The Intimate Enemy Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism

'... an important intervention in colonial ideas... The two essays have interesting and important things to say ... [there is] a certain unity of ideas and execution, the elegance and surprise of [Nandy's] style goes well with his Judgements; and this offers salutary counterpoint to the practised ugliness that has come to be accepted as the standard language of social science.... [Nandy] is one of the very few who are prepared to adopt an extreme hermeneutic position, and his language carries the sensitivity and provocation of isolation.' - Sudipta Kaviraj Indian Economic & Social History Review (1984)

'Nandy's book exemplifies the synthesis he proposes, being a sophisticated blending of insights drawn from Western psychology as ''w well as from India's literary classics and recent historical experience. The Intimate Enemy is compressed and allusive. But, for the reader not lost along the way, Nandy's work is exhilarating, foreshadowing an India that will be a dynamic blend of the best in East and West.' - Francis G. Hutchins The American Historical Review (1985)

'... fully sensitive to the intertwined links between East and West, as well as to the pitfalls awaiting those who try to disentangle them. ... Drawing from but never dominated by poststructuralist and psychodynamic perspectives, Nandy presents "a colonialism which survives the demise of empires".... offers a strategy of cultural survival that is designed to preserve a broader range of beliefs and values for both the colonized and colonizing societies.' - Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Journal of Asian Studies (1985)

'In The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy, one of India's most brilliant political psychologists, undertakes to look at the world upside-down. ... Colonialism once set up its most elaborate factory for the dissemination of its ideology in Bengal, and it is not sheer coincidence that a Bengali should now take the lead in the most heartless hacking of its oppressive genes.' - Claude Alvares Inquiry (1985)

'... a major new critical voice in the analysis of colonialism as a cultural, epistemological and psychological battleground. ... [ The Intimate Enemy] concerns the battle over selfhood that developed in the colonial context in India. For anthropologists, the great significance of this book is that it reminds us that the selves that we study in the non-Western world belong to an endangered species.' - Arjun Appadurai American Ethnologist (1986)

'Nandy's challenges to the "old universalisms" are informed by a conviction that colonialism and modernization, far from erasing India's pasts, have enabled the construction of "a maturer, more contemporary, more self-critical version of Indian traditions"... Nandy's resolution of the problem ... overcomes the nationalist chauvinism that characterizes much of contemporary nativist revivalism, and opens up critically creative ways of thinking modernity in relation to the past.' - Arif Dirlik, Postmodernity's Histories (2000)

'... one of the books that contributed most to setting up the basic framework of the Theoretico-political environment of postcolonial studies in India, among Diasporic Indian intellectuals, and through them across the whole field.... Nandy effectively enabled the articulation of Postcolonialism in India with the major anti-colonial Francophone tradition of Sartre and Fanon...' - Robert J.C. Young Postcolonialism : A Historical Introduction (2001)