Full Description
One of India's leading public intellectuals, Ashis Nandy is a highly influential critic of modernity, science, nationalism, and secularism. In this, his most important collection of essays so far, he seeks to locate cultural forms and languages of being and thinking that defy the logic and hegemony of the modern West. The core of the volume consists of two ambitious, deeply probing essays, one on the early success of psychoanalysis in India, the other on the justice meted out by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the defeated Japanese. Both issues are viewed in the context of the psychology of dominance over a subservient or defeated culture. This theme is explored further in essays on mass culture and the media, political terrorism, the hold of modern medicine, and, notably, the conflict or split between the creative work of writers like Kipling, Rushdie, and H. G. Wells, and the political and social values they publicly and rationally present. Also included is a controversial essay by Nandy on the issue of sati, or widow's suicide.
Contents
PrefaceThe Discreet Charms of Indian Terrorism1Sati in Kali YugaPublic Debate on Roop Kanwar's Death32The Other Within: The Strange Case of Radhabinod Pal's Judgment on Culpability53The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India81Modern Medicine and its Nonmodern Critics: A Study in Discourse145An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema196Satyajit Ray's Secret Guide to Exquisite Murders: Creativity, Social Criticism, and the Partitioning of the Self237Index267
