Godse

[Gail Coelho]

This is very interesting and insightful -- does anyone know if the book is
available in the US?

Gail

At 01:03 PM 9/13/99 +0200, you wrote:
>Those interested  in certain disquieting aspects of modern Indian political
>discourse, may want to read  a 70's paper by Ashis Nandy "Final Encounter:
>The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi"; published - together with five
>other essays in: "At the Edge of Psychology. Essays in Politics and
>Culture", Delhi 1980, Oxford University Press (and, again in OUP, in 1990),
>pp. 70-98.
>
>Gandhi, Nandy says,  "[...] was trying to fight colonialism by fighting the
>psychological equation which a patriarchy makes between masculinity and
>aggressive social dominance and between femininity and subjugation. To fight
>this battle he ingeniously combined aspects of folk Hinduism and recessive
>elements of Christianity to mark out a new domain of public intervention"
>(74).
>According to Nandy, "Nathuram Vinayak Godse [...] was a representative of
>the centre of the society that Gandhi was trying to turn into periphery"
>[76].
>And further on: "Godse not only represented the traditional Indian
>stratarchy which Gandhi was trying to break, he was sensitized by his
>background to this process of elite displacement. Similarly, he also sensed
>the other coordinate of the Gandhian 'revolution': the gradual legitimacy
>given to femininity as a valued aspect of Indian self-definition. This
>revaluation of femininity, too, threatened to deprive the traditional elite
>like Godse of two of their major scapegoats: the Muslims and the British,
>who had defeated and emasculated the Hindus and made them nirveerya or
>sterile and napungsak or impotent. The theory of action associated with such
>scapegoating was that the Hindus would have to redeem their masculinity by
>fighting and defeating the Muslims and the British. [...]" (86)
>
>Hoping this bit of information is found useful,
>
>Artur Karp