Review article

✍ Scribed by Probal Dasgupta

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 973 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-1791
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00159720

✦ Synopsis

In his justly celebrated recent book The intimate enemy, Ashis Nandy examines the pathology of a hypermasculinity which is widely known under its Hispanic name machismo, a name especially well-known in circles sympathetic to ecological and feminist critiques of the dominant patriarchal and industrialist modes of thought. By way of tying his study to our specific experience, Nandy looks at the actions of and reactions to this pathology at both ends of the British Raj, both in dominated Indians and in dominating/dominated Britishers. He shows how machismo, the ideological panoply of hirhsd or violence, has called forth a matching reaction of aggressive nationalist terrorism in some people, but has also inspired others, like Gandhi, to respond by taking fresh cultural and political initiatives in ahirhs~ or non-violence.

This distinctively Indian option, Nandy shows, effectively sidetracks and defuses the rage and rational-systematic repression of the macho adversary. It also successfully protects the non-violent satyfigrahi from the danger of wanting to be violent, to violate the opponent's humanity first in thought (seeing him as an inhuman 'enemy'), then in word, and finally in irreversible action, surrendering to the course of war in which the opponent wishes to embroil the satyagrahi.

Nandy also pays crucial attention to the psycho-ideological hold that violence has on much mainstream thought. He speculates, often insightfully, about ways to break this hold, and seeks unusual and interesting allies in his effort to wage peace rather than war. This is his contribution to the Gandhian struggle against the intimate enemy, against the colonial (both colonizing and colonized) power-self which all too often constitutes our 'normal', violence-based self-image.