File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-14.064, message 91


Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 08:36:40 +0100
From: Hinrich Kuhls <kls-AT-unidui.uni-duisburg.de>
Subject: Re: M-I: Meera Nanda replies to Marxism-International


Thanks to Meera for responding to the list. I think she outlines some
politically and theoretically important points, and her post makes me [my
knowledge of India is small] curious to know what it means in concrete
terms: "Marxism is a far superior position: it denies essentialism by
historicizing national identities but retains space for universalism."

Hinrich


Meera Nanda wrote:

>WHat has led to this anti-science fervor in India that the right wing 
>finds so consonant with its own political ends? This is a very important 
>question.  I don't deal with it in the Dissent paper, which was not so 
>much about Indian politics but about drawing connections 
>between the science wars a al Sokal and reactionary politics in India. It 
>was meant to emphasize that ideas have unintended  consequences and 
>sometimes it is the distant strangers who end up paying the price for 
>intellectual sophistry.
>
>About POMO as "*causing*... the non-progressive cultural and educational 
>policy in India": 
>
>First, I don't claim that postmodernism has "caused" the reactionary 
>cultural and educational policy that I describe. I claim that pomo has 
>*lent intellecutal respectability* to certain trends that have deep roots 
>in the post-independence trajectory of India's political economy. I would 
>say that if it were not for POMO erupting in the West, the cultural 
>natioanlism in India and other non-Western countries would have still 
>been there, only expressed in a different idiom and without the pretense 
>of left-wing avant-guardism. In India, Gandhism has always provided one 
>such idiom and many so-called progressives, thanks to their 
>anti-imperialism, get trapped in that rather reactionary mindset. 
>
>In fact, I would caution agianst treating the BJP's brand of cultural 
>nationalism -- which many supposedly left wing intellectuals share -- as 
>a case of full-blown POMO. A consistent POMO would carry 
>anti-essentialism further and deny that the nation has any specifically 
>virtuous, non-Western traits. Third World nationalists (religious and 
>secular) make a rather opportunistic use of POMO -- they only take its 
>anti-Eurocentric and anti-Enlightenment elements and present 
>their own traditions as the  polar opposite of the West. For Third World 
>intellectuals, to paraphrase Muslim theorist Akbar Ahmed, "POMO means a 
>shift to ethnic or religious identity as against an imported one; a 
>rejection of modernity..."
>
>Please don't misunderstand me: I am not suggesting that Third World 
>intellecutals *should* adopt a more consistent POMO.  I object to POMO not 
>because it is anti-essentialist but because it denies reason and any 
>basis for human universals. That is why I remain convinced that Marxism 
>is a far superior position: it denies essentialism by historicizing 
>national identities but retains space for universalism. 
>
>But the question remains: What are the reasons why Third World 
>intellectuals would be drawn to the anti-science and anti-progress 
>elements of POMO? 
>
>Speaking for India, I think the reasons have to do with an incomplete and 
>very uneven modernization. Again, unlike my fellow Indian-leftists 
>including some Marxists, I don't put the entire problem on the door steps 
>of "imperialism" or "neo-colonialism." I think many internal factors have 
>played a much bigger role than foreign capital, which until recently 
>has been quite miniscule:  a feudal culture, an authorotarian 
>mind set, a highly 
>inefficient, thorougly  corrupt, rent-seeking bureaucracy. BUt the 
>result 
>is that at the end of 50 years of independence, modern institutions have 
>lost their legitimacy. YET, there have been undenible shifts in political 
>power -- thanks to formal democracy. The older cultural and political  
>elite does not have near exclusive sway over political and cultural 
>institutions. There is a war of position going on and I am not very 
>clear just yet who is positioned where. 
>
>But in all of this, it is very clear that given our colonial history, all 
>the institutions that have become dysfunctional can be very conviniently 
>attibuted to the "evil outsiders." Different groups, depending upon their 
>need for legitimacy, use this anti-western rhetoric quite effectively. 
>(Gandhi after all  used it agianst the British).  Right 
>now it is the right-wing's turn. The pity in all of this is how the 
>supposed left in India and in the West has created a vocabulary which 
>serves the right wing very well. 
>
>As I said in my dissent piece, just the fact that the right can so easily 
>appropriate the left's discourse should ring a loud alarm bell. 



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