5 - Upendra Baxi

Summary

Introduction

[T]he tasks of human rights, in terms of making the state ethical, governance just, and power accountable, are tasks that ought to continue to define the agendum of activism.

Human rights futures, dependent as they are upon imparting an authentic voice to human suffering, must engage in a discourse of suffering that moves the world.

Upendra Baxi was born in Rajkot, Gujarat in 1938. His father was a senior civil servant and a noted scholar of Sanskrit. Upendra was brought up in a large household. He remembers his childhood environment as a mix of perpetual pregnancies, relentless micro-politics, and a complete lack of privacy. His view of the extended communal family has remained decidedly unromantic and he reacted against this aspect of Hindu culture. He went to university, did well, and soon embarked on a career as an academic, public intellectual and legal activist.

After graduating in law from the University of Bombay (LLM, 1963), he studied at Berkeley (LLM (1966), JSD (1972)) and taught at the University of Sydney (1968–73), where he worked closely with Julius Stone, the well-known legal theorist and public international lawyer. From 1973 until 1996 he was Professor of Law at the University of Delhi. During this period he also served as Vice-Chancellor of South Gujarat (1982–85), Director of Research at the Indian Law Institute (1985–88), and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Delhi (1990–94). From 1996 to 2008 he was Professor of Law and Development at the University of Warwick.