In the latest issue of Himal South Asian, Ashis Nandy writes that we are ambivalent towards Gandhi because he “tried to disinherit and decentre the middle class; the memory of that still hurts.” In a way, Nandy is saying, we are also ambivalent about ourselves. Here is a section from his provocative piece:

I never became a Gandhian. Indeed, as I moved into new studies and got more deeply entangled with public concerns and social movements, I became increasingly convinced that my earlier discomfort with Gandhi was fully justified. He was not only a negation of the core tenets of Southasian modernity and the region’s contemporary elite; he also invited everyone living with the certitudes of middle-class life in a modern Southasian metropolis to set up an anti-self as a critique and a warning. At every step, he reminded me of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s belief that one moves closer to truth when one’s intellectual work hurts one’s own interests and those of one’s class.

Around that same time, I also concluded that any thinker operating from within Southasia is doubly handicapped. Southasian thinkers not only have the disadvantage of location, but are at all times expected to be fully correct, both politically and academically. People wonder, “If he is really that good, why is he working in Nepal, rather than at Harvard or Oxford or in the United Nations?” When dealing with a Southasian activist-scholar, they also refuse to separate the wheat from the chaff. In Southasia, Plato gets away with his blatant advocacy for buggery of children; Emmanuel Kant and Karl Marx, with their open and unalloyed racism; and Milton, with child abuse. The public, after all, has other aspects of these works upon which they can concentrate. This cannot happen in the case of a Southasian activist-scholar, however, because the aim is ultimately to disvalue his or her contributions.