Are tradition and modernity antagonistic? Ambedkar in and against the postcolonial project

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to demystify the antagonistic relationship between modernity and tradition as construed by Ashis Nandy. As a prominent voice in postcolonial scholarship, Nandy saw modernity as a colonial conception of rights, self, and society. Nandy’s critique of modernity laid the grounds for several projects that rejected the modern consensus for its colonial origins. Juxtaposing Nandy’s reiteration of early anti-modern nationalist thought with a multi-dimensional reading of colonial modernity in contemporary Ambedkarite scholarship, this paper explores the ambivalences of negotiating modern liberalism in a postcolonial order of hierarchical group identities. Despite the close imbrication of modernity with the imperial centre, Ambedkarite scholarship demonstrated how B.R. Ambedkar, synthesized a middle ground, where he incorporated the promise of modernity to liberate the ‘individual’ without dismissing the ‘communal’ collective self, construed by traditions. While postcolonial scholarship is heterogeneous, following Nandy, huge postcolonial melancholia has conflated modernity with coloniality. How do we rethink postcolonial theory from its current culturalist posturing¹ to (re)claim the emancipatory potential of both modernity and tradition? Could it be that Nandy’s anxiety and discomfort with modernity fail to ‘contemporise theory’²?

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial theory
• contempronise
• tradition and modernity
• Ambedkar

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Prof. Sanjay Palshikar, Prof. Dickens Leonard, and Samik Dasgupta for their patient reading, comments, and mentorship that have been foundational to writing this paper. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers from the journal for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The culturalist turn in the social sciences is attributed to the rise of poststructuralist methodology and the emergence of cultural studies departments in the United States. However, several scholars have pointed to the culturalist turn within liberal theory to have emerged early in the age of Imperialism itself. For instance, the anthropologist governor- Henry Maine stressed that the difference between modern political and primitive ethnic communities was in the conception of law. He argued that the ‘primitives’ lacked ‘law’ and were governed by ‘custom’, which intertwined law with kinship based on blood. Late liberal imperial ideology was influenced by Maine’s account of traditional society taking a ‘culturalist turn’, by which native societies were seen as authentic systems of internal governance with customary laws that the Empire had to merely govern through indirect rule.

See Henry Sumner Maine, ‘Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. 1861,’ New York: Dorset, 1986. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the ends of liberal imperialism, Princeton University Press, 2010.

2 Sudhir Chella Rajan, ‘Practising Theory in the Anthropocene A Postcolonial Quest for Reliable Knowledge,’ Economic & Political Weekly, 52(14), 2017, pp 72–74.

3 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 14.

4 Gnana Aloysius, Nationalism Without a Nation in India, Oxford University Press, 1998.

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7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Translation as Culture,’ Parallax, 6(1), 2000, pp 13–24.

8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,’ Cultural Studies, 6(3), 1992, pp 337–357.

9 S. Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India,’ IDS Bulletin, 21(4), 1990, pp 10–15.

10 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Duke University Press, 1999.

11 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘From Civilization to Globalization: The ‘West’as a Shifting Signifier in Indian Modernity,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13(1), 2012, pp 138–152.

12 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’ Millennium, 20(3), 1991, pp 521–525.

13 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Politics of Hindutva,’ Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, 1996, p 270.

14 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,’ Alternatives, 13(2), 1988, pp 177–194.

15 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, Routledge, 2004.

16 VivekChibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital, Verso Books, 2014.

17 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p 149.

Jean-François Bayart, ‘Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition?’ Public Culture, 23(1), 2011, pp 55–84.

18 Ranajit Guha, ‘Preface. Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society,’ 1982.

19 Ashis Nandy, Bonfire of Creeds, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004, p 21.

20 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia,’ Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, 44, 2009.

21 Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India, SAGE Publications India, 1994.

22 Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Bombay: Govt. of Maharashtra, 1978–, Vol 9, p 168.

23 Shabnum Tejani, ‘The Necessary Conditions for Democracy B R Ambedkar on Nationalism, Minorities and Pakistan,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2013.

24 Gopal Guru, ‘The Idea of India: Derivative, Desi and Beyond,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2011, pp 36–42.

