Iconic Indians and the Idea of India

“To me, the Indian past is a place where dead heroes continuously spring back to life, to be dispatched to the front lines of ferocious, contemporary cultural and political battles,” observed author Sunil Khilnani in his keynote address, ‘Iconic Indians and the Idea of India’.
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 people who made its history.The result of this study will materialize in 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 Emperor Ashoka to Dhirubhai Ambani. The book, with over 150 images, will also play out on BBC radio and podcast, a first for Khilnani.
India’s history, Khilnani holds, is a curiously unpeopled place. “Beyond a few iconic names, most of the country’s important historical figures recede into a haze of legend and myth,” he suggested. This has partly to do with the pillage of colonizers, who not only ransacked the country’s material resources but its historical records too. And thus, argues Khilnani, they unmoored the subjects from their traditions and their past. “And so the heroes of modern India were made of myth not primary sources,” he argues.
A telling example is Rani Lakshmibai whose mythic escape from the British is often depicted in Indian lore as an equestrian figure flying off the ramparts of Jhansi fort, with child in tow. This image is also telling of the way pre-20th century Indian women are frustratingly framed in Indian history – as goddesses, not flesh-and-bones, fallible heroes, whom the young women of today can more easily identify with and emulate. “We need to demythologize our history in order to rehumanize it,” he pointed out.
His coming book, Khilnani hopes, will invite Indians to see who they really are. “Thinking about the long arc of our history is not just a backward-looking exercise. At times, especially these times, it’s a way of pushing us forward towards something greater than we are today,” he said.
He spoke of India’s growing tendency to ‘remoralize’, and restrict the space for creative and critical engagement with authority. Many of the illustrious people in our pantheon of nation-makers, we often forget, were a rabble-rousers and trouble-makers. “By turning them into superheroes, we forgot they were once scrappers,” he said., adding that the idea of criticism was central to the idea of progress.
Shobhaa De, who was in conversation with Khilnani, inquired if young India was not sufficiently interested in its own history, to which the academic pointed out that the youth were indeed interested in the past, but being sceptical of any authority figure, needed to see their icons as real human beings.
Referring to Khilnani’s final chapter on Dhirubhai Ambani, De pointed up a line from the book which said Dhirubhai’s gift was mazimizing and monetizing inequality. “That’s a loaded statement,” she charged.
Dhirubhai used access to information as a lever to make money, Khilnani explained. “In Aden he was amazed at a person’s willing to pay a large amount of money for telegram information about a certain train, and he immediately saw in life, if you have information that no one else has, that’s money,” said Khilnani, “And a form of inequality.”