We sat under a spreading old elm tree on the property of the Monastery of the Reclining Buddha called Wofo Monastery, watching the dusk gather around us. The night began with the rising choruses of crickets and frogs deep in the woods of the Western Hills. Nestled in the primordial mountains on the outskirts of Beijing, the monastery became spectral all of a sudden, transporting the mind into the depths of time.
In the cool of early summer twilight, Ashis Nandy was seated across the long picnic table from Chinese writer and critic Li Tuo. I looked around and saw my friend Sharmistha Mohanty sitting down at one end of the table, and at the other end were novelist Allan Sealy sketching in his notebook as usual, artist Kabir Mohanty, musician Bahauddin Dagar, and a few others. Before long, poets Ouyang Jianghe, Zhai Yongming, Xi Chuan, and the Indian poets—the participants in the Beijing dialogue in May 2010—approached and joined us at the picnic table, each holding a drink or smoking a cigarette. Time was ripe for a spontaneous evening conversation to share a lingering thought on the dialogue we had started in the morning. With some trepidation, the conversation began...
Our encounters
I had missed the first India-China Writers’ Dialogues (ICWD) in New Delhi due to a scheduling conflict and joined the second round in Beijing where I met Nandy for the first time. The monastery, the site of our meeting, stood next to a large botanical garden that quickly became Allan Sealy’s favorite haunt. The Chinese writers had picked the hotel on the property of Wofo Monastery as a symbolic site to resume—or more precisely, to restart—the cultural contacts that had brought India and China together through Buddhism and millennia of Indian Ocean trade until our understanding of each other was forcibly disrupted or distorted by colonialism, war, and nationalism. The symbolism of the location was fully intended, but it was not so much about nostalgia as it was about our capacity to reflect and mourn. On this point, the Indian and Chinese writers understood each other perfectly and did not need words to explain.
Nor do we harbor the illusion at any point that communication would come easy. Language barriers are one of the difficulties we struggle with on an ongoing basis. Far more serious and less visible are the barriers that have emerged out of our shared but different histories of colonial encounter with the West. [1] Ashis Nandy was speaking for most of us when he stated at the outset of the inaugural ICWD meeting: “colonialism has now created a situation where we have to talk to each other through centres of knowledge which are located five thousand miles away. And that is something which is tragic too. And our meeting carries a touch of that tragedy.” [2] Nandy has put his finger on a sad but real situation. The good news is that the tragedy has not stopped us from listening to each other and exploring what might open up and become possible again. In this regard, the Wofo monastery—as well as Mumbai, the Ellora and Ajanta caves, all the other places that the Chinese writers visited on our trip to India in 2011 and Kochi that some of us visited in 2016—may well play a role in relocating the centers of knowledge and teach us something new about time, history, and what Nandy calls the “living past.”
The great poet Bei Dao and novelist Sharmistha Mohanty—who is the heart and soul of the India-China Writers’ Dialogues—had kicked off the inaugural meeting in New Delhi in December 2009. Our plan was to reconvene in Beijing and Shanghai, a meeting that Bei Dao himself missed due to unresolved visa difficulty, and then take the third dialogue to Mumbai and Maharashtra which we did. [3] As a participant and one of the organizers of the second dialogue, it seemed like a miracle to me that a small unofficial group of writers and artists from India and China managed to engage each other face to face like this, attempting to unlearn what we had learned about each other in the mirror of the West.
I sometimes think of the India-China Writers’ Dialogues in terms of a thought experiment, a kind of poiesis in the true sense of the word. The main challenge in this experiment is how we might think outside the box. These conversations test the limits of our intellectual openness and willingness to break down boundaries, distinctions and hierarchies, and in particular our cherished certainties about self and other. This last point is extremely important since we all bring our preconceived ideas to the meetings and are in fact defined by the boundaries we wish to overcome— metaphysical, institutional, and other—such as the boundaries of state, academia, and international relations.
To maintain our independence from state or government sponsorship, the ICWD activities are self funded and organized outside of academic intellectual frameworks. More important, this collective tries to stay away from the brouhaha of a media driven discourse of Chindia in global capitalism that we profoundly distrust. The idea of a modernizing India or China beating the West at its own game—developmentalism—is the ultimate homage a Third-World country can pay to the West. And worst of all, the implied sense of cultural and economic inferiority in the game of catching up goes hand in glove with the logic of global expansion of the capitalist market.
