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Aishwary Kumar: "Revolution and finitude: Ambedkar's Samata"

The Center for Asian Studies, the Department of European Languages and Studies, and the Department of History invite you to join us for a talk with Aishwary Kumar, assistant professor of history at Stanford University.

Aishwary Kumar: "Revolution and finitude: Ambedkar's Samata"

Abstract: If Jacques Derrida is right in suggesting that no philosopher has ever mounted a philosophically rigorous critique of the death penalty, then perhaps the task is not simply to ask why this silence has been so profound and so enabling for philosophical anthropology since Kant.  The task instead (or equally) is to ask, what might a philosophically rigorous and revolutionary critique of the death penalty look like? This paper begins with an exemplary moment in the protracted history of capital punishment in India, the Constituent Assembly debates of 1948.  Singular about this moment was not the revolutionary constitutionalist B.R. Ambedkar's courageous decision to mount--right in the middle of the Gandhi assassination trial whose accused the new republic would soon hang--a critique of the death penalty.  Instead, singular about this moment was Ambedkar's decision to invoke India's "ancient tradition of nonviolence" as the foundation of his critique of lethal force, his decision to speak in the language of an antiquity (theological and political) whose limitless propensity for violence against the minority he had always viewed with gravest suspicion.  In this paper, Professor Kumar explores the relationship between the impolitic timing of Ambedkar's resistance against the logic of capital punishment and the courageously nonpolitical relation that, through this invocation of another time, Ambedkar had sought to forge between invention and justice, revolution and finitude, force and nonforce.


Aishwary Kumar (Assistant Professor of history, Stanford University) is an intellectual and political historian of South Asia. He works in areas of modern legal and political thought, political philosophy and democratic culture, religion, caste, and moral psychology, and global histories of empire, constitutionalism, and citizenship. His essays have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Public Culture, Seminar, and Social History, among other places. Kumar's more recent work has examined the relationship between religious conceptions of freedom and the ethics of democratic dissent in the modern nonwest, with an emphasis on the transformation of liberal categories over the last two centuries. On these, he has recently published his first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). He is now completing, on the relationship between revolutionary mysticism and radical democracy, his second book, A Different Force: Ambedkar beyond Measure. Two related studies on the genealogy of what Georges Dumézil had called, in his transwar work Mitra-Varuna (1940/48), "Indo-European representations of sovereignty," are also underway. The first, "The Weight of Truth", examines the kinship between courage and secrecy in republican politics and poetics. The second, "The Figure of the Noncitizen", probes the relationship between animality, place, and freedom in 19th and 20th century nationalist and constituent thought.