Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav will deliver a lecture on ‘Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood’. It will be chaired by Ananya Vajpeyi.
ZOOM ID: 81829238589 PASSCODE: csdsdelhi
This lecture based on the book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood traces Lala Lajpat Rai's nationalist thought between 1915 and 1919 as it shifted in response to his exile in America, closer Congress-League cooperation in India and the First World War globally. With Lajpat Rai firmly renouncing the idea that Hindus and Muslims constituted separate ‘religious nationalities’, the speaker will elaborate the various ways in which he laboured to endow Hindus and Muslims with bonds of common ‘Indian’ national belonging. It will show how Lajpat Rai’s new ‘Indian’ nationalism was reflected in his re-interpretation of India’s history.
Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of modern South Asia and a Senior Research Fellow with ‘Multiple Secularities-Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’, University of Leipzig, Germany. She did her DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. Her latest book is Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (2024).
Ananya Vajpeyi is Associate Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 19 April 2024, 4 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom https://bit.ly/3J8aHNa
