Vinay Lal

Vinay Lal is a cultural critic, writer, blogger, and Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Lal’s intellectual and research interests include South Asian history, comparative colonial histories, the Indian diaspora, public and popular culture in India, cinema, cultures of sexuality, the global histories of nonviolence, and the thought of Mahatma Gandhi. All of his work is deeply permeated by an awareness of the politics of knowledge systems and the desire to strive for the ecological survival of plurality.

Lal’s seventeen authored and edited books include the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (Oxford, 2013); Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (Harper Collins, 2011); Political Hinduism (Oxford, 2009); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi (Penguin, 2005); The History of History (Oxford, 2003); and two books co-edited with Ashis Nandy. He is a founding member of the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics and editor of the book series emerging from the Collective, most recently India and Civilizational Futures (Oxford, 2019). His The Fury of Covid-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus was published by Pan Macmillan (India) in late 2020.

‘Be Still and Do Not Move’: The Covid-19 Migrant and the Ministry of the Soul

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FOR GENERATIONS, IN INDIA AND AROUND THE WORLD, school teachers in classrooms have struggled to contain the impulse that children have to move around. Hundreds of psychologists, on the hunt for explanations for the comparatively poor performance of boys in schools, and their apparently increasing disdain for formal education, allege that children, and boys in … Read more

Internet Hinduism and the North American Hindu Diaspora

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Talk Cancelled Hinduism’s adherents, nowhere more so than in the United States, have displayed a marked tendency to turn towards various forms of digital media, and in particular the internet, to forge new forms of Hindu identity, endow Hinduism with a purportedly more coherent and monotheistic form, refashion our understanding of the history of Hinduism’s … Read more