About the Author Ashis Nandy, Professor, CSDSAshis Nandy is a famous India political psychoanalyst and social theorist. He has been associated with the Press for over a decade now. He was the Senior Fellow and Former Director of CSDS for several years. His research interests centre on the political psychology of violence, cultures ofknowledge, utopias and visions, human potentialities, and futures. Presently he is working on genocide. Product Description 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 anin-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 thePartition 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. Nandyattempts 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 newworldviews and multiple creative forms of resistance.

Breakfast with Evil and Other Risky Ventures: The Non-Essential Ashis Nandy

Literature & Fiction

Nandy, Professor Ashis

Essays & Correspondence

Oxford University Press

Ashis Nandy, one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, contends in this book that India’s political and cultural élites have been trying to impose a secular ideology on their country. This ideology makes little sense to most Indians, who have their own religious and cultural lives, their own diverse pasts, and their own principles of tolerance and hospitality.
Religious extremists have exploited this tension by offering packaged forms of ancient faiths, with ready-made theories of violence and hatred. The resulting clash has fragmented Indians’ views of their precolonial past as well as their increasingly globalized present. In a country with deep roots in legendary pasts, some of these pasts have been made “silent” or “evasive” in the service of modern ideological agendas. They are no longer as easily drawn upon to oppose the forces of intolerance and hatred.
Most of the essays survey the ways in which India’s colonial secularism has produced some of the conditions for the current rise of Hindu nationalism. He shows how both religious nationalists and secular modernists have employed the colonial state’s ideology-producing power to blend the “religious” and “secular” domains. In the process, the indigenous traditions battling sectarianism and religious extremism have been marginalized. Nandy argues that it is possible to reclaim India’s rich, multicultural pasts and alternative forms of cosmopolitanism in order to rescue a truly multicultural present.

Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion

History

Americas

Rutgers University Press

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