Speaker: Prof. Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Professor, Committee on Global Thought, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York

Chair: Prof. Tanika Sarkar, Visiting Professor of History, Ashoka University

Akeel Bilgrami will seek to situate Gandhi’s views on caste as well as his disagreements with Ambedkar within the framework of Gandhi and Ambedkar’s differing views on the inevitability and scope of both liberal modernity and the capitalist economic formation to which the liberal notion of the state are tied.  He will consider the ambivalences into which he was forced on caste by Ambedkar’s skilful appeal to these emerging liberal institutions under colonial rule.