M K Nambyar Annual Lecture 2023 | Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at NLSIU

We are excited to announce that Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor, Columbia University, and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at NLSIU, will deliver the MK Nambyar Annual Lecture for 2023 on 17th November.

The talk will be delivered on the topic ‘Genealogy of the Constitution: On the Originality of Indian Political Thought’ from 6.30 PM to 8 PM in the BIC Auditorium, Bangalore International Centre. The lecture is being co-sponsored by the National Law School of India University and the Bangalore International Centre.

About the Speaker 

Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj is presently Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies in Columbia University.  Prior to joining Columbia University, he taught at the Department of Political Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.  He has also taught Political Science at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and been an Agatha Harrison Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Professor Kaviraj is among the finest political thinkers in contemporary India.  He is a stalwart of the Subaltern Studies collective, extremely well-versed with Marxist scholarly traditions in the West and outside of it, and remains a keen analyst of the foundations and trajectories of modern Indian constitutional politics.  His scholarship has inaugurated novel methodological and theoretical frames for comprehending modern and premodern India without disconnecting from the conceptual repertoire of mainstream understandings of political community.  His recent publications include journal articles titled “What is Western about Western Thought?” (2023),  and “Disenchantment Deferred,” (2016), and essays in edited volumes about religious pluralism (2014; 2021).   His books include The Imaginary Institution of India (2010), Civil Society: History and Possibilities co-edited with Sunil Khilnani (2001), Politics in India (edited) (1999), and The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (1995).

About the Session

“The thinking on political theory that went into the making of the Indian Constitution was not derivative, but highly original. The constitution is based on a long tradition of highly original Indian political reflection. This originality lay in the framers’ forceful critique against some basic axioms of Western political theory. As illustrations, I shall present Tagore’s thinking on religion and modernity, Gandhi-Tagore-Nehru’s on the idea of the nation, and Ambedkar’s late deployment of Buddhism. Indian nationalist thought also displayed a contending tradition that accepted and elaborated on fundamental Western ideas – as in Iqbal and Savarkar. The constitution sought to develop a state-form that was based on a rejection of the European idea of a nation-state – though this is sometimes obscured, because the framers used a Western-derived language. Thus, those who believe that the constitution is ‘Western’ or colonial are in error; and their search for an alternative is based, ironically, on an imitation of modern Western ideals.”

The lecture will be followed directly by a Q&A session with the audience (around 30 minutes) and will be moderated by NLS faculty Dr. Rinku Lamba.

Registration

The event is open to the public. RSVP here.