Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent Hardcover – 26 Apr 2022
by Ramin Jahanbegloo (Author), Ananya Vajpeyi (Author)
Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent is a very unusual festschrift. Neither a celebratory retrospective nor elegiac souvenir on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the festschrift is actually a primal, sacral, hymnal ‘gift of song’ for India’s most celebrated dissenter and also ‘resolutely original and invariably’ controversial public intellectual. For those interested in diagnosing ravages of modernity and violence of development, this is also an imaginary oriental rug-draped Freudian couch on which victims (patients) reveal their fears and fantasies. For many friends or critics of Ashis Nandy, he is a deeply emotive experience, sort of a curlicued script of lived and illusory memory or nightmare. The genealogy of the double-journey of genial-genius Nandy has been scratched over and recopied many times by his colleagues and admirers.
But what makes this festschrift an extraordinaire tour de force is that it is also an ambitious, impossible musical extravaganza of post-colonial India in which Nandy sings with radical Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna the Raag Malkauns in the sharp, piercing ‘mother tongue of leaves, lizards and parrots’, baffling his listeners, interlocutors, and foes. No wonder, he and his controversies thrive at the edge of psychology. Though Nandy whimsically defies all sorts of geographical coordinates and traffic signals to identify the location of his ‘very popular exile’ in Delhi’s east Nizamuddin, his reputation as the ‘Frantz Fanon of our time’ remains undiminished across continents, communities and generations, with or without the Internet.
Product details
- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: OUP India (26 April 2022)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199483949
- ISBN-13: 978-0199483945
- Package Dimensions: 23 x 18 x 3 cm
Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature
Social movements primarily take the form of non-institutionalised collective political action which strive for political and/or social change. While India has witnessed many such movements over the centuries, it is only recently that scholars have begun to study them in depth. This thoroughly revised and updated version of a seminal book critically examines and reviews the literature concerning social movements in India from 1857 to the present. In the process he discusses the theoretical issues raised by various scholars while analysing major trends in different movements. In conclusion, he suggests areas for future research.
Proposing a logical classification of social movements in modern India, this book will be widely welcomed by social activists as well as by political scientists, historians and sociologists. It will also be invaluable as a text in courses on social movements.
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