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.