Rajni Kothari Lectures are instituted in honour of the CSDS Founder Director Professor Rajni Kothari. Earlier speakers in the series include Professors Charles Douglas Lummis, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Sudipta Kaviraj, Gananath Obeyesekere, Rounaq Jahan, Abdellah Hammoudi, Charles Taylor, Arif Dirlik, Shahid Amin, Alfred Stepan, Arindam Chakrabarti, Jayadeva Uyangoda and Mahmood Mamdani.

Secularisms in different societies have been shaped by how religion has evolved in those societies. I develop a comparative frame of reference to discuss the nature of religious accommodation historically in China and Japan as a foil for the classic European model.  What relevance does the former model have for Indian secularism.

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He also holds the Rajni Kothari Chair in Democracy at CSDS. He was professor and chair of History Department in the University of Chicago and Raffles Professor at the National University of Singapore.  Among his books are Culture, Power and State: Rural N China (Stanford); Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago); Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman) and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge).

Rajeev Bhargava is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Friday, 5 April 2019
6 pm, CSDS Seminar Room
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi