Vinay Lal

Vinay Lal is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India (especially cinema), historiography, the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems.

Lal was born in India in 1961 and grew up in Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta, and Washington, D.C. He spent four years in Tokyo, 1965–69, but has almost no memory of those years; and it is not until 1987 that he returned to Japan for a short visit, followed by a lengthier stay of four months in Osaka in 1999 when he was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku).

He earned his BA and MA, both in 1982, from the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University and wrote his Master's thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Indian philosophy. Lal then studied cinema in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship before commencing his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a PhD with Distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1992. He was William Kenan Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University in 1992–93, and since 1993 has been on the faculty of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also holds a joint appointment in Asian American Studies.

Lal is the author or editor of fifteen books. His first, The Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy, argues that nothing has been more effectively, even insidiously, globalised than the knowledge systems of the West. The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, is a study of the politics of history-writing in India since the early 19th century; the book also makes an unusual argument, naturally not well received by historians, to the effect that ahistoricity has been one of the most characteristic features of Indian civilisation, at least until the beginning of Muslim dynasties. Unlike colonial writers, however, Lal does not even remotely construe the absence of histories as a lack. The book was reviewed widely in the Indian press, and in scholarly journals in India and abroad, and nearly full page excerpts appeared in the Hindustan Times and the Indian Express. A new edition of the book, with a fresh foreword, appeared in 2005, and the book is in its sixth impression.

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