Please join UCI Religious Studies for a guest lecture with Dr. Aishwary Kumar, exploring distinctions in the approach to nonviolence from two leading figures in India's fight for independence from the British: M.K. Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar.
Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025 / 2:00-3:20 Humanities Instructional Building 135 (Closest parking is UCI Lot 7; use the Pay-by-Plate cell phone service posted in the Lot)
*This is an in-person event with a Zoom online option. Locally-made samosas and drinks provided (vegan).
Please join in person or by Zoom!
Description: This lecture offers a genealogy of political nonviolence and its limits, placing it in arguments about human freedom and responsibility that transformed 20th century anticolonial thought.
Beginning with an overview of two galvanizing figures of political faith and public institutions in the anticolonial South, the lecture asks: what made Gandhi and Ambedkar so mutually reinforcing, especially in their sustained concern with cruelty, and yet, so incommensurable in their thinking of equality?
For both, nonviolence was a supplement to the more fundamental striving for politics without resentment. They came closest in their concern with the moral psychology of passion and interest. “Religion” was their name for this complex concern. But they swerved away from each other over the political implications of bringing about such a world. For Gandhi, equality itself might breed resentment; for Ambedkar, an unconstrained striving for purity stoked it.
Can a world without ressentiment be possible in a caste society, then, which for Gandhi ironically offered the only dignified, sacrificial framework for nonviolence? Or will caste—with its intricate laws of nonviolence—outlive the human desire for equality itself?
Dr. Aishwary Kumar is Professor of History and of American Institutions, as well as Director of The Democracy Institute at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
This talk is hosted by:
Shri Parshvanath Presidential Chair in Jain Studies
Co-sponsored by:
UCI Center for Citizen Peacebuilding
