Ashis Nandy in Residence at Center for South Asia Studies

Renowned Indian scholar leads program on violence and social creativity

UC Berkeley is privileged to have Ashis Nandy, one of India’s leading thinkers and social critics, in residence at the Center for South Asia Studies during March 2009. Nandy is a political psychologist and sociologist renowned for his work on cultures of knowledge, mass violence, colonialism, and nationalism. Currently he is senior fellow at and director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies and chair of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, both located in Delhi.

On March 7, Nandy led the 2009 Graduate Student Workshop on Violence and Social Creativity at the Center for South Asia Studies. This one-day workshop allowed advanced graduate students to present work in progress on the intersection between social existence and creativity, and human destructiveness particularly as it relates to mass violence.

Alongside his scholarly work, Nandy has coauthored a number of human rights reports and is active in movements for peace, alternative sciences and technologies, and cultural survival. He is a member of the executive councils of the World Future Studies Federation, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development, and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

Through his prolific writing and humanitarian activities and supported by his belief in nonviolence, Nandy has offered penetrating analysis of political disputes and racial conflicts. He has made suggestions on how human beings can exist together globally, irrespective of national boundaries. In 2008, he was listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals of the world by Foreign Policy magazine. A frequent commentator in the Indian media, Nandy was interviewed on March 4 on Pacifica radio station KPFA in Berkeley, where he discussed the recent attacks on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan and the war in Sri Lanka.

For more information on Ashis Nandy’s residence, please see the Center for South Asia Studies website.