A trained clinical psychologist, Nandy has provided theoretical critiques of European colonialism, development, modernity, secularism, Hindutva, science, technology, nuclearism, cosmopolitanism, and utopia.

Currently, he is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the CSDS apart from being the Chairperson of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, New Delhi.

[5] In 2008 he appeared on the list of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll of the Foreign Policy magazine, published by The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

[11] Nandy joined the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, as a young faculty member.

Nandy has coauthored a number of human rights reports and is active in movements for peace, alternative sciences and technologies, and cultural survival.

He is 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.

Nandy argues that the understanding of self is intertwined with those of race, class, and religion under colonialism, and that the Gandhian movement can be understood in part as an attempt to transcend a strong tendency of educated Indians to articulate political striving for independence in European terms.

Through his prolific writing and other activities supported by his belief in non-violence, Professor Nandy has offered penetrating analysis from different angles of a wide range of problems such as political disputes and racial conflicts, and has made suggestions about how human beings can exist together, and together globally, irrespective of national boundaries.

Interestingly, three years later, in 2016–17, he received the KK Daomdaran Award from the Sree Narayana Mandira Samiti, Mumbai for his lifetime achievement as a scholar and intellectual, and for his contribution to the cause of the marginalised communities and castes.

In 2019, The New Yorker magazine reported:[16] "During the dispute over Babri Masjid, Ashis Nandy began a series of interviews with R.S.S.

His subject, Nandy told [the reporter], exhibited all the traits of an authoritarian personality: puritanical rigidity, a constricted emotional life, fear of his own passions, and an enormous ego that protected a gnawing insecurity.

During the interview, Modi elaborated a fantastical theory of how India was the target of a global conspiracy, in which every Muslim in the country was likely complicit.