Revisiting the Violence of Development: An Interview with Ashis Nandy
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Revisiting the Violence of Development: An Interview with Ashis Nandy
Smitu Kothari interviews Ashis Nandy, one of India’s leading intellectuals on the problems of violence embedded in development. The interview sets the scene for the issue’s discussions by giving a historical and philosophical context. Smitu Kothari: This special issue of Development seeks reflections on some of the contentious issues of development politics over the past three decades that have informed and influenced public discourse and public action. The aim is to understand how the conceptual and political map of the world has changed over this period and to take a fresh look at the relationship between development and violence. Since the 1970s and 1980s, your writings and reflections have been among those of a handful of people to bring forward and highlight not just the history of the development idea but also the relationship between development, the state, modern science and violence. We hope you can locate the relationship in a historical context and reflect on the kind of challenges for political thinking and political action that lie before us. It has been a decade since the 500th anniversary of the landing of Columbus and over 2 years since 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq and the expansion of US-led hegemony in the world. This period has also witnessed the growing collective assertion of the historically subjugated and the marginalized peoples as well as others resisting this hegemony and the processes of economic globalization. These assertions are also of other knowledge systems and other cultural systems reaffirming of the value of pluralism ^ systems that experienced victimization under homogenizing developmental and scientific processes. So at one level, there is continuity and an intensification of the adverse impact of development and at another, a growing rumble at the grassroots. How do you see these processes? Ashis Nandy: We must recall that western hegemony did not start 500 years ago. Western aggressiveness began to become salient on the global stage 500 years ago, but the domination took a long time to become established, hegemony even longer ^ hegemony in the sense that in the present-day world, there is a kind of manufactured consent where a majority of the elites the world over accepts that hegemony. There is consent to the extent that even those who fight certain forms of progressivism and developmentalism operate within the western framework. This is true hegemony. Western aggressiveness translated into dominance towards the end of the 18th century. And even that was not the phase when the contemporary construction of ‘development’ began. What we call development began only in the wake of the Second World War. A kind Development (2004) 47(1), 8–14. doi:10.1057/palgrave.dev.1100012
Kothari: An Interview with Ashis Nandy of development took place in England with the advent of the industrial revolution but we called it industrialization and urbanization. SK: Do you see a continuity of the development
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