Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Lord Parekh of Kingston upon Hull
Oration given on Wednesday 9 July 2003
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has
resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon
BHIKHU PAREKH, LORD PAREKH OF KINGSTON UPON HULL.
Bhikhu Parekh was born in a small village in
Gujarat, India. His family provided him with loving emotional support,
although he experienced too the normal tensions of family life. His
social environment was multicultural and multireligious. It was also
marked by the caste system, which created in him an early concern for
social justice. As a boy, he was shocked by the assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi. The first member of his family to go to university, he was
awarded his B.A. degree in 1954, and his M.A. in 1956, by Bombay
University. He married Pramila Dalal, despite the fact that she was of
higher caste and her grandfather objected to the marriage. One of his
teachers had persuaded him to study at the London School of Economics,
and so the couple arrived in Britain in October 1959.
He obtained his PhD in 1966 with a dissertation on
the idea of equality in English political thought. At the LSE he had
experienced no racial discrimination, but in flat-hunting in London he
and his wife encountered British racism. This led him to appreciate the
support he found in the Indian community. After brief spells teaching at
LSE and the University of Glasgow, he went to the University of Hull,
where he became Professor of Political Theory in 1982.
He is the author of several widely acclaimed books
on political philosophy, including works on Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx and
Gandhi. He has edited a dozen books, including four volumes on Jeremy
Bentham, and published over a hundred articles in academic journals and
anthologies. He is an erudite scholar, but he has not been afraid to be
controversial. His studies of Gandhi’s political thought have not won favour with all Indians. His recent book, Rethinking Multiculturalism,
is a major contribution to an important philosophical and practical
topic, and a thought-provoking, though sympathetic critique of Western
liberalism.
Bhikhu Parekh has justly been called a public
intellectual on three continents. He has been a Visiting Professor at
the University of British Columbia, Concordia and McGill universities in
Montreal, Harvard University, the Institute of Advanced Studies in
Vienna, the University of Pompeau Febra in Barcelona, the University of
Pennsylvania, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in
Paris. He is currently Centennial Professor at LSE and Professor of
Political Philosophy at the University of Westminster. In 1981 he
returned to India to serve as vice-chancellor of the University of
Baroda for three years.
He has, however, been no ivory-tower academic. He
was a member of the Rampton/Swann committee on the educational problems
of ethnic minority children, and deputy chair of the Commission for
Racial Equality from 1985 to 1990, its acting chair in 1988. This was
the time of the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic
Verses, to which he made a characteristic contribution, condemning
unequivocally the death threat to Rushdie and defending the principle of
free speech, yet attempting to show to each side of the debate the
legitimate concerns of the other that were hidden by its strident
rhetoric.
Bhikhu Parekh was elected Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts in 1988, British Asian of the Year in 1992, Fellow of
the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences in 1999, and its
President in 2002. He was given the BBC’s Special Lifetime Achievement
Award for Asians in 1999. He was appointed to the House of Lords in
2000. He has just been elected Fellow of the British Academy.
In 2000 he found himself at the centre of a
national controversy, as Chair of the Commission on the Future of
Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Commission had been set up by the Runnymede
Trust, an independent think-tank devoted to the promotion of racial
justice in Britain. The Commission was composed of distinguished men and
women from many different sectors of British society. Its aims were to
analyse the unsolved problems of racism in Britain, and to propose ways
of making Britain a confident and vibrant multicultural society. The
authors expected criticisms and disagreement. They did not expect the
misrepresentation and vituperation with which sections of the media
greeted the report. Characteristically, Bhikhu Parekh responded with an
article in The Daily Telegraph, combining moderation of tone with
analytical keenness, calling for a national debate in which everyone
would observe the virtues of mutually respectful democratic dialogue.
Bhikhu Parekh has made a unique contribution to
British society. His distinguished academic career would be admirable in
itself, but he has enriched that, and us, by drawing on elements of his
Indian culture that give his political philosophy and his public service
a highly distinctive character. His life’s journey began in his family
and community in rural India. He has lived much of it in British
academia. It is fitting, and impressive, that two of his sons are
professors at Oxford University, while the third is managing director of
a prominent bank in Switzerland. He and his brother have set up a
charitable foundation that promotes mutual understanding between India
and the West. Family, community, social justice, the life of the mind
and reflective patriotism have been themes of his philosophy and his
life. He has written that the true Gandhian would be a Gandhian in his
own way. Bhikhu Parekh has embodied in his life the Gandhian virtues of
justice, inter-cultural understanding, courage and truthfulness, but he
has done so in his way. It is fitting that we honour his contribution.
Chancellor, I present to you BHIKHU PAREKH, BARON
PAREKH OF KINGSTON UPON HULL.
Orator: Professor
Michael Freeman