Biography

Vinay Lal was born in Delhi and raised in India, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

He studied literature, history, and philosophy as an undergraduate, and earned his B.A. from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University in 1982. He received a M.A. from the same institution, also in 1982, for a thesis on Emerson and Indian Philosophy. He then studied film in Australia and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship before commencing his graduate studies at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded his Ph.D. with Distinction in 1992. His dissertation, “Committees of Inquiry and Discourses of ‘Law and Order’ in Twentieth-Century British India”, received the Marc Galler Award for the best dissertation in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He was a William R. Kenan Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, at Columbia University in 1992-93.

Vinay joined the history faculty at UCLA in Fall 1993, and has since held several fellowships, including a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, and a fellowship from the Society for the Promotion of Science/Japan Area Studies Center at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. He was elected a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science in February 2000.

Vinay teaches a broad range of courses in Indian history, comparative colonial histories, subaltern history and Indian historiography, as well as graduate level seminars on the contemporary politics of knowledge, postcolonial theory, and the politics of culture. He has designed and taught a cycle of upper-division undergraduate lecture courses on British India, Contemporary South Asia, the Indian Diaspora, and the Moral and Political Thought of Mohandas Gandhi. Seminars in Indian history cover such subjects as the Politics of Religion and Ethnicity in South Asia; Hindu-Muslim Encounters in South Asia; “The Woman Question” in Colonial India; The Life of Krishna in Indian Art, History, and Culture; History and the Novel; the Partition of India; Violence in Contemporary Indian Society; and History and Popular Cinema.  He also teaches in alternate years the lower-division course in contemporary world history. His lecture courses in Indian history are now available in their entirety on his aacdemic youTube channel, a link to which can be found below.  He has also designed and taught seminars, mainly for PhD students, on subjects such as “colonialism and the politics of knowledge systems”, anti-colonialism, and the global South, and comparative studies in systems of oppression, focusing on slavery on the American plantation, the Holocaust, and the caste system in India.

Vinay has written regularly on a wide variety of subjects for over two hundred fifty scholarly journals, periodicals, and newspapers in the US, India, and Britain. Among other subjects, he has written on various aspects of the political and legal history of colonial India, sexuality in modern India, the popular Hindi film, the Indian diaspora, Indian documentaries, the politics and history of history, dissent in the Gandhian mode, contemporary American politics, the politics of culture, genocide, and the global politics of knowledge systems. His twenty-two authored and edited books reflect a similarly broad range of intellectual, political and research interests. He has been a frequent contributor to The Indian Express, the Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai), and OPEN Magazine. He had a column with India’s largest media network, ABP [abplive.in], from 2018-early 2023.

Vinay was formally associated as a Visiting Fellow in the summers of 1993 and 1994 with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Delhi-based Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures. He was then associated, since its inception, with Multiversity, a group of scholars, intellectuals and activists that met every other year in Penang, Malaysia until 2012, with the objective of engaging in a radical decolonization of the knowledge systems of the Western academy. He is also a founding member of the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics (2010-2020), which met annually in Kerala until the onset of COVID. He shares the sentiments of the scholars, public intellectuals, and activists who are engaged in all these enterprises, which may be described as motivated by “an intellectual concern for the ecology of plural knowledge, a normative concern with cultural survival, and a potential concern with the search for humane futures for the victims of history.” Vinay served as University of California’s Director of the Education Abroad Program in India for 18 months, and while on leave from UCLA in 2010-11 he served as Professor of History at the University of Delhi. He has over the last three decades divided his time between Los Angeles and Delhi.

Vinay was appointed to the Board of Delegates to the Oxford University Press as India Academic (Humanities) Delegate in 2022 for a three-year term and will be serving a second three-year term from 2025-28. All books in history, philosophy, religion, and the humanities (except literature) fall under his jurisdiction. He was also a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), South Africa, in the second half of 2024, and is presently the holder of a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship for Academic and Professional Excellence. Both fellowships facilitate his work on a four-book project which he has tentatively entitled, “The Genocide and Hope Quartet: Studies in the Architecture of Oppression and the Redemptive Possibilities of Nonviolence”. The four books comprising the project are: I Dandi; II Auschwitz; III Hiroshima; and IV Robben Island.

His most recent books include three edited volumes–India and the Unthinkable, India and Civilizational Futures, and India and Its Intellectual Traditions--from the Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics, all published by Oxford University Press, Delhi (2016, 2019, and 2023, respectively).  The Fury of Covid-19:  The Passions, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus, was published in October 2020 by Pan Macmillan (India) in digital and paperback editions.  Earlier books include Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002; 2nd rev. ed., New Delhi: Sage Publishers, 2005); The History of History: Politics and Scholarhip in Modern India (Oxford UP, 2003; 2nd enlg. ed., 2005); and Of Cricket, Guinness, and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Seagull Books, 2003; paperback ed., Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005). More recent titles include Insurgency and the Artist: The Art of the Freedom Struggle in India (Roli Books, 2023) and (edited) Gandhi, Truth, and Nonviolence: The Politics of Engagement in Post-Truth Times (Oxford University Press, 2025).