CHS SEMINAR
TITLE: NEHRU AS A HISTORIAN
SPEAKER: PROFESSOR MADHAVAN K. PALAT
TIME AND VENUE: WEDNESDAY 13 SEPTEMBER 2023, 3:00 P.M., ROOM 326, SSS-III, JNU
Abstract
Nehru composed four books of history to argue the following theses: 1) We may decide our future only if we could satisfy ourselves that the past has made it possible; the future he pursued was a united humanity, not one splintered into warring nations; his Glimpses of World History was accordingly of all of humanity, not of its civilizational or national segments; 2) the future he dreamed of for India was democratic, harmonious, and united, which, he claimed in his Discovery of India, was enabled by ancient democratic panchayats, a composite culture, and civilizational continuity from the Indus age to his day; 3) the past taught lessons on the nature of civilizational decline, with which he was obsessed, and he explained it through the closing of the mind and the consequent loss of creativity; 4) anti-colonial nationalism would unite and liberate India, but must thereafter be transcended to forge a common future for humanity through the United Nations, including within it a now non-imperialist West.
About the Speaker:
Madhavan K. Palat was born in 1947 and read history at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge. Thereafter he specialized in late Imperial Russian history and took the D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford. He taught history at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1974 to 2004, was Visiting Professor in Imperial Russian History at the University of Chicago in 2006, National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla 2010-2011, and has been Editor of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru from 2011, seeing the project to completion in 2019.
His publications have been mainly on Russian and Soviet history, on workers, peasants, Eurasianism, Dostoevskii, Solzhenitsyn, Nikolai Roerich, Mironov, nationalities policies, and Central Asia; on Europe they are essays on Hobsbawm, History and Memory, and Geopolitics; on India, they areThe Spiritual in Nehru’s Secular Imagination, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture, New Delhi, 14 November 2019; Nehru’s Democratic Dilemmas, the Nehru Memorial lecture at King’s College, London, on 3 March 2023, available on their website; and “Socialism in India”, in The Cambridge History of Socialism, 2022, vol. 2, pp. 413-434.
A selection of his publications may be accessed at www.madhavanpalat.academia.edu
