A disowned father of the nation in India:Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the demonic and the seductive in Indian nationalism
Ashis NANDY
ABSTRACT This essay traces the trajectory of Savarkar’s life through its many vicissitudes and the internal contradictions, to examine the deeper consistencies in his political beliefs and the deeper sources of his absolute, uncritical faith in the modern-state system and its secular imperatives.
Keywords: nation-building and state-formation, political ideology of violence, nineteenth-century modernity, rationality, political realism
Author’s biography
Ashis Nandy began as a sociologist and clinical psychologist but has, over the years, strayed into areas outside formal social sciences and normal academic concerns. His research interests now centre on the political psychology of violence, cultures of knowledge, utopias and visions, human potentialities, and futures. Presently he is working on genocide and on lost cities. The running themes in his work have been his concern and respect for marginalized categories and systems of knowledge and a robust scepticism towards expert-driven, packaged, professional solutions to human problems. His work seeks to create more space for concepts and categories thrown up by the experiences of Southern cultures and the algorithm of everyday life of ordinary citizens. He has authored many books, and among them are: The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism; The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games;The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self; The Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves; An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination; The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics; Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts; and Time Treks: The Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotisms.