Ashis Nandy has worked for more than thirty-five years on two diametrically opposite domains - social existence, -human potentialities or creativity and human destructiveness, particularly mass violence. It is the oscillation between these two domains that has defined his life and work. Even in his ongoing study of genocides in South Asia, the emphasis is not only on human destructiveness, but also on the resistance offered by ordinary people to organised machine violence and ethnonationalism. This has brought him close to social movements and non-state political actors grappling with issues of peace, human rights, environment, and cultural survival. During the last thirty years he has served in a number of commissions, hearings and investigations into communal riots, violence of development, racist crimes against women, electoral malpractices and human rights abuses .

Trained as a sociologist and clinical psychologist, Nandy is also known for his work in political science and future studies. However, during the last three decades, has travelled through some of the less familiar territories of social knowledge, such as scientific creativity, future studies, post-developmental and post-secular visions, cities of the mind, myths of nation-states, and alternatives. He is associated with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, of which he was a director for a number of years. He has been also a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, and Regent's Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles .

Among his books are: Alternative Sciences, At the Edge of Psychology, The Intimate Enemy, The Tao of Cricket, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, The Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves, An Ambiguous Journey to the City, Time Warps, The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics and Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias. His co-authored books include (with Ziauddin Sardar, Claude Alvares and Merrill Win Davies) The Blinded Eye: 500 Years of Christopher Columbus and Creating a Nationality (with Shikha Trivedi, Achyut Yagnik and Shail Mayaram). Among his edited and co-edited books are Science, Hegemony and Violence, The Secret Politics of Our Desire and Finger-Printing Popular Culture (with Vinay Lal), The Multiverse of Democracy (with D. L. Sheth) and The Future of knowledge and Culture: A Twenty-First Century Dictionary (with Vinay Lal).