VICTIMS AND LOSERS

The book under review is an extremely important one, cap¬able of being read and res¬ponded to at many levels. It can be seen as a professional psychological/ psychoanalytical treatise on how two civiliza¬tions reacted and responded to modern colonialism and im¬perialism. It is simultaneously a major attack on the dichoto¬mizing nature of the current forms of analysis. To put it simply, Ashis Nandy challenges the naive notion of colonialism as an unmitigated victory for the West and by the same token a defeat of the East. Instead the book talks about the victims, the losers and the survivors and the struggle at a mental and cultural level by people to understand and confront a new global social relation—colonialism. The colonial encounter, accor¬ding to Ashis Nandy, opened up two new and distinct possibilities, mainly because it implied a schism in the traditional order. For those in the East, ‘the exploited and the cornered within the tradi¬tional order’, the encounter with the West, with its psy¬chological pull of reason and rationality, meant a possibility of escape. For similar reasons, the critical minds in the West saw in this encounter the possibility, through colonia¬lism, of introducing modern structures into the barbaric world— of history producing out of oppres¬sion, violence and cultural dislocation not merely new technological and social forces but also a new social consciousness in Asia and Africa…. It was thus that the ahistorical primitives would one day, the expecta¬tion went, learn to see them¬selves as masters of nature and, hence, as masters of their own fate.