Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy (b. 1937) is one of the leading social, cultural and political critics of India. His field covers a vast area of thinking such as public conscience, political psychology, mass violence, nationalism and culture. He has worked on cultures of knowledge, visions, and dialogues of civilizations. He received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize [http://www.asianmonth.com/prize/english/18/index.html] in 2007. In 2008 he has been named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals of the world by the magazine, Foreign Policy, published by The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4314#bios]

Early Life and Education

Nandy was born in a Bengali Christian family at Bhagalpur in the state of Bihar in 1937. He is the eldest of the three sons of Satish Chandra Nandy and Prafulla Nalini Nandy. Later his family moved to Calcutta. Nandy's mother was a teacher at La Martiniere School, Calcutta and subsequently became the school's first Indian vice principal. When he was 10, British India was partitioned into two separate nations of India and Pakistan. He witnessed the succession of conflicts and atrocities that followed.

Nandy quit medical college before joining Hislop College, Nagpur to study Social Sciences. Later he took a Master's degree in Sociology. However, his academic interest tended increasingly towards clinical psychology and he did his Ph.D. in Psychology from Gujarat University, Ahmedabad.

Academic Life

Nandy joined the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi as a young faculty. While working there, he developed his own methodology by integrating clinical psychology and sociology. Meanwhile, he was invited by a number of universities and research institutions abroad to carry out research and to give them lectures. He served as the Director of CSDS between 1992 and 1997. He also serves on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture, a reviewed journal published by Duke University Press.

Nandy has coauthored a number of human rights reports and is active in movements for peace, alternative sciences and technologies, and cultural survival. He is a member of the Executive Councils of the World Futures Studies Federation, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development, and the People's Union for Civil Liberties. Nandy has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Hull, and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh. He held the first UNESCO Chair at the Center for European Studies, University of Trier, in 1994. In 2006 he became the National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

Professor Nandy is an intellectual who identifies and explores numerous and diverse problems. He has written extensively in last two decades. His much discussed book titled ‘The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism’, which was published in 1983 by the Oxford University Press, India talked about the psychological problems posed at a personal level by colonialism, for both colonizer and colonized. Nandy argues that the understanding of self is intertwined with those of race, class, and religion under colonialism, and that the Gandhian movement can be understood in part as an attempt to transcend a strong tendency of educated Indians to articulate political striving for independence in European terms. Through his prolific writing and other activities supported by his belief in non-violence, Professor Nandy has offered penetrating analysis from different angles of a wide range of problems such as political disputes and racial conflicts, and has made suggestions about how human beings can exist together, and together globally, irrespective of national boundaries.

He was recently involved in a controversy with the Government of Gujarat for writing an inflamatory article, but the Supreme Court restrained the government from arresting him. [ [http://www.countercurrents.org/gatade180608.htm Why Narendra Modi Loves To Hate Prof. Ashish Nandy?] ]

Publications

*1978 - "The New Vaisyas: Entrepreneurial Opportunity and Response in an Indian City". Raymond Lee Owens and Ashis Nandy. Bombay: Allied, 1977. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic P, 1978.
*1980 - "At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture". Delhi: Oxford UP, 1980. Delhi; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
*1980 - "Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists". New Delhi: Allied, 1980. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995.
*1983 - "The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism". Delhi: Oxford UP, 1983. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
*1983 - "Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity". Ed. Ashis Nandy. Tokyo, Japan: United Nations University, 1988. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1990.
*1987 - "Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness". Delhi; New York: Oxford UP, 1987. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
*1987 - "Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity". Ed. Ashis Nandy. Tokyo, Japan: United Nations University, 1988. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1990.Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. Delhi; New York: Oxford UP, 1987. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
*1988 - "Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity". Ed. Ashis Nandy. Tokyo, Japan: United Nations University, 1988. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1990.
*1989 - "The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games". New Delhi; New York: Viking, 1989. New Delhi; New York: Penguin, 1989.
*1993 - "Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism". Merryl Wyn Davies, Ashis Nandy, and Ziauddin Sardar. London; Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1993.
*1994 - "The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self". Delhi; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.
*1994 - "The Blinded Eye: Five Hundred Years of Christopher Columbus". Claude Alvares, Ziauddin Sardar, and Ashis Nandy. New York: Apex, 1994.
*1995 - "The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves". Delhi; London: Oxford UP, 1995. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995.
*1995 - "Creating a Nationality: the Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self". Eds. Ashis Nandy, Shikha Trivedy, and Achyut Yagnick. Delhi; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
*1996 - "The Multiverse of Democracy: Essays in Honour of Rajni Kothari". Eds. D.L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy. New Delhi; London: Sage, 1996.
*1999 - Editor, "The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema" Zed: 1999. (also wrote introduction)
*2006 - "Talking India: Ashis Nandy in conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.
* 2007 - "TIME TREKS: The Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotisms". New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007.
* 2007 - "A Very Popular Exile". New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Essays

* [http://www.littlemag.com/faith/ashis.html Unclaimed Baggage] , The Little Magazine
* [http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/513/513%20ashis%20nandy.htm Obituary Of A Culture]
* [http://india.eu.org/1733.html A Billion Gandhis]
* [http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Socissues/hindutva.html Hinduism Versus Hindutva] : The Inevitability Of A Confrontation
*1982 - "The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age, and Ideology in British India". Psychiatry 45 (Aug. 1982): 197-218.
*1983 - "Towards an Alternative Politics of Psychology". International Social Science Journal 35.2 (1983): 323-38.
*1989 - "The Fate of the Ideology of the State in India". The Challenge in South Asia: Development, Democracy and Regional Cooperation. Eds. Poona Wignaraja and Akmal Hussain. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1989.
*1989 - "The Political Culture of the Indian State". Daedalus 118.4 (Fall 1989): 1-26.
*1990 - "Satyajit Ray's Secret Guide". East-West Film Journal 4.2 (June 1990): 14-37.
*1993 - "Futures Studies: Pluralizing Human Destiny". Futures 25.4 (May 1993): 464-65.
*1994 - "Tagore and the Tiger of Nationalism". Times of India 4 Sept. 1994.
*1995 - "History's Forgotten Doubles". History & Theory 34.2 (1995): 44-66.
*1996 - "Bearing Witness to the Future". Futures 28.6-7 (Aug. 1996): 636-39."
*1999 - "Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics". The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema. Zed: 1999. 1-18. (also editor)

Awards

Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007

ource

*Sardar, Ziauddin and Loon, Borin Van. 2001. Introducing Science. USA: Totem Books (UK: Icon Books).

References

External links

* [http://www.csds.in/index.php Homepage-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi]
* [http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/NANDY.HTM Postcolonial Studies at Emory University: Ashis Nandy]
* [http://ashisnandysolidarity.blogspot.com Ashis Nandy - solidarity Blog]