Now consider the obverse; namely, the nationalist opposition to the West. Does this provide an alternative? The answer is no, because such antithesis—whether in the form of state-sponsored Confucianism in China, Hindu nationalism in India, religious fundamentalism or some other guise—means that we remain beholden negatively to the mirror of the West and cannot break free of their hold on what the future might look like for the people of Third-World countries. Many years ago, Nandy offered a perspicacious diagnosis of this psycho-existential condition in one of his best-known works The Intimate Enemy, showing that “the pressure to be the obverse of the West distorts the traditional priorities in the Indian’s total view of man and universe and destroys his culture’s unique gestalt. It in fact binds him even more irrevocably to the West.”[4] The bad news is that things have gotten worse in the contemporary world. Not only does the above noted psycho-existential condition remain with most postcolonial nations but its pressures are felt everywhere around the globe, including in post-socialist China.
How do we work our way out of the conundrum? Must we bind ourselves to the logic of antithesis, the drive to compete, and to despair and self-destruction? What would it take to decolonize the soul? Why have we—Third-World intellectuals—failed so miserably in that task? Nandy’s many published writings attempt to address these questions, although, as I have come to realize, the clarity of his analyses had not hit home with me until we both became involved with the India-China Writers Dialogues.
Analyzing the pathology of modernity
Nandy is one of the most original and formidable thinkers of our times. And I might add that he is probably the most melancholic intellectual to emerge in the Global South. I could be wrong, but I think there is a touch of poetic melancholy in many of his works and that sensibility seems to underlie his enduring attention to the victimized, the defeated, the weak and the silenced. For some time, I have been trying to think of writers or public intellectuals in contemporary China who are similarly— temperamentally and intellectually—disposed to poetic melancholy in their relation to the modern world and their aversion to dogma and arrogant knowledge claims. It’s not easy to find an exact match but two names come to my mind: Han Shaogong and Zhang Chengzhi. [5] Luckily, Han joined the third round of the dialogues when we met again in Mumbai about one year after the Beijing encounter and became a core member of ICWD. I will have more to say about the nature of their shared melancholy which, I believe, springs from very different sources and personal experience. With Nandy, it is mainly a response to the postcolonial state of India whereas with Han Shaogong and Zhang Chengzhi, they reflect mostly on the situation of revolutionary and post- revolutionary China.
As a public intellectual, Nandy remains in close touch with the living pulses of contemporary Indian society but, whenever he engages with urgent political or social issues in his writing, he always takes care to wrestle existential, ethical or philosophical questions from them, be it the investigation of the wounded self, the self-hatred of the postcolonial middle class, sources of creativity, competing moral universals, or popular storytelling. He insists on a distinction between the remembered past and the objective histories produced by professional historians and is deeply invested in the former. The remembered past is one of the places that remain ethically open toward the future and in that sense “the past remains unconquered.”[6]
When one reviews his extremely rich and wide ranging works, as I did for the purpose of writing my tribute to his intellectual achievements, one may identify a few core concerns that run throughout Nandy’s thinking and methods. These are, first, his incisive analysis of the pathology of modernity; second, his reframing of self-other relationship as a set of multiplicity and, third, his elaboration of critical traditionalism as method that is distinct from critical modernism. Although I hesitate to reduce his lifelong work to a few central themes, it’s necessary to highlight some of them in order to arrive at what I want to say about his unique contributions to modern political thought.
Nandy’s analysis of the pathology of modernity begins with an effort to understand the sources of human suffering, violence, and social conflict in today’s world. One may follow this thread, for example, from his earlier studies of sati in British India through his recent analyses of religious strife in secular politics, terrorism, mass violence, and popular culture. Unlike the Subaltern Studies collective with whom he shares a range of concerns, Nandy is not interested in developing a coherent or systematic approach to the study of history or its problems; as a matter of fact, he rejects the social scientific method altogether and approaches social and political problems as symptoms of the pathology of modernity. His unapologetic decision to prioritize human emotions, dreams, memory, ideology and the return of the repressed may alienate many social scientists who value facts, rigor and hard evidence. There is an unspoken disciplinary hierarchy in academia that regulates the relative importance of one’s subjects of study or methods, but Nandy brushes it all aside and pursues his unorthodox but extremely fresh and interesting line of critique. Commenting on his own deviance from professional historians and social scientists, he writes in the usual parodic tone: “modern colonialism is too serious a matter to be left entirely to the latter.” [7]
For me, it has been exhilarating to read Nandy—on religion, secularism, terrorist hijacking, and so on—not because he is the ultimate dissenter but because he is not afraid to take risks with ideas. Whenever he does so, he is capable of delivering brilliant, often counterintuitive analyses of India society and the contemporary world. But what is the ground from which Nandy stages his well-known critiques of the modern state, institutions of rationality, centers of knowledge or the modern West? It is not something that could be reified as tradition, nor even the plurality of India’s cultural traditions, but rather an intellectual stance that he calls “critical traditionalism” which, by the way, could easily be misconstrued. What does Nandy mean by this? How are we supposed to distinguish critical traditionalism from mere traditionalism? I will return to these questions shortly.
The second distinguishing feature of Nandy’s work that I find particularly worthy of note is what he had done with the relation of self and other. The notion of a self that does not cease to struggle with the other sounds commonsensical or Hegelian enough, but for Nandy it is more Freudian than Hegelian—not very surprising for an analyst who trained in psychology and knows his psychoanalysis well—and it is a self troubled by neurosis and haunted by the past. What centrally engages Nandy’s attention, however, is not any universal human subject but often a self situated in the Southern hemisphere, whether individual or collective, who exhibits a number of unique psychological traits. The psychic condition of this conflicted self—especially when it is male and Westernized—is exacerbated or made particularly painful by the losses he and his people have suffered and must endure as a consequence of colonial conquest or postcolonial ethnic conflict. Nandy’s research on the lives of many talented intellectuals, scientists, and artists, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Srinivasa Ramanujan, J.C. Bose, and Satyajit Ray throws fascinating light on their fraught psychic relationship to the West and their equally fraught relationship to India’s past.[8]
Whereas these biographical studies portray the complex and ambivalent world of India’s Westernized intellectuals, Nandy reserves his sharpest barb for the middle class elite in the Global South. He observes in Time Warps that the defeated civilizations of our times, i.e., most postcolonial societies, turn Western Man into a norm and cannot seem to reason outside of his invisible reference point. Of course, that reference point is a fabrication by postcolonial societies, having little to do with Western Man in reality or in history, which immediately raises an issue: Does Western Man—his double—exist in reality, and whose reality is it? That’s precisely the point: Western Man is no more than an invisible reference point for postcolonial societies.
Taking religion and politics as a test case, Nandy describes two contrasting responses whereby the postcolonial subject relates himself— often gendered male—to the dominant image of Western Man. The first response is to model himself on the image where “something more than mimicry or imitation is involved. The response consists in a desperate attempt to capture, within one’s own self and culture, traits seen as the reason for the West’s success on the world stage.” Nandy goes on to argue: “The second response to Western Man is that of the zealot. The zealot’s one goal is somehow defeat Western Man at his own game, the way Japan, for instance, has done in economic affairs.” To the rank of developmentalist zealots, I might also add the middle class elite of South Korea, China and other countries. It is truly astonishing that the number of people who have joined the ranks of zealots—developmentalist or religious—has grown exponentially in the Global South over the past three decades. This will confirm Nandy’s observation; namely, people mistakenly accuse zealotry and religious fundamentalism of retrogression into primitivism or pathology of traditions whereas these are actually “by- products of modernity and their pathological responses to it.”[9] His detailed analysis of secularism—which is not one thing but many different things—offers some of the most penetrating insights on religion and politics in today’s literature on the subject. For him, the vital question is not how to compete or fight with the West, but when postcolonial societies can break their habit of making pathological or violent responses to it, that is, the habit of never ceasing to look into the mirror of the West. Are there success stories elsewhere that exist outside the fatal mirror? Nandy’s answer would be yes. To give an example, he takes us on a personal journey into the living past of Kochi (Cochin) in the essay “Time Travel to a Possible Self” to search for an alternative to the pathology of modernity. As one of the few cities “where pre-colonial traditions of cultural pluralism refuse to die,” Kochi is for Nandy and perhaps for others, too “the ultimate symbol of cultural diversity and religious and ethnic tolerance.”[10] He calls it “alternative cosmopolitanism” in order to distinguish it from the European Enlightenment notion of cosmopolitanism. My quibble with this usage is that “alternative cosmopolitanism” does not go far enough toward conceptual innovation and, whether intended or not, it implies too much accountability or reciprocity with the Kantian discourse of universal history. I would suggest a slightly different reading of Nandy than the author himself and believe that his work raises a more interesting question than can be captured by “alternative cosmopolitanism”; namely, can the rest of the world be made to hold the mirror of Kochi and see themselves in it? It seems to me that one must leave Immanuel Kant behind if Kochi is to stand on its own as a source