K se Karuna: India’s Intellectual Inheritance

About the Lecture

Join us for a lecture that asks where our political vocabulary, that we use almost every day - actually came from:

Liberty, equality, fraternity. Three words that built the modern nation, and all three arrived here from somewhere else. What if the organising idea had come from within South Asia instead?

The nation-making of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries settled on that trio, and we have lived inside it ever since: in constitutional safeguards, in the language of rights, in what we understand democratic life to guarantee. Ideas that germinated in the continental world and travelled into the Global South as imports, carrying both a formal-legal meaning and a substantive promise for how people might live together.

Pia David turns to a different inheritance. Karuṇā, compassion, is an idea that emerges from within this geography, and it has its own long history of thinking about difference, diversity and ethical living. Not only in the ancient past, but through the reformist and political thought of modern India, where it kept resurfacing in arguments about what a shared life demands.

The question the lecture leaves us with is a live one. What would it mean to treat karuṇā not as sentiment but as political method?A way of addressing global conflict, human despair, and the particular poverty that enters political discourse when compassion goes missing from it?

The session explores:

How liberty, equality and fraternity became the default grammar of modern political life
Karuṇā as an idea with its own intellectual lineage in South Asia, ancient and modern
How questions of diversity, difference and ethical living were imagined from within this region
What compassion offers as a mode of praxis, not just a normative horizon for theory, but something politics could actually do

About the Speaker

Pia David is from Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, and is trained as a political scientist. As a Foundation for Universal Responsibility Dalai Lama Studies Fellow in 2023, she worked on Dharma and Dhamma: A Modern Reading of Gandhi and Ambedkar in the Context of Deep Diversity.

Her interests span liberal political philosophy and social and political thought from South Asia in the context of the world. She can be found on long walks through forested gardens, tombs and ruins, usually with friends, sometimes in solitude, never without music. Her current favourite is Libertango. She lives in Delhi, wondering about Mir's lament on his exile.