TIME WARPS: THE INSISTENT POLITICS OF SILENT AND EVASIVE PASTS By Ashis Nandy Permanent Black, Rs 495 In the highly polarized and charged world of Indian social science, Ashis Nandy is something of a loner. The secularist lobby led by scholars who are somewhat leftward inclined cannot claim him as one of their own, and the Hindutva brigade certainly cannot. Nandy's academic positions have been carefully carved through a well-formulated critique of modernization projects and of modernity. Nandy's is a critique of secularism but he is no communalist. His non-acceptance of the premises of what goes by the name of secularism is based on a more fundamental critique of Western civilization, the violence embedded in it and the alienation from the self that it entails. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is the obvious inspiration here. But Nandy's position is far more nuanced and sophisticated than what Gandhi articulated in his wholesale rejection in Hind Swaraj. In the essay entitled 'The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance', which stands as a cornerstone in this collection, Nandy makes the point that a state or a society commited to secularism is no guarantee against religious discrimination and persecution. If one takes secularism to mean, as it is taken to mean in the Western world, the chalking out of a space in public life where religion has no entry, then religious belief becomes a completely private affair. Those who enter public life leave their private faiths behind. But such a system in no way eliminates the persecution of religious minorities. One has only to recall the Nazi state which worked completely on secular principles but carried out the most horrible atrocities on Jews and other minorities. Nandy identifies a non-Western understanding of secularism which did not differentiate between religion and politics. This meaning of secularism 'revolves around equal respect for all religions' and stands for a 'continuous dialogue among religious traditions and between the religious and the secular'. This assumes that 'each major faith includes within it an in-house version of the other faiths both as an internal criticism and as a reminder of the diversity of the theory of transcendence.' Nandy rightly identifies this as the more accomodative meaning of secularism. Nandy argues that most Indians have lived and worked in complete ignorance of the Western idea of secularism. The accommodative meaning is a part of their daily life. Not surprisingly, most Indians who uphold this are the ones who are least touched by modern Western ideas or have consciously rejected such ideas. Such people believe that 'the traditional ways of life have, over the centuries, developed internal principles of tolerance, and that these principles must have play in contemporary politics.' It does not surprise Nandy that more than ninety per cent of the riots in independent India 'begin in urban India and, within urban India, in and around industrial areas.' A new political culture must draw on the pool of religious tolerance which is encoded in the everyday life associated with the different faiths of India. This, in Nandy's terms, entails an abandonment of what he calls 'internal colonialism', which has embraced with ease the objectification, scientization and bureaucratic rationality imbricated with the idea of modernity. Nandy reworks some of these themes in three other essays included in the volume. In fact, the changing role of secularism in Indian public life has been one of Nandy's persistent intellectual concerns. Another related concern of his is the most important site of secularism, the Indian state. Two essays in this volume look at the culture and contradictions in the Indian state. Nandy writes lucidly but he trained as a psychologist and this training comes through often in his language and in his approach to problems. This is initially jarring, but his analysis is so rich and so novel that these reservations soon disappear and in fact his style begins to appeal, as Nandy does have a way with words. Nandy's work has immense contemporary significance. It forces us to rethink notions and ideas which we have come to take for granted. He also shows that the fight against communal violence cannot be fought on the grounds of modernity, for to a large extent the violence flows out of the phenomenon of modernity and the politics and statecraft associated with it. Communal violence is a special type of violence associated with modernization and its attendant alienation. In the critique of modernity and eurocentrism, Nandy's writings have some overlap with the post-modernists'. But unlike the latter, his writing is always clear and comprehensible. He also has a certain passion which is never drowned in jargon.