of universal ethical aspiration. But I immediately ask myself: what would it take for Kochi to stand on its own? In December 2016, I had the good fortune of visiting Fort Kochi myself to take part in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. While there, my friend Kabir Mohanty, a core member of ICWD who had his art installation on exhibit, urged me to read “Time Travel to a Possible Self” which I promptly did. While there, I visited some of the places Nandy discusses in his study and was deeply impressed by the millennia-long coexistence of Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Hindu communities along with many of the other ethnicities who migrated from Southeast Asia, China, Africa, West Asia and Europe. I told Kabir that I had brought with me a book called Yingya shenglan written by Ma Huan, a Chinese Muslim who accompanied Admiral Zheng He on several of his seven oceanic expeditions in 1405- 1433. Ma Huan made his first voyage to Kochi in 1413 and transcribed its name with two Chinese characters as the Kingdom of 柯枝 Kezhi. [11] Interestingly, Ma Huan’s account bears an outsider’s witness to the international trading town where apparently Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and others coexisted in diverse community. Equally fascinating to me are some of his detailed observations on the caste system as well as the social and religious hierarchy he noticed in Kochi in around 1413-1421. There is no mention, however, of the existence of the Jewish community in his memoir and, furthermore, Ma Huan seems to have confused Hindus with Buddhists in Kochi as well as in some of the other kingdoms he visited along the Malabar coast. Does his confusion say something about the limitation of his observations or the non-distinct boundaries of the communities he records, or both?
If the latter or both were a plausible explanation, Ma Huan’s pre- colonial written source—before the arrival of the Portuguese—could serve as supporting evidence for Nandy’s reading of Kochi. That reading stands as a powerful rebuke of the secular model of government in modern India which cannot but construct distinct or mutually exclusive ethnic, religious, and social categories. In contrast, the ecumenical traditions exemplified by Kochi suggest a different conception of identities whose boundaries are fluid and malleable. Nandy calls this formulation of the self elsewhere the “multiplicity of self” which is an incredibly important idea, one that in my view has the potential of re-grounding modern political theory.
In his essay “Coping with the Politics of Faith and Cultures,” Nandy elaborates on the notion of “multiplicity of self” thus:
The subcontinent—or at least the major traditions in it—has never conceptualized the self in culturally “pure” terms. It has seen the self as essentially plural, necessarily located in more than one culture. South Asians have tended to define others not only as a set of distinct not-selves threatening the self but as parts of a hierarchised and prioritised self. It can even be argued that the social and cultural landscape of homo hiarchicus is basically a projection of this hierarchised self, and the harsher aspects of the landscape were sometimes mitigated by this plural concept of the self. “Self” in India is not only a process, as McKim Mariott and his followers insist; it is also a configuration of self and aspects or “attenuated” forms of not-selves or others. The other is not only another who defines the self by being a not-self; the other is simultaneously the definer of the self by being a part of the self. [12]
This conception of self and other appears to refute the logic of negativity and is based on an argument of multiplicity that itself derives from the worldview of classical civilizations. Can the argument be substantiated by historical evidence? I leave the answer to South Asian historians.[13] As far as political theory is concerned, the question of evidence may be less relevant than the ethical imperative of Nandy’s argument. It seems to me that, as ethical imperative, the notion of “multiplicity of self” is a great deal more robust and innovative than the idea of “alternative cosmopolitanism.” I take the former to be Nandy’s important contribution to modern political thought and to the discussion of some of the most urgent issues that trouble the contemporary world.
If one must name a single concern that runs through Nandy’s theoretical work, I would say that it is his preoccupation with the pathology of modernity. As I mentioned earlier, the ground on which he stages his critique of the modern state, or institutions of rationality, or centers of knowledge is not something that can be reified as tradition, nor even the plurality of India’s many traditions, but is an intellectual stance he has carved out for himself called critical traditionalism. It is on this ground that Nandy takes off on many of his time travels to the past—a living past that speaks in and through the present.
