Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy, 2007

Ashis Nandy (Bengali: আশিস নন্দী; born 1937) is an Indian psychologist, social theorist, social critic and human rights activist. Nandy, trained as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, has presented numerous critical analyzes of European colonialism and Western understandings of development, modernity and secularism, also received in Western countries. In India itself he has emerged as a vehement opponent of all forms of fundamentalism, especially the Hindu fundamentalist concept of " Hindutva ". His accompanying analyzes of the relationship between state, politics and violence are relevant far beyond India. In addition, as part of his cultural studies, Nandy has drawn an original historical profile, for example, of Indian commercial cinema and the game of cricket.

From 1992 to 1997 Ashis Nandy was director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi. Today he is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the institute and Chairman of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures . In 2007 he received the Japanese Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for his services to the preservation of Asian culture. In 2008 Foreign Policy Magazine listed him among the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals". In 2019 he was honored with the Hans Kilian Prize by the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Center at the Ruhr University Bochum for his life's work .

Family and childhood

Nandy was born in 1937 to a Bengali Christian family in Bhagalpur, Bihar state. He is the eldest of three sons of Satish Chandra Nandy and Prafulla Nalini Nandy. His brothers are Pritish Nandy and Manish Nandy. The family later moved to Calcutta, where Nandy's mother was a teacher at La Martiniere School and later became the school's first Indian vice president. When he was 10 years old, what was then British India was divided into the two sovereign countries India and Pakistan. Nandy experienced the time of conflicts and atrocities that followed in the course of the division and which he also dealt intensively with in his later scientific work.

Education and academic background

Ashis Nandy began medical school but dropped out and studied social sciences at Hislop College in Nagpur. He later completed a master's degree in sociology. However, his academic interest turned increasingly to clinical psychology and he received his PhD in psychology from Gujarat University in Ahmedabad. Nandy joined the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi as a young member . There he developed his own integration of clinical psychology and sociology. He has since been invited by a number of universities and research institutions abroad, as a speaker and as a fellow. From 1992 to 1997 he was director of the CSDS. He is also a long-time member of the editorial board of Public Culture , a magazine published by Duke University Press.

Nandy has authored a number of human rights reports and is actively involved in social movements for peace, alternative science and technology, and the survival of cultural achievements. This shows u. a. in his membership in the Executive Councils of the World Futures Studies Federation , the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative , the International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development and the People's Union for Civil Liberties . Nandy was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson Center , Washington, DC, a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Hull, and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities , University of Edinburgh. In 1994 he took over the first UNESCO chair at the Center for European Studies at the University of Trier. In 2006 he became a National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research .

Web links

• Literature by and about Ashis Nandy in the catalog of the German National Library