This anthology invites readers to revisit Ashis Nandy’s thought and to participate in the open-ended, intellectual adventure of his work. The essays included do not merely reflect his long-term political and moral concerns but are also a continuous intellectual challenge to us. They force us to ask ourselves new questions, even as they offer guidance in the regeneration and re-enchantment of our own selves. What Nandy calls the possible and retrievable selves within us. A pioneer in radical critiques of development and modern science, Nandy has become, for many, a world public intellectual, trying to give primacy to culture and to people’s knowledge and seeking to dismantle the intellectual apparatus underpinning the enterprise of experts-led development and the in-built violence of Baconian science. Both demand, Nandy believes, a plural vision of a desirable society and a capacity to live with open ideas of the human future. This collection, introduced by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu S. Prakash, gives the reader comprehensive introduction to the democratic, post-secular sensitivities that shape Nandy’s approach to transformative politics and his non-hierarchical, anti-technocratic ideas of people’s knowledge. In this book, as in his entire intellectual life, the two pivots of his work have remained the political psychology of violence and the cultural psychology of knowledge. Trained to explore the complexities of human subjectivity, he has continued to explore the extremes of human destructiveness and human creativity and to use knowledge as a therapeutic intervention in society and politics. For such an intervention to be successful, knowledge not only has to be decolonized but must also be made to admit the importance of the mythopoetic and the sacred in human affairs. This anthology will be of enduring interest to social scientists, policy makers, activists and those interested in the complexities of Indian politics and culture.
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