Sonam Kachru

Sonam Kachru is an Assistant Professor specializing in the history of premodern South Asian philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy. One day soon, he believes, the histories of philosophy and literature in premodern South Asia will more widely be seen to be an integral part of the humanities. As they should be. (For a personal version of this commitment, see this manifesto.)

His first book, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, takes up the ways in which one premodern Buddhist philosopher, Vasubandhu of Peshawar, used descriptions of experiences in dreams and non-human forms of life in thought experiments to rethink the relationship between mind and world. For more about Other Lives, which was written with a commitment to global philosophical outlook and with particular attention to a possibly connected ancient world, see this précis, or this review.

Current book projects include a study of what the history of mind (as revealed through the history of Buddhist philosophy) can teach us about artificial minds, including our own; what the history of literature and literary criticism (and the twinning of philosophy of mind and literary theory in Sanskrit) can teach us about immersion in fictional worlds and the peculiar labor of criticism and close and slow reading. 

The fragility of persons and works matters to him, as do disciplinary fragilities and absences. Consequently, he is also working on longer-term projects, foregrounding a surprising history of global philosophy (somewhat hidden in plain view); and the arguments and conceptual innovations associated with women in premodern Indian philosophy. He continues to translate the lyrical archive of Lalla of Kashmir.

For a sense of what Kachru hopes to contribute to undergraduate teaching at Yale, see 5 Questions with Sonam Kachru, an interview with Daevan Mangalmurti. Along with courses on Indian and Buddhist philosophy (such as Fear, Suffering, Anger, Love), Kachru teaches courses imagining what the humanities might look like when framed with the help of South Asian concepts, arguments, and textual practices and experiences: he teaches The Bhagavad Gita: Lessons from Indian Humanities for the End of the World; and, thinking with women (human and non-human; historical and fictional) from the history of Indian Philosophy, Philosopher Queens of Hinduism. 

For those who prefer audio: ‘Making Sense of the Sense in Endings’ was delivered at the Memorial Symposium for Steven Collins at the University of Chicago (Nov 15-16, 2018); “The Truth about Poetry” at Smith College (Feb 15, 2023); and in this episode about the Buddhist ruler Asoka from the podcast Sacred and Profane, in conversation with Hosts Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Kurtis Schaeffer, one is afforded the interesting experience of hearing Patrick Olivelle’s recitation of Asoka’s words and Janet Spittler’s recitation of their translation into Greek from antiquity.

Kachru has been a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow (2023-2024); and with Laura Nasrallah, he is co-director of Archaia, the Yale Program for the Study of Global Antiquity.