25 Ram Rajya is a Gandhian concept of political organisation, which called for the preservation of the sanatanadharma through an anarchic federation of village republics in South Asia (i.e., mythological Bharathiya). In contrast, Savarkar insisted on the Hindu Rashtra; which was not just ‘rule’of sanatanadharma, but also enforced the idea that all the subjects in the rashtra had to be homogenously Hindu. Savarkar sought the preservation of sanatanadharma through a cultural reformation of all subjects of the subcontinent into Hindu, along with direct capture of the political power of the state. Gandhi was suspicious of state power and vouched for sanatanadharma as ‘universal’ dharma and Ram Rajya which was inclusive of Muslims, unlike Savarkar’s rashtra that had ethnic conceptions of nationhood.

26 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism, and Other Masks of Deculturation,’ Alternatives, 22(2), 1997, pp 157–176.

27 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 104.

28 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism, and Other Masks of Deculturation,’ Alternatives, 22(2), 1997, 157–176.

29 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 71, p 74.

30 Aparna Devare, ‘Secularizing Religion: Hindu Extremism as a Modernist Discourse,’ International Political Sociology, 3(2), 2009, pp 156–175.

31 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 28.

32 Jyotirmaya Sharma, ‘Digesting the Other,’ Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres, 2009, pp 150–72.

33 Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The history of the World's Largest Democracy, Pan Macmillan, 2017.

34 Ashis Nandy, ‘A Disowned Father of the Nation in India: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Demonic and the Seductive in Indian nationalism,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 15(1), 2014, pp 91–112.

35 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 26.

36 Valerian Rodrigues, ‘Reading Texts and Traditions: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2011.

37 V. Geetha, ‘A Part Apart: Dr Ambedkar’s Indictment of the Hindu Social Order,’ Violence Studies, Kannabiran, Kalpana, 2016.

38 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Pakistan or Partition of India, Thacker and Company, 1945.

39 Sahana Udupa, ‘Print communalism: The press and the Non-Brahmin Movement in Early MYSORE, 1900–30,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology, 44(3), 2010, pp 265–297.

40 Gregory Aloysius, Nationalism Without a Nation in India, Oxford University Press, 1998.

41 Modernity created universal conceptions of space (the invention of public space –schools, parks, offices, and technologies for locomotion like the railways in which untouchability could not be sustained), time (standardization through clocks), and what it meant to be a human being (as the subject with rights).

Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Univ of California Press, 2009.

42 Jesús Francisco Cháirez-Garza, ‘Touching Space: Ambedkar on the Spatial Features of Untouchability,’ Contemporary South Asia, 22(1), 2014, pp 37–50.

43 Shabnum Tejani, ‘Re-considering Chronologies of Nationalism and Communalism: The Khilafat Movement in Sind and its Aftermath, 1919–1927,’ South Asia Research, 27(3), 2007, pp 249–269.

44 Babasaheb Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, Prabhat Prakashan, 1941.

45 Jesús Francisco Cháirez-Garza, ‘‘Bound Hand and Foot and Handed Over to the Caste Hindus’: Ambedkar, Untouchability and the Politics of Partition,’ The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 55(1), 2018, pp 1–28.

46 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 28.

47 Vazira Zamindar, ‘South Asia in Dark Times: Homogenizing Nation-States and the Problem of Minorities,’ Current History, 114(771), 2015, p 149.

48 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 76, p 104.

49 Sanjay Palshikar, Evil and the Philosophy of Retribution: Modern Commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita, Routledge, 2017.

Jyotirmaya Sharma, ‘My Religion is Less Violent Than Yours,’ Partition: The Long Shadow, 2015.

50 Ashis Nandy, ‘Nationalism, Genuine and Spurious: Mourning Two Early Post-Nationalist Strains,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2006, pp 3500–3504.

Also see Sudhir Chella Rajan, ‘Practising Theory in the Anthropocene A Postcolonial Quest for Reliable Knowledge,’ Economic & Political Weekly, 52(14), 2017.

51 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,’ Alternatives, 13(2), 1988, pp 177–194.

52 Ambedkar argues the following in an interview with the BBC London on 12th May 1956, taken from Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Bombay: Govt. of Maharashtra, 1978–), 24 Vols.

