15th Annual Solanki Lecture–Professor Ananya Vajpeyi–April 25th
The 15th Annual Solanki Lecture will be presented by Professor Ananya Vajpeyi from the Centre for Developing Societies (New Delhi) on Tuesday April 25th at The Pointe. There will be a free buffet at a 6 pm reception before the event. Please rsvp to indiastudies@csulb.edu. An abstract for the lecture and a flyer are provided below.
The Difficulty of Being Equal: Ambedkar and his Struggle with India
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) questioned and contested the caste system throughout his life. He sought to end it through many different routes: mass politics, intellectual argumentation, systematic legislation, scholarly critique, and finally, religious conversion to Buddhism. While he was able to find, within Indian political thought and moral discourses, ideas of non-violence, compassion, liberation and even forms of fraternity, it was equality as a value that remained recalcitrant to adoption, adaptation and acceptance within Indian society. Arguably this is true even today, 70 years after India’s independence from British rule. What makes equality so elusive for modern Indians, despite electoral democracy and equal citizenship? How did Ambedkar deal with the difficulty of being equal?
