Aishwary Kumar

Aishwary Kumar (PhD., Trinity College, University of Cambridge) holds the Shri Shantinath Endowed Chair in Ahimsa Studies at Cal Poly Pomona, where he is also the Director of The Ahimsa Center, focusing on the pasts and futures of nonviolence as a philosophical and political idea. Kumar is an intellectual historian and political theorist whose work spans South Asian, European, and American political thought and the global life of democratic rights. Primarily concerned in his work with the relationship between political violence and inequality, his writings and courses examine visions of human freedom and political faith that have come to most decisively shape the planetary present and alter the modern social contract.

Kumar’s first book Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015) looks at two exemplary thinkers of anticolonial disobedience—Bhimrao Ambedkar and Mohandas Gandhi—who argued, for the first time, that the modern failure to resist the sacrificial lure of violence was but a function of nationalism’s civil, peaceful indifference to caste and material inequality itself. Kumar is currently working on two studies on the moral psychology of liberal democracy and the global trials of secular, constitutional politics: Neodemocracy: Freedom and Violence after Neoliberalism, funded by an award from the Korean Academy of Sciences, Seoul, and The Sovereign Void: Ambedkar’s Critique of Violence. In these works, he probes the power of political nonviolence as a strategy for abolitionist justice and citizenship in the face of democratic disappointment, rightlessness, and cruelty. In his courses, Kumar similarly develops ways of thinking about political freedom and democratic judgment from and for the Global South, across the modern “color line” and its caste contract.

Before Cal Poly Pomona, Kumar taught at Stanford University for 11 years, where he first began as an assistant professor of history and global political thought. He has been a fellow of the Teagle Foundation’s National Forum for the Future of Liberal Education, New York; Senior Fellow of IWM: Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna; and Senior Fellow in Human Rights, Constitutional Politics, and Religious Diversity at the Lichtenberg Kolleg: Institute of Advanced Study, Göttingen. In 2019-20, he was a visiting professor of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. When not preoccupied by democracy, he spends time thinking about the notion of style in the cinematic music of composer Rahul Dev Burman and his father Sachin Dev; the moral and political life of animals; and of the prose of the commons through food. In Fall 2022, he is offering courses on “What is Freedom?” and “Political Nonviolence and Democratic Life.”