Professor Ashis Nandy is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, a premier institute of India in the social sciences and humanities. He received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007. In 2008 he has been named as one of the top 100 public intellectuals of the world by the magazine, Foreign Policy, published by The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has been a member of the Executive Councils of the World Futures Studies Federation, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development, and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.  In 2006 he became the National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. 

Ashis Nandy’s work is defined by oscillations between two diametrically opposite domains of social existence—human potentialities or creativity and human destructiveness. Even his ongoing study of genocide in South Asia emphasises not only on human destructiveness but also on the resistance offered by ordinary people to organised mass violence and ethnonationalism. This has brought him close to movements and non-state actors grappling with issues of nonviolence, environment, and cultural survival and has forced him to gatecrash into areas such as future studies, postdevelopmental visions, cities of the mind, and psychobiography of nation-states. It has also forced him to allow his work to be contaminated by the categories that emerge from—or could be built upon—vernacular subjectivities.