In The Intimate Enemy, Nandy offers a provocative theoretical model of the relations between the colonizers and the colonized. He suggests that colonial forces operate in two complementary and yet distinct forms. The first form is basically organized around the violent conquest of the colonies by ‘bandit-kings’. The ‘bandit-kings’ have no civilizing mission; they are influenced not by Eurocentric conceptions of progress or religious duty but by crude racist theories which reduce the racial ‘other’ to a sub-human status. The second form of colonialism, by contrast, is organized around the Westernization of the colonized. The ‘bandit-kings’ are displaced by the colonizers, the ‘well-meaning, hard-working, middle-class missionaries, liberals, modernists, and believers in science, equality and progress’. The colonizers do not violently eliminate the colonized; although they view the colonized as child-like, backward and dependent upon Europe for their progress, they do recognize the colonized as fellow human beings. The violence of the colonizers is a cultural and psychological violence: they take hold of the cultural difference of the colonized, they enter the culture of the colonized at local levels and they train the colonized to internalize Western values. Their colonizing intervention hegemonically installs the Western imaginary as the only possible social imaginary. ‘[Colonialism] helps generalize the concept of the modern West from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.’
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