July 25, 2016
In this spin-off from his eponymous BBC radio show, Khilnani (The Idea of India) embarks on an idiosyncratic and lively journey across 2,500 years of Indian history, offering bite-size essays on the lives of 50 exemplary figures whose achievements and afterlives have influenced contemporary Indian identity. Khilnani is joyously and unabashedly political in his choice of subjects; engaging with the Indian past in all its complexity is particularly important, he notes, in light of current political trends that seek to reduce what it is to be Indian “into a single religious concoction.” The essays place such well-known religious figures as the Buddha and Hindu monk Vivekananda alongside political activists “Red Annie” Besant and Jyotirao Phule. What unites them is Khilnani’s argumentative yet playful tone, as well as his sensitivity to the ways in which historical memory can be constructed, appropriated, and reappropriated. If the book has one flaw, it is its structure, with each essay barely skimming the life of its subject. Is six pages really enough for an account of the life of the Buddha, even a highly condensed one? Length aside, Khilnani’s essays are provocative and serious, a worthy rebuttal to the image of Indian history as “curiously unpeopled.”