Book Description

"This is a collection of three significant works of Ashis Nandy - The Tao of Cricket, An Ambiguous Journey to the City, and Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias. In The Tao of Cricket, Nandy shows how a game once identified with the British Empire - and a preserve of the British gentry - is now more South Asian than English. He examines the sneaking entry of the modern urban-industrial ethic and mass culture into a game that used to thrive on its ability to be a living critique of modern life. Through the story of Indian cricket, he attempts a systematic analysis of world-views, ideologies, cultural exchanges, and political choices. An Ambiguous Journey to the City - concerned with the apparently territorial journey between the village and the city - captures some of the core fantasies and anxieties of Indian civilization over the past century. Nandy argues that the decline of the village from the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades has altered the meaning of this journey drastically, and that the true potentialities of Indian cosmopolitanism cannot be realized without renegotiating the myth of the village. Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias is a collection of essays on the modern West and its cultural and psychological impact on the East. Nandy analyses, brilliantly and insightfully, aspects of East-West relationship - from Western visions, which have displaced all other ideals of a good society, to western histories that have displaced all other pasts of the East. Yet, the apparently defeated have, through the likes Gandhi and Senghor, tried to subvert the West's construction of the rest and to ensure cultural survival and on open-ended future. This volume is essential reading for social scientists, policymakers, activists and anyone interested in the way Indian politics and culture are now enmeshed with a global struggle to protect human dignity and democratic values. This is the third omnibus edition of Ashis Nandy's writings, the first two being Exiled at Home and Return from Exile"--Jacket.