Bonfire of Creeds: The Essential Ashis Nandy

This anthology invites readers to revisit Ashis Nandy’s thought and to participate in the open-ended, intellectual adventure of his work. The essays included do not merely reflect his long-term political and moral concerns but are also a continuous intellectual challenge to us. In this book, as in his entire intellectual life, the two pivots of his work have remained the political psychology of violence and the cultural psychology of knowledge. Trained to explore the complexities of human subjectivity, he has continued to explore the extremes of human destructiveness and human creativity and to use knowledge as a therapeutic intervention in society and politics. This collection, introduced by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu S. Prakash, gives the reader a comprehensive introduction to the democratic, post-secular sensitivities that shape Nandy’s approach to transformative politics and his non-hierarchical, anti-technocratic ideas of people’s knowledge.