53 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,’ Alternatives, 13(2), 1988, pp 177–194.

54 Triloki Nath Madan, ‘Whither Indian Secularism?’ Modern Asian Studies, 27(3), 1993, pp 667–697.

55 Rajeev Bhargava and T. N. Srinivasan, ‘The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism,’ The Future of Secularism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007.

56 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, Stanford University Press, 2020.

57 Ambedkar argues the above quote in the Constituent Assembly debates, which implies that he did believe in the principle of secularism as quoted by Shyam Chand (the former minister of Haryana), in ‘Dr. Ambedkar on Democracy’ of Mainstream, Vol XLV, No 51.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 78–79.

61 Aishwary Kumar, ‘In the Void of Faith: Sunyata, Sovereignty, Minority,’ Secularization, Tolerance, and Democratic Politics in South, 2018, pp 156–190.

62 Gandhi, YI 19-9-1929, p 305.

63 Ibid.

64 Aishwary Kumar, ‘Ambedkar's inheritances,’ Modern Intellectual History, 7(2), 2010, pp 391–415.

65 Mathias Samuel Soundra Pandian, ‘One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2002, 1735–1741.

66 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,’ Alternatives, 13(2), 1988, pp 177–194.

67 Shabnum Tejani, ‘Reflections on the Category of Secularism in India: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Ethics of Communal Representation, c. 1931,’ In The Crisis of Secularism in India, Duke University Press, 2007, pp 45–65.

68 Babasaheb Ambedkar, Thoughts on Pakistan, Prabhat Prakashan, 1941.

69 Ambedkar, ‘Motion on the Draft Constitution,’ 4 November 1948, Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Bombay: Govt. of Maharashtra, 1978–, 24 Vols, pp 13 and pp 62.

70 Anupama Rao, ‘Dalits As A Political Minority,’ In The Caste Question, University of California Press, 2009, pp 118–160.

71 Faisal Devji, ‘A minority of One,’ Global Intellectual History, 2021, pp 1–7.

72 Ambedkar, ‘Communal Deadlock and the Way to Solve It,’ in Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Bombay: Govt. of Maharashtra, 1978–, 1: 377.

73 See Vijay Prashad, The Riddles of AshisNandy, Outlook Magazine, 2013, https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/the-riddles-of-ashis-nandy/283859.

74 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Pakistan or Partition of India, Thacker and Company, 1945.

75 Rupa Vishwanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern India, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014.

76 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 110.

77 Ibid, p 108.

78 Pradeep P.Gokhale, ‘Ambedkar and Modern Buddhism: Continuity and Discontinuity,’ In Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste, Routledge India, 2020, pp 257–273.

79 Ambedkar, B.R. Ambedkar Speaks: 301 Seminal Speeches, ed., Narendra Jadhav. Seattle, WA: Konark Publishers, 2013.

80 AishwaryKumar, ‘In the Void of Faith: Sunyata, Sovereignty, Minority,’ Secularization, Tolerance, and Democratic Politics in South, 2018, pp 156–190.

81 Ashis Nandy, ‘Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness,’ 1987.

82 Ashis Nandy, ‘Woman Versus Womanliness in India: An Essay in Social and Political Psychology,’ Psychoanalytic Review, 63(2), 1976, pp 301–315.

Also see, Ashis Nandy, ‘Sati: A Nineteenth-Century Tale of Women, Violence, and Protest,’ At the Edge of Psychology.

83 Ashis Nandy, ‘Sati as Profit versus Sati as a Spectacle: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar’s Death,’ Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India, 1994, pp 131–48.

84 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Psychology Press, 1996.

85 Dorothy MatildaFigueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest, SUNY Press, 1994.

86 Ibid.

87 Louis Dumont, ‘Homo Hierarchicus,’ Social Science Information, 8(2), 1969, pp 69–87.

88 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 10.

89 Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 53.

90 Ibid.

91 The Ardhanarishvara is a composite androgynous form of the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati (the latter being known as Devi, Shakti and Uma in this icon). Ardhanarishvara is depicted as half-male and half-female, equally split down the middle.

