Hindi Cinema and Half‐Forgotten Dialects: An Interview with Ashis Nandy

Abstract

India as a culture area will be nowhere, I think, in the world of knowledge, the sciences and arts, if it does not first defy the European monopoly of the scientific method established in modern times.1 These words are by the anthropologist J. P. S. Uberoi, but they can also be used to adumbrate one of the starting points from which the cultural critic and histo-rian Ashis Nandy has set about investigating the "vestigal dialects " that have remained beneath the mimicry with which India responded to the West. In certain idioms of popular culture, Nandy has recovered what might—in other contexts—be termed a Ginzburgian subaltern subconscious with which to attack the simplicities of colonialism. He is searching for "an ethically sensitive and culturally rooted alternative social knowledge " and believes that this is "already partly available outside the modern social sciences [among] those who have been the 'subjects, ' consumers or experimentees of these sciences " (1983:xvii). Nandy—who might be carica-tured as a neo-Gandhian 2—is intent on recovering a third space from which an assault can be made on the West and the West's slavish imitators who have been largely responsible for the current state of the world: It has become more and more apparent that geno-cides, ecodisasters and ethnocides are but the un-derside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic tech-nologies wedded to new secular hierarchies, which have reduced major civilizations to the status of a set of empty rituals. The ancient forces of human greed and violence...have merely found a new legitimacy in anthropocentric doctrines of secular salvation, in the ideologies of progress, normality and hyper-masculinity, and in theories of cumula-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.