October 16
Davis International House
5:30 - Reception
6:00 - Talk
Who is the Gandhi imagined by individuals experiencing incarceration? How do their experiments in ahimsa—in non-harm and love—say something about a shared human condition amid stark divisions between “the inside” and “the outside”? How do carceral life and post-carceral living articulate hope, ambivalence, aspiration, and creativity—in which the figure of Gandhi plays some role? I explore these questions through vignettes from my experience teaching Gandhi in federal and state prisons in North Carolina and from life-stories of freed individuals in India who engaged Gandhi’s ideas during their imprisonment.
Leela Prasad (Ph.D. Folklore & Folklife, University of Pennsylvania) joined Brown's Department of Religious Studies in 2024 after 25 years at Duke University. She is interested in the anthropology of ethics, human rights and social justice, gender, diasporic life, storytelling and performance, colonialism & decoloniality, prison and post-prison life, and Gandhi. She enjoys putting early Indic literary and religious thought into conversation with contemporary practices of everyday life. Apart from university teaching, Leela teaches graduate seminars on Gandhi in US prisons. She is also documenting the life-stories of Gandhi-inspired individuals in India who read Gandhi while serving prison terms. With her collaborator, Baba Prasad, she is co-directing a film called Let Us See on the lifelong resonance Gandhi on a schoolteacher who met him in 1944 when India was on the brink of freedom from colonial rule. Leela is President of the American Academy of Religion.
