Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. x, 244 pp. (B&W photos.) US$72.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7290-8.
In this collection of interlocking essays, Andrew Willford seeks to explore the relationship between a more “civil” past—in which social identities comprised “complex multiplicities,” boundaries were “permeable” and “fuzzy,” and inter-group relations, fluid and flexible—and a pathological present in which identities have hardened and are used instrumentally for political purposes and worldly gain. Fans of European thinkers like Derrida, Freud, Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek will find much to mull over in Willford’s frequent references to these figures. The book’s core argument, however, derives from the ideas of the Indian theorizer Ashis Nandy, and fellow travellers Sudhir Kakar and D.R. Nagaraj, who interpret large-scale political and sociological realities through the lens of ego psychology. Although it is not possible to directly observe pre-colonial civility using the methods and sources at Willford’s disposal, he infers it from evidence that presently conflictual identities existed side-by-side and apparently without conflict in the pre-colonial past, and from the fact that oftentimes bearers of these identities co-exist harmoniously today. Present-day instances of civility are, in this way, interpreted as offering a window into past behavioural norms.
A hidden premise in all this equates rigid social boundaries with collective aggression (but see Talal Asad, “Reading a Modern Classic: W.C. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion,” History of Religions 40, no. 3 [2012], p. 212), and therefore links the absence of conflict to the continued presence in submerged form, or “tacit memories” (190), of a more cosmopolitan and pluralist age. And yet, paradoxically, the incomplete erasure of this plural past is also a source of violence in Willford’s analysis. Because the present can never be fully rid of the past, monolinguistic and monocultural identities are deemed an unstable “fantasy” (139), which, by “betraying older forms of plurality. . . [that still exist] within the selves of individuals and communities,” are left perpetually “troubled and anxious” (164). Thus an ultimately futile attempt to repress India’s originary pluralism leads to fragile, “fear-centred” (162) forms of identity that cause their bearers to attack non-conforming others, in Willford’s version of scapegoat theory (113). In short, modern forms of identity contain the seeds of their own destructiveness insofar as they “require a supplement in the form of an Other that threatens the integrity of the self” (157), which Willford links to Derrida’s logic of “the supplement,” conceived as “an originary act of violence” doomed forever to repeat itself (161).
Willford pursues this complex and theoretically overdetermined argument via a series of thematically overlapping chapter-length case studies, in which the most salient identities are linguistic (Tamil vs. Kannada) and religious (Hindu vs. Muslim). Five chapters (2, 3, 4, 6, and 7) draw on a wealth of published sources on regional history and current conflicts to make sense of the author’s own firsthand impressions of everyday life in Bangalore, his conversations with residents from different neighbourhoods and social backgrounds, and his observations of a public meeting of Tamil activists he attended in December 2003. Chapter 2 takes us from precolonial empires to present-day ethno-linguistic conflicts in just 11 pages; chapter 3 recounts two periods of anti-Tamil rioting in Bangalore; chapter 4 offers an historical overview of the Tamil–Kannada conflict; and in chapter 6 Willford visits four former villages now incorporated within the city of Bangalore, and decodes, with help from the Tamil and Kannada specialist S. Carlos, traces of these plural pasts in the inscriptions and architectural forms of both standing and ruined temples, which he connects to the polyglot and flexible identities he discerns among present-day residents of these locales; and chapter 7 uses the public unveiling of a statue of the pre-modern Tamil philosopher Thiruvalluvar to further comment on ethnic conflict and its management. The force of Willford’s argument depends on the counterfactual assumption that pre-colonial India was in fact less violent and conflict-prone than the present, though he is certainly correct that the modern forms of identity politics he charts had little salience.
Willford’s most interesting and empirically rich contributions are chapters 5 and 8. The former comprises a 50-page mini-ethnography revisiting the author’s pre-doctoral research on the Ramakrishna Mission (RKM) in the early 1990s, now an invaluable historical record in its own right, whereas chapter 8 is based on hundreds of hours of research at the prestigious National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, conducted over 12 months in 2014–2015. Heavily patronized by the Indian state and English-speaking Hindu elites, the RKM is commonly seen as a link to an older, more tolerant form of Hinduism now threatened by Hindu majoritarian (“Hindutva”) politics. Complicating this vision, Willford conceives a conflict between RKM monks’ spiritual impulses and their support for Hindutva ideology, which, following Ashis Nandy, he understands as an instrumentalist perversion of genuine religiosity. Willford attributes this development to the influence of the RKM’s middle-class patrons, rather than the internal development of the mission’s own doctrines, which, being rooted in a Hindu past, are ex hypothesi necessarily tolerant. The chapter on NIMHANS offers a series of harrowing psychiatric case studies, drawn from his own observations and patients’ medical records, to illustrate the psychological interpretations of identity hinted at in previous chapters. Without claiming direct equivalence, Willford draws attention to “overlapping features” between these case studies and the “forms of troubling” of identity he and Nandy regard as pathological. Willford’s boldly interdisciplinary approach comes through most powerfully in his willingness at several points to go beyond official medical diagnoses in order to posit social etiologies inspired by his readings of the Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar. Thus, “hemiparalysis and hurting oneself … suggest a kind of inward-directed aggression that cannot find an external target … [which] accords with Kakar’s psychodynamic model of paralysis and masochism as a means to defend against the horrors of being unfilial” (174).
This is, in short, a daring work that will challenge and provoke readers on many levels.
Nathaniel Roberts
University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany