Threats to cultural diversity: Ashis Nandy at Sahitya lecture

Noted critic and social theorist Ashis Nandy today enumerated on the six sources which pose a threat to the country's cultural diversity.
Delivering the 28th edition of the Samvatsar Lecture of Sahitya Akademi here, he said, "The attack on cultural diversity on the world I suspect comes from six sources."
Development, high levels of mobility or uprootedness, the accelerating pace of secularism, theories of social change, and rejection of parts of culture that are not marketable were listed out by Nandy as possible threats.
"Do we protect cultural diversity or does cultural diversity protect us," he asked.
"If our cultures are different our first instinct is not to say that we are different but all humans are the same. Or that culture is not different from us but what we will become tomorrow," he said.

Nandy said most problems were created by the impact of the modern world and the manner of looking at social change, political system, cultural and social differences, modernisation all mapped in a diachronic manner.

"Half the societies of the world seem to be constantly crawling their way up an inclined plane. Other societies are on the top of the hill who seem to give advice on how to climb up," he said.
Noting that in China and India which have between them 40 per cent of the world's population, people who want to live a good and moral life wanted to go to New York and not heaven.

"New York is like the capital of another world we are aspiring to join. They are like our consultants and we are like students perpetually trying to catch up," he said.
Nandy said this amounted to a prescription for cultural suicide.
Cultural diversity, he said, was also destroyed by high levels of uprootedness and mobility, which gradually pushes people to opt for versions of religion that they could carry with them over geographical and cultural differences.
He cited an example of a "Malayali who if he goes to Assam would find that he has nobody to share his Hinduism with."

He said he had heard so many versions of Ramayana that provided a different perspective and defined local identities.
"Uprooting and mobility is steamrolling religious beliefs also in a monolithic," he said and pointed out that all nation states dislike cultural diversity because it makes it difficult to rule.
He also described late painter M F Husain as the "most creative interpretor of Hinduism".
He gave the example of an NDTV reporter who went to Pakistan in the late 1990s to interview a man on the streets on his views on the hijab, something which he said won't be possible today.

Nandy, a trained psychologist, said the clue to survival of cultural diversity lay in "acknowledging the possibilities offered by the other."
"I hope a celebration of differences of acceptance of it is not something as a moral duty but a clue to opening up your own possibilities," he said.