'A journey to know our icons in flesh & blood'

The Indian past is where dead heroes continuously spring back to life, to be dispatched to the front lines of ferocious, contemporary cultural and political battles,” author Sunil Khilnani said in his keynote address: ‘Iconic Indians and the Idea of India’.
The Khilnani coinage ‘Idea of India’ caught PM Modi’s attention and he repeated it 19 times in his Parliament address on Constitution Day.
After exploring in his previous book the ‘Idea’ – that is, the political and social processes that shaped India, Khilnani now investigates the making of its ‘Icons’. The result of this study materialises next February as a book of essays called Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, on 50 of India’s notable personalities known and unknown, spanning 2,500 years from Ashoka to Dhirubhai Ambani
India’s history, Khilnani holds, is unpeopled. “Beyond a few iconic names, most important historical fi gures recede into a haze of legend and myth,” he said. This has partly to do with the pillage of colonisers, who ransacked the country’s material resources and historical records. They unmoored the subjects from their past. “So the heroes of modern India were made of myth, not primary sources.”
A telling example is Rani Lakshmibai. Her escape from the British is depicted as an equestrian fi gure fl ying off the Jhansi fort ramparts, child in tow. This image is telling of the way pre-20th century Indian women are framed in history — as goddesses. Young women can’t easily identify with them. “We need to demythologise our history to rehumanise it.”
His coming book, Khilnani hopes, will invite Indians to see who they really are. “Thinking about the long arc of our history isn’t just backward-looking. At times, especially these, it’s a way of pushing us towards something greater,” he said.
He spoke of India’s tendency to ‘remoralise’ and restrict the space for creative and critical engagement with authority. Many in our pantheon of nation-makers, we forget, were rabble-rousers and troublemakers. “Turning them into superheroes, we forgot they were once scrappers,” he said.
Shobhaa De inquired if young India wasn’t suffi -ciently interested in its history, to which Khilnani said the youth were interested, but they needed to see their icons as human beings.