Gandhi and the Regime of (Human) Rights (Lecture by Prof. Vinay LAL)

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Though Gandhi is routinely invoked as a key figure in the history of anti-colonialism, as a champion of human rights, and as the supreme advocate of the idea of nonviolent resistance to oppression, he could not abide by the idea of “rights” and in particular “human rights” as it is ordinarily understood.  Indeed, we may even say that Gandhi, even as he upheld the idea that no human life was either without dignity or without a spark of divinity, was a rigorous critic of the notion of “rights” and of the framework of humanist thinking within which it is embedded.  In this talk, Prof. Vinay LAL traces briefly the evolution of the idea of “rights” in the West and the notion of rights-talk before moving to a more detailed exposition of Gandhi’s thinking on rights, his philosophical, ethical, and political reservations about the idea of rights, and his anticipation of the Anthropocene.

Lecturer

Vinay LAL

(Professor, UCLA)

Moderator

Trent BROWN

(Associate Professor, Tokyo College , University of Tokyo)

Vinay Lal is a blogger, cultural critic, writer, public commentator, and Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He writes widely on Indian history, politics, public and popular culture; Gandhi and nonviolence; the Indian diaspora; colonial histories; American politics; and global culture. His intellectual interests also include history and theory, historiography, political philosophy, the Global South, and the politics of knowledge systems. He writes for Open (New Delhi), Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), Indian Express, The Hindu, and various other publications. He is the author or editor of eighteen books.