A seminal idea proposed in The Intimate Enemy which has subsequently come rather to define Nandy's (frequently mis-represented) public political stance concerns the disjunctions imposed by colonialism which have returned to haunt contemporary India. The pen- etration of the West has created a class of mimic men, "modernists, whose attempts to identify with the colo- nial aggressors has copies man in the subcontinent" (1983:74) and Nandy places his hopes with a different class of Indians who are "neither pre-modern, nor anti-modern but only non-modern" (ibid). It is here that Nandy' s essentialism ceases to look merely "strategic" as he seeks to ontologize his preferred brand of wisdom ("perfect weakness") in the depths.
