Dr. Vinay Lal is a cultural critic, writer, and professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).  He earned his BA and MA from Johns Hopkins University in 1982.  This was followed by a year-long stint in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship studying cinema.  He earned his PhD with distinction from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.  Prof. Lal was the William R. Kenan Fellow (1992–93) at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University  and immediately thereafter moved to UCLA where he has remained ever since.

Prof. Lal’s intellectual and research interests include comparative colonial histories, the politics of knowledge systems, cinema, cultures of sexuality, the global histories of nonviolence, and the thoughts of Mohandas Gandhi.  He has authored and edited 21 books, including the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City (2013); The History of History (2003); The Fury of Covid-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus (2020); and Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India (2022).  Prof. Lal is a founding member of the Backwaters and Metaphysics Collective and the editor of the three volumes that emerged from this initiative.  He is also the Academic India (Humanities) Delegate (2022–25) of the Oxford University Press.  He maintains an extensive academic YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/dillichalo.  He also writes frequently for the Indian Express and Open Magazine.  His forthcoming books include two volumes of his collected papers on Gandhi.

Gandhi’s march to the sea at Dandi has long been recognized as a pivotal moment in India’s anti-colonial struggle.  Prof. Lal’s Fulbright-Nehru study, based on archival, museum, and field research in India, is attempting to furnish a different understanding of this paradigmatic instance of nonviolent resistance in world history.  The argument is that the Salt March can be read more productively – interculturally and intertextually – alongside Gandhi’s satyagraha march in South Africa (1913) and the traces it has left around the globe.