Ashis Nandy

Biography

Ashis Nandy, sociologist and clinical psychologist, has over the years strayed into areas outside formal social sciences and normal academic concerns.  Nandy's books include Alternative Sciences, At the Edge of Psychology, The Intimate Enemy, The Tao of Cricket, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, The Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves, An Ambiguous Journey to the City, The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics, Time Warps, Time Treks, and Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias. He is also a co-author of The Blinded Eye: 500 Years of Christopher Columbus and Creating a Nationality; editor of Science, Hegemony and Violence and The Secret Politics of our Desires; and a co-editor of The Multiverse of Democracy and The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Twenty-First Century Dictionary. Nandy is a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne, and a member of the Global Scientific Committee for Higher Education (UNESCO). Over the years, he has been also associated with initiatives such as the Centre for Ecology and Food Security, New Delhi; People’s Union of Civil Liberties, the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, Delhi; Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and the Intercultural Institute of Montreal. Nandy received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007 and was chosen one of 100 top public intellectuals in the world in 2008.

Research Interest

His research interests centre on the political psychology of violence, cultures of knowledge, utopias and visions, human potentialities, and futures. Presently he is working on genocide. The running themes in his work have been concern and respect for marginalized categories and systems of knowledge and a robust scepticism towards expert-driven, packaged, professional solutions to human problems.