The Ninth Annual Uka and Nalini Solanki Foundation Lecture

The Ninth Annual Uka and Nalini Solanki Foundation Lecture took place at CSULB’s Karl Anatol Center on Wednesday, March 16^th. Ramachandra Guha, considered one of India’s leading intellectuals, gave this year’s lecture entitled “The Rise & Fall of the Indian Liberal Tradition.”

Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. He has previously taught at Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press), an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador), and India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (HarperCollins).  Published in 2007, India after Gandhi won the Ramnath Goenka Award for the best work of non-fiction published in India, and The Economist, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Outlook chose it as a Book of the Year.

The Yadunandan Center for India Studies was formally inaugurated in 2005, following a generous donation from the Uka and Nalini Solanki Foundation.  The center is named after Nalini Solanki’s great-great grandfather, an early advocate of education in northern India.  The endowment from the Solanki family also helped establish the Uka and Nalini Solanki Lecture Series, an annual event that brings a well-known scholar in the field of India studies to the CSULB campus.

The Uka and Nalini Solanki Foundation’s donation to the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach, is an endeavor to help bring greater recognition to India studies by establishing a regional center.  Mr. Solanki is the founding president of the Indian Council for the Advancement of Education in India, as well as the founder, president, and patron donor of the Sardar Patel Award at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Ramachandra Guha