Ashis Nandy – författare

Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures is a pre-emptive attempt to bring together the scattered writings of Ashis Nandy over his entire span of writing career and scan those scattered lectures, interviews, and writings including essays and columns for newspapers and journals for an in-depth analytical study. As the author himself explains, these are not his musings on static, time-bound issues, rather they capture how he confronts and negotiates the living past in the political, social, and cultural landscape of South Asia-starting from the manmade famine of 1943 to the Partition and freedom of India and the birth of Pakistan in 1947, the Bangladesh War in 1971, and the protracted civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009). The essays, often written as forewords to other scholars' works, straddle languages, systems of knowledge, and forms of voice and silence. Nandy attempts to identify a critical and intellectual strategy for survival in the Third World. He establishes that though a traumatic ambience-marred by aggressive development, instant nationalisms, or the brutalizing spectacles of modern nation-states-numbs one's imagination, it can also lead to new worldviews and multiple creative forms of resistance.

This volume brings together three significant works of Ashis Nandy - Alternative Sciences, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, and The Savage Freud. It is essential reading for social and political scientists, and all those interested in the complexities of Indian politics and culture.

This book narrates how Ayodhya's inhabitants experienced the events that led up to and followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the end-product of a century's effort to convert Hindus into a 'proper' modern nation. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the culture of communal conflict, the nature of organized mass violence, and the political psychology of Hindu nationalism.

This book is a biographical sketch of the lives of two celebrated Indian scientists, J.C. Bose, the plant physiologist, and Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest untrained mathematical geniuses the world has ever known. Nandy discusses the extent to which the colonial context within which these men worked, impinged on the calibre and nature of their work.

The essays in this volume written as part of psychological biography of the Indian state, explore the scope, limits, and fate of some key concepts in the mainstream culture of politics that have come to structure India's public life. These concepts constitute the dominant public ideology within the consciousness of the expanding middle classes in the country and they range from concrete concerns like 'secularism' and 'development' to more abstract ones such as 'dissent' and 'history'. The essays, mostly inquire into the culture of the Indian state, suggest tangentially the directions in which to move for a cultural and psychological biography of the state. The idea of a moderate state, which was of a state that was neither over-burdened with the responsibility of engineering all aspects of its citizens' lives nor of seeking to extend the market and global capital into every corner of every society, was not unknown to all societies at all times. While such moderate states may not have been great successes and may not have survived, neither can the modern nation-state system claim to be the greatest success story of all times.The question of its survival as an arrangement of political communities, too, remains to be finally decided. The essays in this book explore the vicissitudes of the idea of the modern state under different cultural and psychological conditions.

The word barbarian is derived from the Greek term 'barbaroi' - or one who cannot speak Greek. As the Greeks believed that language was the tool of reason, non-Greek speakers, therefore, were considered devoid of the facility to reason or to act according to logic. This concept of barbarism in turn shaped the early anthropological observations of Columbus and the first European visitors to the Americas.Barbaric Others examines the convenient myopia which through the ages has allowed - and continues to allow - the West to see other peoples as 'barbarians', infidels, even 'savages'. In the book, the authors present a succinct history of racism, xenophobia and the concept of 'otherness' from ancient Greece to the present day. Topics covered include the representation of the 'other' in mythology, the medieval fascination with demons and the idea of the wild man, a critical overview of Columbus and 15th century exploration and the 'other' as colonial subject.'[Constitutes] a bold attempt at the de-masking of the iconography of evil in out times. Full of factual detail, it seeks to crush the reader by the sheer weight of meticulously researched and daringly analysed historical information.' Muslim World Book Review'Barbaric Others provides a valuable introduction for the non-specialist reader to some of the tactics colonial nations have utilised to dominate the territories and peoples they have encountered.' Patterns of Prejudice