The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2008
The Mahesh
Chandra Regmi Lecture 2008
3.45 pm - 12 August, 2008 (Tuesday) - Russian Cultural Centre, Kamalpokhari
Where is the
Revolution?
Towards a Post-National Politics of Social Justice
by
David Ludden
ABSTRACT
How should we think
about today’s political transition in Nepal? To address this critical
question, we need a conceptual framework, and our most popular choice would be
to think inside national history, thus to consider the nation from a
perspective anchored in the capital. I want to describe another perspective: it
is a post-national framework for thinking about the politics of social justice.
National thinking appears in rather different light when we step outside, and
my work has for some years now focused on mapping analytical spaces that
include the nation without being defined by national territorialism.
Nepal’s
transition is unfolding inside (1) South Asian regionalism, (2) a growing
collection of modern states transformed by rustic revolutions, and (3)
contemporary globalization. These three contexts highlight the role of
urban-rural and inter-regional inequity in generating radical politics.
Struggles for social justice that originate in deprived places can successfully
transmit their energies to the capital—which they do in various ways – but
distances remain profound which separate ‘the nation’ defined in the capital
from ‘the local’ defined in rustic towns, villages, slums, swamps, mountains,
and forests. Local struggles for social justice remain local even when they
provide a political basis for radical change in national state regimes. This
defines the basic challenge for urbane politicians.
David
Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalisation, New York University.
He received his PhD from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1978
and was Professor of History there from 1999-2008. His areas of interest are
economic development, agrarian conditions, health environments, empire,
inequality, social conflict. His monographs are India and South Asia: A
Short History (2002), An Agrarian History of South Asia (1999), and Peasant
History in South India (1985). His major edited volumes are Capitalism
in Asia: Readings from the Journal of Asian
Studies (2004) and Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical Histories,
Contested Meanings, and the Globalisation of South Asia
(2002). He has served as President of the Association for Asian Studies and has
received research awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
(2003), American Council of Learned Societies (2002), and the National
Endowment for the Humanities (1990).
(Admission is free and open to all.)
The Social Science Baha was set up in January 2002 to foster and facilitate the development of the study of the social sciences in Nepal. 
The Immersion Course has been designed as an orientation programme for graduates without a social science base. 