Which brings me to the third main feature of Nandy’s work that I want to highlight in my essay, namely, the methodological distinction he maintains between his own critique of modernity on the one hand and the familiar critiques we find in Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Freud, and the Frankfurt School of critical theorists on the other. This is not to say that Nandy is any less indebted to the critical thinkers of the West and, of course, he is. He reads them, reflects upon them, and reevaluates them but finds them inadequate in how their critiques remain bound up with the idea of progress, Eurocentrism, or rationality, such as in Karl Marx. For Nandy, the critical theorists are internal critics—internal to Europe and the West—and dissenting children of the Enlightenment, and they should, therefore, be relegated to the rank of critical modernism.[14] His own critical traditionalism, on the other hand, represents a theoretical voice arising from the Global South that not only analyzes the pathologies of modernity but responds simultaneously to the internal critics of modernity in the West. Nandy writes:
Today, the battle of minds rarely involves a choice between modernity and traditions in their pure forms. The ravages of modernity are known and, since the past cannot be resurrected but only owned up, pure traditions, too, are a choice not given to us. Even if such a choice were given, I doubt if going back 2500 years into the past is any better than going 5000 miles to the West for ideas, especially in a post-Einsteinian world in which space and time are inter-translatable variables. Ultimately, the choice is between critical modernism and critical traditionalism. It is a choice between two frames of reference and two world-views.[15]
For those of us who share Nandy’s educational background—having read or taught the critical theorists of the West—and are similarly engaged with the project of decolonizing the soul in the Global South, we cannot pretend that the choice he presents in the quote is not real. The fact that many critical theorists and radical philosophers of the West, past and present, neglect to take modern thinkers from the Global South seriously as thinkers—who are predominantly read as native informants—says something about their arrogance, lack of curiosity, and unavoidable collusion with the colonial past. The line that Nandy draws between the internal and external critics of modernity as two frames of reference and two worldviews makes sense in that regard. But critical modernism is only one piece of the methodological puzzle, and there is also the fraught issue of traditionalism. How does Nandy distinguish his critical traditionalism from traditionalism?
It is interesting that he evokes the life of Mahatma Gandhi as one of the ways to make that distinction. Gandhi strove to embody the traditions of rural India, but he never eulogized the Indian village or advocated a return to the past. Nandy makes it clear that Gandhi’s intellectual resources come both from within and from the outside, which presents a sharp contrast to traditionalists such as Ananda Coomaraswamy who seems to reify the traditions and are defensive on their behalf. He goes on to point out:
Unlike Coomaraswamy, Gandhi did not want to defend traditions; he lived with them. Nor did he, like Nehru, want to museumize cultures within a modern frame. Gandhi’s frame was traditional, but he was willing to criticize some traditions violently. He was even willing to include in his frame elements of modernity as critical vectors. He found no dissonance between his rejection of modern technology and his advocacy of the bicycle, the lathe and the sewing machine. Gandhi defied the modern world by opting for an alternative frame; the specifics in his frame were frequently modern. (Ibid.)
In this account, Gandhi embodies the very tension of modernity by critically negotiating with the traditions. His life and politics always straddle the two—self and other, tradition and modernity, etc.—and are thoroughly ambivalent in that sense. If Gandhi prefigures the critical traditionalist for Nandy, the latter sees himself as carrying on the same struggle by being engaged in a two-pronged battle of his own. That is, his quarrels with the traditionalist—in particular, the cultural nationalist—in India and across the Global South on the one hand and with the critical modernist in the West on the other. We must view his methodological innovation and understand his work in light of this two-pronged battle.
Ashis Nandy’s poetics of the defeated
If a theorist is so bold as to challenge our textbook definition of colonialism by stating that “colonialism is first of all a matter of consciousness and needs to be defeated ultimately in the minds of men...liberation ultimately had to begin from the colonized and end with the colonizers,” we ought to spend a good deal of time reading him and figure out why. [16] This is only one of the reasons we must read Nandy and thinkers like him from the Global South. Call them critical traditionalists or not, these scholars have made great efforts to stay in touch with the living past of their ancient civilizations.[17] In their works, we will discover a treasure trove of competing universals or new ideas concerning identity, moral wellbeing, sources of social conflict, war and peace that speak directly to the contemporary world.
