Ashis Nandy and ‘Towards A Third World Utopia’

Ashis Nandy is an Indian political psychologist, social theorist, and critic. A well-trained clinical psychologist, Nandy has provided theoretical critiques of European colonialism, development, modernity, science, technology, nuclearism, cosmopolitanism and utopia. Nandy has been associated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. 

Nandy’s work has alternated between human destructiveness and human potentialities. And he has combined these interests with efforts to move out of conventional scholarship, to build into his work categories and sensitivities used in marginalised knowledge systems surviving in the backwaters of the world. His earlier books include Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (Oxford University Press, 1995), The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (Oxford University Press, 2000), An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in Indian Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2000), Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics (Oxford University Press, 2008), Time Warps (Rutgers University Press, 2002), and Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias (Oxford University Press, 1988).

In his popular essay Oppression and Human Liberation: Towards A Third World Utopia, Ashish Nandi posted his views on the emerging third world. To him, the Third World is bound together by the experience of oppression rather than by common cultural traditions. This vision recognized the continuity between the oppressed and the oppressor and sees the institutional and psychological liberation from outer oppression as a matter of self-realization.

Third World. The concept of the Third World is not a cultural category; it is a political and economic category born of oppression, indignity and self-contempt. A Third World utopia must recognize this basic reality. To have a meaningful ‘life’ in the minds of men, such a utopia must start with the historical issue of oppression that has given the Third World both its name and its uniqueness. This paper is a civilizational perspective on oppression, with a less articulate secular theory of salvation as its appendage.

His approach is based on three assumptions. First, as far as the core values are concerned, good and right ethics are not the monopoly of any civilization. All civilizations share certain basic values and such cultural traditions as deriving from man’s biological self and evolutionary experience.

Second, that human civilization is continuously trying to alter or expand its awareness of exploitation and oppression. Oppressions that were once outside the span of awareness are no longer so, and it is quite likely that the present awareness of suffering, too, would be found wanting and would change in the future.

Third, those imperfect societies produce imperfect remedies for their imperfections. Theories of salvation are not uncontaminated by the spatial and temporal location of the theorists. Since the solutions are products of the same social experiences that produce the problems, they cannot but be informed by the same consciousness or, if you allow psychologism, unconsciousness. 

Gender History

Gender history is a type of historical analysis that has developed out of women’s history. In the 1960s and 1970s, gender was often used as a synonym for women’s history. But from the 1980s the term developed as a separate interest among historians and critics in other disciplines. Joan Wallach Scott defined gender as “a social category imposed on a sexed body,” and stated that “gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power.” Gender can be defined as the study of the cultural (including the historical, social, class, intellectual, economic, political, psychological, literary, etc.) organisation, functioning, representation and meaning of sex/body difference. Gender distinction has been explored as a common and omnipresent characteristic of society.

Gender as a category of analysis, is a mechanism by which change over time can be interpreted and represented. Initially, it grew as a part of women’s history in the 1960s. It began in some ways as a branch of social history, and many of the essays include extensive discussions of issues that matter to social historians: the family, work and leisure experiences, marriage patterns, and class differences. It criticized patriarchy, and male dominance and explained why women were hidden from history. Then, Juliet Mitchell and Teresa Brennan, the feminine through their psychoanalysis explained the subjectivity of women through language. From the 1970s and into the 1980s, especially through the early efforts of Sally Alexander and Catherine Hall, women, class and sexual difference came under the scope of a variety of Marxist historians. In this phase of women's history, sex and class often figured as related forms of oppression: the female sex was viewed as a subordinate class, subjugated by a dominant class of men.

By the mid-1980s a gradual breakdown of the category "woman" had begun to propel the turn to gender. The critical questioning of women as organized historical subjects, objects, and political identities was one factor that necessitated the arrival of gender as a keyword of historical analysis. By the early 1990s gender had become a substantial topic among historians and those interested in an interdisciplinary approach to it. Two edited texts from that time, Julia Epstein’s and Kristina Straub’s collection Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (1991) and Sue Tolleson Rinehart’s Gender Consciousness and Politics (1992), indicate the final arrival of gender consciousness among historians as well as academics.

Gender also made inroads into philosophy in the early 1990s and the most important works are Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter’s edited Feminist Epistemologies (1993), Ann Garry’s and Marilyn Pearsall’s Women, Knowledge and Reality (1996), and Jean Curthoys’s Feminist Amnesia (1997). Most notably French feminist philosophers and critical theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, along with Judith Butler, Diane Elam, Teresa Brennan, Mary Poovey and Donna Haraway, have explored the process of cultural absorption into a dominant gendered discourse, raising questions about how gender historically defines sex.

Gender is now firmly fixed as a part of the historical construction. For example, explorations that link sexuality, gender, and nationalism are revealed in texts like George L. Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (1985) and the multiple-authored Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992). On gender, race, imperialism and colonialism see Anne McClintock et al., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nations, and Postcolonial Perspectives (1997) and Ida Bloom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall, Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (2000).

Like all the concepts that historians use, gender is a modelling device for organising and then representing the past. Gender history is a way of looking at the past that expands our vision.