Ashis Nandy: intellectual contributions and theoretical work

¶ … threat posed to it by the Western Secular or Christian World View

Is fundamentalism an expression of cultural regression? Or is it an act of creative nationalism? Truly, religious and nationalist fundamental can manifest itself in both guises. On one hand, during the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, the fundamentalist expression of religion became a creative response of liberation in the eyes of the many whom had been oppressed by the Soviet, communist, and fundamentally anti-religious regime. On the other hand, fundamentalism can also be used to express fears of Western economic and cultural domination, rather than to express an alternative political voice.

For instance, for a woman to wear the veil in a once-Muslim Soviet republic was an act of transgression against a state, a state that would punish her for behaving according to her religious beliefs with heavy penalties. To learn the language of the Koran rather than Russian was also a radical act. For an individual to go to church and to profess Jesus over love of Lenin was a radical religious, political, and nationalist act against the totalitarian state regime. Even for an individual within Iran during the 1970's, although accompanied by noxious anti-American sentiment (to Western ears), to profess hatred for the Shah's dictatorial regime and love of the Ayatollah's espousal of Islamic ideals could be construed as a politically radical act because it arose from an ideology that attempted to create a new state that more fully gave voice to the people of Iran.

However, fundamentalism is not always so positive for its adherents. For instance, in the terrorist 'cells' that threaten the world today, anti-Western sentiment is espoused out of fear of cultural impingement rather than as a creative expression of an alternative world view. The impetus is to destroy, not to create a new and alternative regime. Even aspects of the governments of the postcolonial world, as noted by the renown postcolonial scholar Ashis Nandi, although perhaps understandably 'protectionist' in their orientation against the West, may do more to close such nations off to economic opportunities, then to truly expand the minds of citizens, as was seen in the Sudan's rejection of Western, GMO seeds which could have curtailed the region's famine.

The West is still seems to wield cultural hegemony over the world not just over a region of the world. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, "a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations." (Huntington, 1993) Societies such as France are becoming divided between immigrants and nationalists, secularists and fundamentalists. Yet even secularism can be a form of fundamentalism, too, as noted in France and its prohibition against students wearing any religious totemic representations whatsoever.