In a strange way, Nandy, one of the most outspoken public figures, is also the most melancholy intellectual from the Global South. I made this point briefly at the outset and would like to follow up on it in my concluding remarks. For no other thinker has placed so much emphasis on the sharp, painful experience of loss that all uprooted people— migrants, those cut off from their traditions, the defeated and victims of history—endure and share. Other social critics may have condemned the rich and the powerful, analyzed structures of social domination and oppression, or embraced the cause of the defeated. Whatever the sources of their critique, the majority of critics start from a position of moral certitude that is averse to the kind of poetic melancholy we find in Nandy. This is especially true of social scientists in the Global South who, according to Nandy, have lost the ability to mourn or relate to the past other than by way of denial. That denial—whether conscious or unconscious— inhibits the intellectual life of the Global South and its creative potential more than does it elsewhere.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the India-China Writers Dialogues, Nandy went further with his critique and explained why literature and art must centrally engage our attention to help combat that denial. His words struck a powerful chord with his Chinese interlocuters. He stated:
We have forgotten the language of mourning. Our literature, our art, they do reflect this mourning of what we have lost. But that is by default. Because, while negotiating modernity, both these civilisations have learnt to shed the language of mourning. They have learnt the language of accountancy, the gains and losses from different sectors of modernity as it enters different sectors of our lives. So we are supposed to celebrate only what we have gained from modernity. And not lament the fact that there are crucial elements of ourselves which we have to jettison or reject or discard in accepting modernity. This rejection of the language of mourning is most pronounced in our social knowledge.[18]
Turning his back on the language of gains and losses, Nandy looks to writers and artists for inspiration and the possibility of releasing the creative energies of large sections of marginalized people. Interestingly, a similar decision was taken by Chinese-Muslim writer Zhang Chengzhi who walked away from his profession as a historian and devoted many years of his life to the study and preservation of the living past of the Hui minority group in northwest China. If Nandy is primarily concerned with the postcolonial condition, Zhang’s career as a writer is driven by the need to reckon with his generation’s ambivalences toward the Chinese revolution. Looking back, Zhang writes: “It is no longer about my regret for the revolution, but a confrontation with the powerful order of things, isn’t it? To make a judgment about marginalization, one must stand amongst the marginalized.”[19]
To stand amongst the marginalized, that was the original aspiration of Chinese revolutionaries in the 20th century, wasn’t it? In our youth, writer Li Tuo, Bei Dao, Zhang Chengzhi, Han Shaogong, and I myself each stood amongst the marginalized by joining the ranks of manufacturing workers (Li Tuo and Bei Dao) or by leaving the city to become farmers (Han Shaogong, Zhang Chengzhi, and myself) in the remotest corners of the country for many years. We went all the way to the bottom of society to reeducate ourselves, but today we find ourselves living amongst the ruins of that revolution. To reckon with the ruins and reflect on our past, Han Shaogong wrote his Geming houji (Postscript to the Revolution), Bei Dao wrote his Open up, City Gate, and Zhang Chengzhi his Xinling shi (History of the Soul).[20] But no matter which way we turn, we cannot escape an overwhelming sense of defeat. This is not a sentiment we could easily share with the left-leaning intellectuals in the West or, in Nandy’s words, those critical modernists. The reason is very simple: the majority of left-wing intellectuals in the West have experienced neither the success of a great revolution nor its failure the way we did and, at the same time, their theoretical sophistication in Marxism leaves little room for melancholy.
Li Tuo, who was Nandy’s interlocutor at ICWD on many occasions, has related an old story about Confucius (BCE 552-479) which goes that the Master traveled from state to state—across many warring states before the unification in BCE 221—offering advice to the heads of states and attempting to counsel them, but everywhere he went, Confucius’s ideas were met with indifference and rejection. With his noble aspirations getting nowhere, Confucius gained the reputation of a homeless dog. The astonishing thing is that not only did the Master not mind being called homeless dog but he found the epithet to be a suitable description of his plight.[21] I suspect that the story tells us something remarkable about the defeat and survival of rootless intellectuals, and such a story is the opposite of what you get from the official discourse of Confucianism in China.
