He has written a best-selling book called The Tao of Cricket, with the intriguing subtitle "On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games". In the book he made the now legendary observation that "cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English". His other books have titles such as Traditions, Tyrannies and Utopias; The Blinded Eye: 500 Years of Christopher Columbus; and the best known, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism.
Ashis Nandy is one of India's foremost philosophers and social psychologists. For more than three decades he has also been one of the main creators of post-colonial theory. In The Intimate Enemy he came up with the radical thesis that colonialism as an experience was just as traumatic for the coloniser as it was for the colonised.
Born in 1937 and educated in Calcutta, he learned how the peoples of occupied India had often tried to become like the English, either in imitation or opposition. Some militant nationalists developed a militarist code, which seemed to threaten the occupiers with insurrection. But, says Nandy, this was really a capitulation to the "might is right" philosophy of the British Empire.
The British, wherever they went, projected onto the natives all those qualities of caritas and fine feeling that might disable them in their military and administrative duties. Onto the natives they projected a femininity that was still widely devalued at home. These attitudes were internalised by some of the more militant Indian nationalists, who began themselves to look upon the rather passive Hindu male as the victim of a pathology even more "dangerous" than that of femininity itself.
In the days when women did not have the vote, the suggestion that the native male was feminised had always carried the strong implication that his people were unready for self-government.
Nandy says that, in consequence, nationalist intellectuals faced a choice: either to fight British fire with fire in open military confrontation, or to embrace the typology of the womanly man, on condition that they could offer a more positive reinterpretation of it. In drawing up his brilliant analysis of the colonial encounter, Nandy says he learned not only from the non-violent principle of Gandhi, but even more explicitly from the writings of Oscar Wilde.
Wilde as an Irish liberationist, in both his art and his life, manifestly rejected the either/ or antithesis of official British thinking. He did not accept its view of the world as divided between the polar opposites of British and foreign, male and female, good and evil. Rather, he sponsored a both/and philosophy that praised manly women and womanly men.
Wilde did not recognise the idea of pure male or pure female: against these simplified notions he pitted the idea of androgyny. And for the rival atavisms of English or native nationalisms he substituted the ideal of international brotherhood and human liberation.
Ashis Nandy argues that what Wilde suggested represented at once the deepest fear and strongest need of British imperialists. "Instead of trying to redeem their masculinity by becoming counter-players of the rulers according to the established rules, the colonised will discover an alternative frame of reference within which the oppressed do not seem weak or degraded".
Hence Mahatma Gandhi and his followers soon came to see their violent rulers as morally inferior beings, then subversively began to feed these alternative forms of thought back to the more liberal and anti-imperial elements in British society.
Nandy says the colonial adventure not only led to injustice overseas but also had a deeply corrupting effect on "home" European societies. The projection of a despised femininity onto natives damaged the self-image and standing of women at home. Nandy holds that Wilde was one of the first post-colonial theorists and that his androgynous philosophy threatened the basis of Britain's colonial mentality.
All of Nandy's books and essays are written in a similar spirit of radical analysis, which leads him to criticise both narrow-gauge nationalisms and the shallow consumerist cosmopolitanism that often seeks to replace them.
His recent work has studied the role of violence in the 20th century and has sought to imagine a global future beyond "the nuclear age". He calls himself a critical traditionalist who can question the notion that science, the nation state or economic development supply the principal criteria of modernity. He is an active participant in ecological movements for the protection of the planet.
Ashis Nandy will deliver a lecture entitled "The Culture and Politics of Violence in the Post-Colonial World: Freud, Modernity and the Boundaries of the Self" in Theatre P, the Arts Building, UCD, on Thursday April 26th at 7.30 p.m. Admission free.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD and author of Inventing Ireland and Irish Classics.
