Arguing Democracy: Intellectuals and Politics in Modern India

Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series
Prof. Sunil Khilnani
Starr Foundation Professor and Director of the South Asia Studies Program, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University
Reception from 5 to 6pm (MCEAS, Foyer)

Lecture from 6 to 7:30pm (MCEAS, The Stephanie Grauman Wolf Room)

About the lecture

The emergence and consolidation of democracy in India – with all its imperfections and partialities – is one of the historical surprises of our era. It challenges understandings of India’s own history, as much as it challenges axioms of classical political theory. While we understand something of the workings of contemporary Indian democracy –its institutional format, its electoral forms – our sense of its intellectual foundations is less firm. The emergence of democracy in India was neither imperial gift nor recovery of lost treasure from India’s ancient past: its context was the struggle to solve practical problems, above all that of how to give representative political form to different kinds of difference. In this struggle, political intellectuals and their debates have played a role.

About the speaker

Sunil Khilnani is Starr Foundation Professor and Director, South Asia Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. His publications include Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale, 1993), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (with Sudipta Kaviraj: Cambridge, 2001), and The Idea of India (3rd edition, Penguin, 2003) - which has just appeared in Arabic. He is at work on a study of Jawaharlal Nehru, and on a history of democracy in India.

Full text of lecture

Event Flyer

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.