The single, raw impulse at the origins of the 'political psychologist' Ashis Nandy's complex career has been the desire to recover indigenous systems of knowledge in Southasia that have perished under the onslaught of colonial modernity. From the very beginning, this undertaking has been one of excavation. One of Nandy's first books came out in 1980, entitled Alternative Sciences: Creativity and authenticity in two Indian scientists. This was an attempt to uncover the deepest cultural impulses of the two early scientists, Jagadis Chandra Bose and Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose work, on the surface, appeared to be thoroughly modern. Though Nandy convincingly demonstrated that the two were not blind imitators of the West, and indeed struggled to reconcile traditional paradigms with modern science, the two worlds remained incommensurable and their projects ended in failure and tragedy. The sympathetic reader is inevitably overwhelmed with a sense of loss and futility in reading this account; the old worldviews seem irretrievable, unable to withstand the pressures of modernity.
Conscious that by confining himself to digging he would remain a mere purveyor of nostalgia, over time Nandy developed an unsystematic but comprehensive critique of the worldview that originated in the European Enlightenment and was then assimilated, in myriad ways, by the non-West. This included all of history, science, the nation state, secularism and theories of progress. By exposing how catastrophic the introduction of these ideas had been to non-modern societies, he hoped to enable the recuperation of the 'non-modern'. And, if this could not work as a complete alternative, it could at least offer an opposition.
In 2002, Nandy came out with a collection of essays, Time Warps: The insistent politics of silent and evasive pasts. Both that volume and the new Time Treks are in many ways a synthesis and distillation of the entirety of his work to date. The previous volume, Nandy writes, "remains an adventure in one kind of time travel – the sort in which one mainly uses or invokes the past to try and intervene in the present." Time Treks, on the other hand, "reverses that journey. It mainly deploys ideas of the future to redefine and intervene in the present."
However clear this distinction may appear, it is disingenuous. Both volumes are in fact collections of essays that Nandy wrote over long periods of time, and themes inevitably overlap. By collecting these essays into book form, and then writing prefaces to tie them together, Nandy is giving them a retrospective coherence they did not originally possess. A more accurate (though perhaps more pedestrian) description of the difference here would be geographical focus. While Time Warps was concerned particularly with Indian modernity and the re-introduction of traditional modes of knowledge into Indian public life, Time Treks focuses on modernity in general and the resuscitation of all of the world's non-modern cultures. This represents a change of direction in Nandy's ambition: to be a global thinker rather than a Southasian one.