Publication
Lal is the author or editor of fifteen books. His first, The Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy, [1] argues that nothing has been more effectively, even insidiously, globalised than the knowledge systems of the West. The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, [2] is a study of the politics of history-writing in India since the early 19th century; the book also makes an unusual argument, naturally not well received by historians, to the effect that ahistoricity has been one of the most characteristic features of Indian civilisation, at least until the beginning of Muslim dynasties. Unlike colonial writers, however, Lal does not even remotely construe the absence of histories as a lack. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] The book was reviewed widely in the Indian press, and in scholarly journals in India and abroad, and nearly full page excerpts appeared in the Hindustan Times [10] and the Indian Express . [11] A new edition of the book, with a fresh foreword, appeared in 2005, and the book is in its sixth impression.
Introducing Hinduism, illustrated by Borin van Loon, is Lal's contribution to the "Introducing" Series; the book has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Finnish. The book was reissued in 2010 as Introducing Hinduism: A Graphic Guide. [12] Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009) is a collection of eight essays, but the book is not centrally concerned with the rise of Hindu nationalism as such; rather, it considers what a political Hinduism might be that is not Hindutva. Another of Lal's abiding interests is cinema, and his book on Deewaar , the 1975 blockbuster Hindi-language film with Amitabh Bachchan and some of the most memorable dialogues in Indian film history – "mere paas ma hain" ("I have mother") – was published by HarperCollins in 2011. His co-edited book, Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema, appeared from Oxford University Press (2006). It is one of two books, along with The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century, he has co-edited with Ashis Nandy, arguably India's most prominent intellectual. Lal's engagement with the work of Nandy commenced in the late 1980s, and led eventually to the first serious assessment of Nandy's work, published as Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures: The Multiple Selves and Strange Destinations of Ashis Nandy. [13]
The range of Lal’s intellectual, cultural and political interests is perhaps best explored in his collection of eight essays, Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture. [14] Writing on cricket, the hijras, popular cinema, Gandhi, the national-security state in India, notions of masculinity, and the obsession with the Guinness Book of Records , Lal argues that there is a tension between the idea of India as a nation-state and the idea of India as a civilisation. How India resolves this tension may well determine the course of India's future.
Lal's most recent work is The Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (Oxford, 2013) in two complementary volumes. The anthology draws upon the writings of nearly 100 writers, some of great eminence and some of whom are relatively little known. This is a very personal and yet critical anthology, prefaced by a long introduction, focused on how the city in India has been imagined, and the antinomies it invokes are of day and night, passion and reflection, exclusion and inclusion. The writers represented in it include Nirad Chauduri, Gieve Patel, Premendra Mitra, Nissim Ezekiel, Ananthamurthy, Tagore, Pritish Nandy, Buddhadev Bose, Ravi Dayal, Amitav Ghosh, Daya Pawar, Chandralekha, and Prakash Jadhav, and contemporary intellectuals such as Thomas Blom Hansen, Shiv Viswanathan, Sumanta Banerjee, and Ashis Nandy.
Contributions
Lal has been involved in various initiatives designed to enhance South-Asian cultural and political contacts, foster systematic critiques of dominant knowledge systems and the various imperialisms of the West, and suggest more ecumenical futures for all humanity. Prominently among these initiatives is Multiversity, an organisation of activists, scholars, and intellectuals from the Global South that has had four meetings in Penang, Malaysia, since 2002. Lal is the founding editor of the Dissenting Knowledges Pamphlet Series, under which eleven works have appeared so far, and also the Asian Thinkers (Pamphlet Series), launched in 2011. Both series are initiatives of Multiversity and Citizens International. He has also been associated with INCAD (International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development), the Intercultural Institute of Montreal, and the Coalition for an Egalitarian and Pluralistic India (Los Angeles).
For some years, Lal wrote a column for the Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai) published as "Letter from America". He is an acerbic critic of American foreign policy and many aspects of American society. Lal is equally a critic of Hindu nationalism, and his op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Coming Out From Gandhi's Shadow" (19 May 1998), was the first piece in a major American newspaper to sharply criticise India's nuclear explosions. Lal's views on American society and politics have earned him a place in David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
Hindutva is a political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India. The political ideology was formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1922. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar.
