The Sixth Annual Carol Breckenridge Memorial Lecture in South Asian History:
The India China Institute is pleased to co-sponsor a public talk by Professor Uday Mehta titled “Putting Courage at the Center: Reflections on Gandhi.”

What might it mean to place courage and related notions such as a willingness to die at the center of one’s conception of an ethical life, both for individuals and collectivities? In many ways this pursuit was the informing creed of Gandhi’s life and the link between his ethical and political philosophy. For Gandhi, courage had a centrality that trumped even his opposition to war and the British Empire. It also gave a distinctive hue to the specific connection that Gandhi identified between courage and democracy – a connection that gave no special precedence to familiar political conceptions of democracy.

Uday Singh Mehta is a political theorist whose work encompasses a wide spectrum of philosophical traditions. He has worked on the relationship between freedom and imagination, liberalism’s complex link with colonialism and empire, and more recently with issues of war, peace and non-violence. He is the author of two books, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke (Cornell University Press, 1992), and Liberalism and Empire: Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1999). In 2002, he was named a Carnegie Foundation scholar. He is currently completing a book on the moral and political thought of M.K. Gandhi. He was an undergraduate at S warthmore College, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University. He has taught at Princeton University, Cornell, MIT, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania.
The talk will be followed by a reception. RSVP through eventbrite is welcome but not necessary to attend.