Time Treks: The Uncertain Future Of Old And New Despotisms

In Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts Ashis Nandy argued that his work can be seen as ‘an adventure in one kind of time travel, where one mainly uses or invokes the past to shape the contemporary.’ In the present collection he reverses that journey. Using the metaphor of the future—imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come—Nandy redefines the present. His effort is to demonstrate that, in a world increasingly dominated by a narrow range of ideologies, one must affirm that social ethics and a more humane society can be based on grounds other than those framed for the past 200 years by political and psychological forces that have tried to flatten and homogenize the world and reduced the possibility of diverse futures. Nandy critiques the Enlightenment and the limited ideas of ‘reason’, ‘progress’ and ‘development’ given shape in Europe. He asks that we own up to our responsibility for alternative systems of knowledge at points in time ‘when human beings turn emancipatory ideas, ideologies, and categories into new tools of violence and oppression.’ The imaginatively titled essays in this book include ‘The Beautiful, Expanding Future of Poverty’; ‘The Fantastic India–Pakistan Battle, or the Future of the Past in South Asia’; and ‘Shamans, Savages, and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent and the Future of Civilizations’.