Ashis Nandy has occupied a distinct and unrivaled place in the intellectual life of India over the course of the last three decades. He is unquestionably the country's most exciting, and perhaps its most controversial, thinker. He has been described variously as a cultural psychologist, futurist, political theorist, cultural critic, and much else. What is certain is that his writings on secularism, the Indian state, and contemporary Indian society have ineradicably altered the framework by which India is sought to be understood.
Nandy's some twenty odd books cover a vast terrain and offer trenchant critiques of the modern nation-state system, the supposed rationality of science, the violence of development, and the zero-sum politics of our times. Writing on subjects as diverse as the popular Hindi film, psychoanalysis, the cinema of Satyajit Ray, childhood, the culture of cricket, Gandhian politics, the politics of utopias, and alternative futures, he lays bare the oppressive nature of modernity and provides a different framework for social action and alternative conceptions of culture.
This volume is the first attempt to engage with the work of one of the most versatile thinkers in the world. A long conversation between Nandy and the editor, prefaced by the editor's introduction, furnishes some idea of the canvas of Nandy's thought and intellectual interests. A second section offers a brief sampling of his essays, some of them autobiographical and extensively revised for this volume; other pieces, originally written for The Times of India, suggest his stature as a public intellectual. A third, concluding section offers some analytical perspectives on Nandy's work by public intellectuals and scholars, among them literary critics, a film theorist, a historian of Chinese intellectual history, and a historian of the subaltern school. For the revised edition of this volume, a new introduction has been added and the bibliography of Nandy's writings has been updated.
Vinay Lal teaches history at UCLA. He was Professor of History at University of Delhi, 2010-11. His recent books include Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (2011), Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (Oxford University Press, 2009), The Other Indians: Politics and Culture of South Asians in America (2007), and The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Ashis Nandy (2005). His two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City is appearing in 2013.
