Author: Ashis Nandy
Ramin Jahanbegloo/
: Ramin Jahanbegloo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 149
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195678982
Description
Multifaceted thinker and prolific author, Ashis Nandy is considered one of India’s leading intellectuals. For someone trained as a clinical psychologist and a sociologist, he continues to cross disciplinary boundaries and capture the imagination of the reading public and everyone interested in the world of ideas.
This book is a journey into his mind, a mind that battles the dark side of modernity – a modernity that makes voiceless the dissenting voices of our times. The book explores Nandy’s myriad and unpredictable ways of thinking and the essential humanism of his writings, which are homage to the known and unknown victims of history.
The book has grown out of a series of six comprehensive interviews conducted by Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian philosopher. The interviewer questions Nandy within the context of his own ‘Indian-ness – from philosophical thought and religion to culture pluralism and participatory democracy. The conversation covers Nandy’s perspectives on a wide range of issues, including political culture of India and Pakistan and the future of democracy in South Asia, globalization, the survival of Indian culture and traditions, and Gandhi.
Nandy offers a post-Gandhian view of industrialized and technocratic science as an instrument of violence, the nation-state as a flawed and limited form of social togetherness in contemporary times, and the ideologies of development and secularism as negation of participatory democracy. He also rejects positivist Marxism and Hindu nationalism as direct by-products of ninetieth-century colonialism.
Talking India is not only a dialogue between two intellectuals from the East, but also part of a broader global dialogue of cultures and an exercise in mutual learning. Both the participants in the dialogue believe that visions of human future need to be founded on an ontology of distinctiveness, as reflected in sensitivity to one’s cultural past and openness to a self that is defined by legends, myths, epics, and ‘other worlds of knowledge’.
This book will interest both a scholarly and informed lay audience, which wants to understand India as seen through the eyes of one of the country’s greatest contemporary thinkers.
Contents
Ashis Nandy : Ontology of Dissent by Ramin Jahanbegloo
PART I
An Indian Childhood
PART II
Looking in the Mirror of the East
PART III
Tradition and Modernity
PART IV
The Idea of India
PART V
Is India a Postmodern Culture?