Eastern philosophy or Asian philosophy includes the various philosophies that originated in East and South Asia, including Chinese philosophy, Japanese philosophy, Korean philosophy, and Vietnamese philosophy; which are dominant in East Asia, and Indian philosophy, which are dominant in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.
Stanley Albert Wolpert was an American historian, Indologist, and author on the political and intellectual history of modern India and Pakistan and wrote fiction and nonfiction books on the topics. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from 1959 to 2002.
Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti is an Indian archaeologist, Professor Emeritus of South Asian Archaeology at Cambridge University, and a Senior Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University. He is known for his studies on the early use of iron in India and the archaeology of Eastern India.
Ashis Nandy is an Indian political psychologist, social theorist, and critic. A trained clinical psychologist, Nandy has provided theoretical critiques of European colonialism, development, modernity, secularism, Hindutva, science, technology, nuclearism, cosmopolitanism, and utopia. He has also offered alternative conceptions relating to cosmopolitanism and critical traditionalism. In addition to the above, Nandy has offered an original historical profile of India's commercial cinema as well as critiques of state and violence.
Ramachandra "Ram" Guha is an Indian historian, environmentalist, writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary, environmental and cricket history, and the field of economics. He is an important authority on the history of modern India.
Pritish Nandy is an Indian poet, painter, journalist, parliamentarian, media and television personality, animal activist and maker of films, TV and streaming content. He was a parliamentarian in the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra, elected on a ticket from the Shiv Sena. He is the author of forty books of poetry in English and has translated poems by other writers from Bengali, Urdu and Punjabi into English as well as a new version of the Isha Upanishad. Apart from these, he has authored books of stories and non fiction as well as three books of translations of classical love poetry from Sanskrit. He was Publishing Director of The Times of India Group and Editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Independent, and Filmfare in the 1980s, all simultaneously. He has held six exhibitions of his paintings and calligraphy. He founded Pritish Nandy Communications Ltd, the content company, in 1993. He also founded People for Animals, India's first animal rights NGO which is currently run by co-founder Maneka Gandhi as chairperson.
Bania is a mercantile caste mainly from the Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, with strong diasporic communities in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra and other northern states. Traditionally, the main occupations of the community are merchants, bankers, money-lenders, and owners of commercial enterprises.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a historian of the early modern period. He is the author of several books and publications. He holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA which he joined in 2004.
Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. (MRML) is a leading publishing house located in New Delhi, India. Established in 1952 by Manohar Lal Jain, it is one of the oldest publishing houses in India.
Professor Nalin Mehta is an Indian political scientist, journalist, and writer. His latest book, The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World's Largest Political Party, has been hailed as a "seminal", non-partisan revisionist account of the rise of the BJP in India. Some of the world's leading scholars on India have called it a "classic", praising it as an "indispensable" and "masterful account" of the rise of the BJP. Its findings ignited a major global debate on Indian politics and caste
Ritu Birla is an historian of modern South Asia. She is an associate Professor of History and is formerly the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and former Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Jyotirmaya Sharma is a professor of political science at the Department of Political Science and, currently, the Dean of School of Social Sciences, at the University of Hyderabad, Telangana, in India. He was a Senior Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Germany, between 2019-2021. Between September 2015 and June 2016, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Earlier, between January–June 2012, he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and Fellow of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, in 2012–13. He was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the French Network of Institutes for Advanced Study, RFIEA between 2013 and 2016. In January 2015, he was appointed member of the scientific advisory board of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen.
Science and technology studies (STS) in India is a fast growing field of academic inquiry in India since the 1980s. STS has developed in the country from the science movements of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the scholarly criticism of science and technology policies of the Indian state. Now the field is established with at least five generations of scholars and several departments and institutes specialising in science, technology and innovation policy studies.
M. K. Raghavendra is an Indian film/literary scholar, theorist, critic and writer who had, till 2016, authored six volumes on cinema, and contributed to numerous newspapers and periodicals in India and outside. He received the Swarna Kamal, the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997.
Tridip Suhrud is an Indian writer, political scientist, cultural historian and translator from Gujarat, India.
Vasudha Dalmia is an Indian professor emerita of Hindi and Modern South Asian Studies in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her authored works include The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth Century Banaras (1997), the essay collection Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, History (2017), and commentary on Hindi novels in Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India (2019). Her edited works include Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (1995), Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent (2001), and Religious Interactions in Modern India (2019).
