A Very Popular Exile

This paperback edition, with an Introduction by Imtiaz Ahmed, brings together three of Ashis Nandy's popular books-The Tao of Cricket, An Ambiguous Journey to the City, and Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias. The first uses the metaphor of cricket to examine how the politics of cultural choices has played out in South Asia. Nandy examines the evolution of the game itself-a legacy of the colonial past that has been increasingly appropriated to South Asian popular culture. This is a book on cricket that after a point becomes a psychological analysis of worldviews, ideologies, cultural exchanges, and political choices. The second is the story of the myth of the journey between the village and the city and the changes that myth has undergone. By showing that the urban-industrial vision as the hallmark of civilization is a misnomer, Nandy reiterates the need to recover the village in the Indian imagination in order to fully realize its potential. The third book is a critique of the Western model of linear progress and an examination of the ambivalent East-West relationship. He is particularly interested in uncovering the subversive ways in which the oppressed, even in their subjugation, reject these imposed technocratic values to find alternative humane concepts of compassion, justice, dissent, and freedom.