92 Ashis Nandy, ‘A Disowned Father of the Nation in India: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Demonic and the Seductive in Indian nationalism,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 15(1), 2014, pp 91–112.

93 Sanjay Palshikar, ‘The Androgynous Warrior: Gandhi’s Search for Strength,’ European Journal of Political Theory, 15(4), 2016, pp 404–423.

94 Ibid.

95 See. Anupama Rao, Representing Dalit selfhood (india-seminar.com).

96 EleanorZelliot, ‘Understanding Dr. BR Ambedkar,’ Religion Compass, 2(5), 2008, pp 804–818.

97 SharmilaRege, ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of 'Difference' and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 1998, pp WS39–WS46.

98 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Secularism and Toleration,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 29, 1994, p 28.

99 Nivedita Menon, ‘Elusive ‘Woman’: Feminism and Women’s Reservation Bill,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2000, pp 3835–3844.

100 ShailajaPaik, ‘Forging a New Dalit Womanhood in Colonial Western India: Discourse on Modernity, Rights, Education, and Emancipation,’ Journal of Women's History, 28(4), 2016, pp 14–40.

101 Ornit Shani, ‘Women and the Vote: Registration, Representation and Participation in the Run-Up to India’s First Elections, 1951–52,’ South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2021, 1–19.

102 Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Feminist Challenges to Conceptions of God: Exploring Divine Ideals,’ in Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, 2013.

103 Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 1993, pp 579–585.

Sharmila Rege, ‘Caste and Gender: The Violence Against Women in India,’ 1996.

104 The Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Minor and Guardianship Act, the Hindu Adoptions, Maintenance Act and the Hindu Succession Act.

105 Eleanor Newbigin, ‘The Hindu Code Bill and the making of the modern Indian state,’ PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2008.

106 Ambedkar, B. R. The Rise and Fall of Hindu Women, Jalandhar: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1980.

107 Sunaina Arya and Aakash Singh Rathore, ‘Introduction: Theorising Dalit Feminism,’ In Dalit feminist theory, Routledge India, 2019, pp 1–21.

108 Ambedkar, B.R. The Buddha and his Dhamma: A Critical Edition, Oxford University Press, 2011, p 115.

109 Ashis Nandy, ‘Toward a Dialogue of Asian civilizations,’ Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 1998, p 127.

110 Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization 1977, London: Picador, 2002.

Taken from, Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p 42.

111 Even within the logic of classifying history in the Eurocentric classification of Ancient, Medieval and Modern; which is what makes the French Revolution the first ‘modern’ struggle, the French Revolution was followed by the Haitian Revolution. The demand for ‘rights’ by white people in France enabled black slaves of Haiti, (which was then a French Colony) to fight for rights using the same language. See: Nick Broten, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2017.

112 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,’ October 28 1984, pp 125–133.

113 R Siva Kumar, Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism, New Delhi Gallery of Modern Art, 1997.

114 Ambedkar, B.R. Ambedkar Speaks: 301 Seminal Speeches, ed., Narendra Jadhav. Seattle, WA: Konark Publishers, 2013.

115 Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India,’ Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, 3, 1987, p 364.

116 Sudhir ChellaRajan, ‘Practising Theory in the Anthropocene A Postcolonial Quest for Reliable Knowledge,’ Economic & Political Weekly, 52(14), 2017, pp 72–74.

117 Leonard M, Dickens, ‘One Step Inside ‘Tamilia’: On the Anti-Caste Writing of Language,’ Social Scientist, 45(1/2), 2017, pp 19–32.

118 Pharmakon is the Greek word which has two opposite meanings – ‘cure’ and ‘poison’. I borrow the concept of pharmakon, from Derrida’s reinterpretation, as he pointed to the play of binary oppositions crucial to Western logocentric tradition: remedy/poison, speech/writing, good/bad, interior/ exterior, etc.Nandy’ essentialist binary opposition between modernity and tradition can also be deconstructed using the same method.

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Noel Mariam George

Noel Mariam George, I recently completed my M. Phil in Political Science, with my thesis Reconstruction of Religion: Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism in the writings of Ambedkar. I am currently a Doctoral Student at IIT Madras, where I work on citizenship claims in the Eastern Himalayas. I have published my writings in the South Asia Journal and the Social Scientist.