maternal
principle is equally available even in the West, as evoked by C.
F. Andrews. For Andrews, the 'self' is hyper – masculine and the
'other' is feminized man. Gandhi transforms this 'feminized man'
into an 'ideal man'.
Gandhi's radical self – fashioning gives 'femaleness' an equal
share in the making of anti –colonial subjectivity. So, also by
refusing to partake in the disabling logic of colonial sexual
binaries, he successfully complicates the authoritative
signature of colonial masculinity. From the other side, Wilde
similarly protests the dubious worth of manly British
robustness. As with Gandhi, his critique of conventional sexual
identities and sexual norms threatens what Nandy describes as “a
basic postulate of the colonial attitude in Britain”.
Savyasachi, the hero of Saratchandra's Pather Dabi, as Ashis
Nandy shows us in The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, is equally
accomplished as Kshatriya and as Brahmin. He has internalized
both the East and the West. He has inherited the Western
ideology of hyper– masculinity who believes that the sin of
man-made suffering can only be washed away by the blood of its
rebellious victims. For him, the poison in the heart of the
victimized is the real capital of revolution. He feels the lack
of 'real' men who could fight to set his country free from the
foreign rule. Savyasachi's world view is hyper–masculine. At the
same time his maternal instincts come to the surface in terms of
his passionate love for his motherland that drives him from
country to country like a wild animal, in the same manner of a
mother who would passionately love and care about her child.
These contradictory pulls imbue him with some of the qualities
of Saratchandra's other heroes, who are always conspicuously
androgynous. It is as if Savyasachi was hiding this other
bipolarity – his ability to be almost maternal in some
situations, defying his own overly masculine concept of the
ideal male.
There are countless other examples – Edward Carpenter, Lynon
Strachey and Virginina Woolf – as Nandy writes, 'living protests
against the world view associate with colonialism' (Nandy p.
43). Much like Wilde and Gandhi, Woolf's denunciation of
aggressive masculinity, in her Three Guineas, supplies the basis
of a shared critique of chauvinist national and colonial
culture.
References:
- Nandy Ashis, The Intimate Enemy, New Delhi: OUP, 1983. Print.
- ______. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, New Delhi: OUP, 1994. Print.
- Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 2005, Print.
- Gandhi, Leela, Postcolonial Theory, New York: Columbia UP, 1998, Print.