Like Confucius, all rootless intellectuals are, in a sense, homeless dogs. This story lives on in our midst, like a gift to the present. As we share more of each other’s stories, the Chinese and Indian writers are essentially building a transnational literary alliance based on our melancholy knowledge of the living pasts. That our friendship can grow and form a lasting bond is owing to the fact that, in Nandy’s words, “India and China are both in some fundamental sense societies which negotiate the past and the future similarly despite all differences. This similarity lies in the fact that in both countries the past is as open as the future.” [22]
______________________ [1] The names of the interpreters who contributed to the three rounds of ICWD in 2009-2011 are Shen Shuang, Zhong Yurou, and Wang Yan.
[2] Ashis Nandy, “Open Pasts, Open Futures”, Almost Island, No.4, Summer 2009:2.
[3] Our group rally around two avant-garde literary journals: Almost Island and Today (Jintian). Almost Island is an online journal, founded and edited by Sharmistha Mohanty along with poet Vivek Narayanan. On the Chinese side, Bei Dao is the chief editor of Today (Jintian) with Li Tuo, Zhai Yongming, Ouyang Jianghe, and myself being on the editorial board. Banned from the PRC since 1980, Today has been issued in Hong Kong and elsewhere for several decades.
[4] Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.73.
[5] Han Shaogong is the author of the Dictionary of Maqiao and many other works of fiction and non-fiction that are not yet available in English. Zhang Chengzhi, a renowned Chinese Muslim writer, authored an important work titled History of the Soul among his many other work that which have not been translated into English.
[6] The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p.x.
[7] Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, p. xviii.
[8] See Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1995) and An Ambiguous Journey To the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (OUP, 2001).
[9] Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (New Brunswick, NY, Rutgers University Press, 2002), p.78.
[10] Time Warps, p.157 andp.158.
[11] See Ma Huan, Yingya shenglan, (1433). For English translation, see The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores trans. J. V. G. Mills&ed. Feng Ch’eng-chün, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
[12] Ashis Nandy, “Coping with the Politics of Faith and Cultures,” in Time Warps, p.127.
[13] But I am aware that Nandy is a harsh critic of professional history. See his arguments in “History's Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory, 34.2 (May, 1995): 44-66.
[14] See Nandy, “Modernity and the Sense of Loss, or Why Bhansali’s Devdas Defied Experts to Become a Box Office Hit” in Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.158-174.
[15] Nandy, “Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo,” Alternatives, XI1 (1987):116.
[16] Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, p.63.
[17] I have in mind people like the renowned anarchist Liu Shipei in the first quarter of the twentieth century. See Joachim Kurtz, “Disciplining the National Essence: Liu Shipei and the Reinvention of Ancient China's Intellectual History” in Benjamin Ellman and Jing Tsu, (eds.), Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s-1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2014). pp. 67–92.
[18] Ashis Nandy, “Open Pasts, Open Futures”, Almost Island, No.4, Summer 2009:2.
[19] Zhang Chengzhi, “Preface”, Xinling shi (History of the Soul), (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 1991).
[20] I should also include my experimental novel in Chinese Liuge zimude jiefa (The Nesbit Code) published in 2013, as it was composed in the same melancholy spirit as the other works I mention here. Except for Bei Dao’s memoir Open up, City Gate translated by Jeffrey Yang and released in 2017, none of the works I mention here are available in English.
[21] Li Tuo credits this interpretation to Li Ling, a distinguished scholar of paleography and historian who teaches at Peking University in China.
[22] Ashis Nandy, “Open Pasts, Open Futures”, Almost Island, No.4, Summer 2009:2.
This essay first appeared in Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (Oxford University Press, 2018), edited by Ramin Jahanbegloo and Ananya Vajpeyi, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the author.
Han Shaogong 韩少功 is one of the representative names of Chinese contemporary literature, often mentioned in the same breath as Wang Meng, Feng Jicai and Liu Suola. During the mid-eighties, he led the development of a literary school called "Root-seeking literature," the practitioners of which sought to distill an independent, "Chinese" narrative from their rural backgrounds. Something of a hermit, Han Shaogong moved back to the countryside of his native Hunan province after several years working for the Writer's Association of Hainan. A prolific writer, Han Shaogong is famous for his novellas Da Da Da and Woman Woman Woman, as well as for the full-length novel A Dictionary of Maqiao, first published in 1996 and translated by Julia Lovell into English in 2003. In 1987, he collaborated on a translation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being into Chinese.
Julia Lovell teaches modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, The Great Wall: China Against the World and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. Her several translations of modern Chinese fiction include Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao (winner of 2011 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature), Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars, and Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China. Recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize, she is currently working on a global history of Maoism.