About the talk

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav will talk about her book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood. The book highlights the Indian nationalism that Rai once articulated and shows that, as a Hindu Mahasabha leader in the mid-1920s, he organised a Hindu politics in the service of a secular Indian nation-state, a position fraught with internal tension.

Committed to making history accessible without compromising on disciplinary rigour, Bhargav’s book is based on her doctoral research and published by Penguin Random House India in February 2024. It also covers the themes of religion, majoritarianism, secularism, and caste.

The talk will be followed by a moderated Q&A session with the author.

Hosted by IHA in collaboration with Azim Premji University.

About the speaker

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, Faculty, National Law School, Bengaluru, is a historian of modern South Asia. She is interested in nationalism and secularism, and religious and political thought, in general. She was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Multiple Secularities Research Group, University of Leipzig, Germany, and ICAS: M.P., New Delhi, India. Vanya has also taught modern South Asian history to undergraduates at Oxford.

Vanya’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals, such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Global Intellectual History, Studies in Indian Politics and Religions. Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood is her first book.

Her detailed profile can be accessed here.