Doctor of Laws

Thursday 7 July 2022 - Orator: Professor Tariq Modood 

Listen to full oration and honorary speech on Soundcloud 

Academic Registrar 

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Lord Bhikhu Parekh, Fellow of the British Academy and the European Academy, and a past Chair of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is an outstanding political theorist, a recipient of the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize for lifetime contribution to political philosophy– and indeed,one of only four living individuals who has been identified as one of the seventeen leading British political theorists of the twentieth century. 

He has combined this intellectual excellence with public service. He has been a Deputy Chair and Acting Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality in the 1980s and has served as a Labour peer in the House of Lords since 2000. He has advised more than one Indian Prime Minister and was awarded the Padma Bhushan from the President of India, the second-highest Indian civilian honour. 

His path-breaking thought and engagement with government at the highest level – of speaking truth to power – were brought together in his Chairmanship of the Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain. Their report,published in 2000 and known by his name, as The Parekh Report, set out the core guiding principles of British multiculturalism. Sixty-six percent of its recommendations were implemented by the government within three years and it is a landmark in forging the idea of a multicultural Britishness, a conception of our country that is fully inclusive of its minorities as well as the majority. 

These achievements are all the more remarkable given the humble origins of Bhikhu Parekh. His father was a goldsmith in a village in Gujarat, India, of modest means and the son was the first in his family to go to university. He became a lecturer at the University of Baroda at the age of 22 but was soon advised to do a PhD in Britain. He secured a place at the London School of Economics. Here he came to know and learn from the political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott. 

It would be fair to say that Oakeshott has been one of the intellectual influences on his work together with that of Parekh’s compatriot, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s penetrating analysis of British imperialism and the evils of the caste system and his vision of multicultural, multifaith learning, cooperation and solidarity has been a lode star that has guided Lord Parekh throughout his life. 

Professor Parekh has learnt from and published books on various political philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt and has constantly reflected on the nature of political philosophy and its relationship to political practice; is it possible to escape ideological bias or is one necessarily trapped in the way of thinking of one’s society or class or ethnic group? 

Let me say a few words on the political ideas that have dominated Bhikhu Parekh’s mature career and for which he is now best known. His masterpiece, Rethinking Multiculturalism, with great originality brings out how the history of western philosophy has rarely taken the idea of culture and cultural diversity seriously but has been dominated by forms of rationalism and individualism that presuppose that we must aspire to live in the same way and that there is only one good politics. Lord Parekh has shown that those ideas are flawed and harmful, given how much we are shaped by culture. So a contemporary respect for diversity must be based on intercultural learning, not converting everyone to a single point of view such as Western liberalism. 

This work has led Professor Parekh to teach in several universities and countries and to be respected as a global thought leader on multiculturalism. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he has received the Distinguished Global Thinker Award from the India International Centre. 

Coming closer to home, he has had a very distinctive influence at Bristol University thorough the Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Relations. While that centre works mainly in sociology and political science, Bhikhu Parekh’s work has been an inspiration to many at the centre over its twenty-three years, including now several cohorts of PhDstudents and postdocs, who have gone on to themselves contribute to this stream of work. Professor Parekh’s role here has been recognised in recent years as a foundation of what has been called the ‘Bristol School of Multiculturalism’. 

Lord Parekh’s contribution, then, has been global and Bristolian. He has forged the way, intellectually and practically, to working out how we can be a successful multicultural society. In inspiring and leading younger cohorts he has made that society more likely than it would otherwise be. The greatest beneficiary of his remarkable journey from an Indian village to the House of Lords, is British society. The University is proud today to honour him for a lifetime contribution to the cause of multiculturalism.  

Academic Registrar I present to you Lord Bhikhu Parekh of Kingston-upon-Hull as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa.