A Very Popular Exile

This Omnibus 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, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias. The first is a delightful account of how cricket, once the preserve of the Victorian gentry, is now more South Asian than English. Nandy examines the increasing gamesmanship in cricket and the sneaking entry of the modern urbanindustrial ethic and mass culture into a
game that thrived on its ability to be a living critique of modern life. This is a book on cricket that ceases to be so after a point and becomes an informal but systematic analysis of worldviews,
ideologies, cultural exchanges, and political choices. The second is the story of a territorial journey between the village and the city in which Nandy contends that the decline of the village in the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades has altered the meaning of this journey drastically and that the true potentialities of Indian cosmopolitanism and urbanity cannot be realized without rediscovering the myth of the village. The third book analyses various aspects of the East-West
relationship, from western visions that have displaced all other ideals of a good society, to western histories that have displaced even the pasts of the East. Nandy explores the ways in which the East
and its protagonists have developed ways of countering Western cultural imperialism.