“There is properly no history,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841, “only biography.”
Whatever the truth of Emerson’s dictum in mid-19th-century America, it is not an accurate representation of the way history tends to be written in India today. Indian academia has long regarded biography as a genre inherently antithetical to serious social history, and both biography and narrative history are still oddly absent from the contemporary Indian literary landscape – so much so that it’s difficult to think of an up-to-date and really first-class biography of a single Indian pre-colonial ruler.
All this has inspired Sunil Khilnani, professor and director of the Indian Institute at Kings College London, and the author of the much-admired The Idea of India, to do something to fill the gap: “Indian history is a curiously unpeopled place,” he writes at the opening of his engaging and skilfully woven history, Incarnations. “As usually told, it has dynasties, epochs, religions and castes – but not many individuals.”
Biography may have been abandoned by professional historians, he notes, but it has been eagerly appropriated by political myth-makers, who tend to turn the real flesh-and-blood lives of the Indian past into a one-dimensional gallery of black-hearted demons – such as the iconoclastic Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, against whom are ranged a series of heroic nationalist angels, who are considered beyond reproach: “Some historical icons are so staunchly defended against scrutiny,” he writes, “that libraries whose collections have enabled scholars to write about those icons have been attacked. Books thought insufficiently reverent towards cherished figures are pulped and banned, their authors threatened, silenced or worse.”
Khilnani has triumphantly taken on this tendency by writing a history of South Asia in 50 warts-and-all lives – a sort of pointillist biography of the subcontinent told through a wonderfully diverse and inclusive cast of characters. These range from a mystic prince born in the fifth century BC to a former petrol pump attendant turned business mogul who died in 2002, encompassing on the way a kaleidoscope of kings, sultans, princes and politicians, mathematicians, orientalists, physicians and freedom fighters, film-makers, philosophers, artists and poets.
Some are major and familiar figures such as the Buddha, the Mughal emperor Akbar and Mahatma Gandhi; others are borderline obscure, and will be unfamiliar even to most Indians: who now remembers the 12th-century mystic poet and social reformer Basava, the 17th-century Ethiopian-born guerrilla leader Malik Ambar, or Raj-era Adivasi tribal activist Birsa Munda, three figures Khilnani has now resurrected from obscurity?
What Khilnani’s 50 lives have in common is that their biographies represent major ideas and arguments in India’s struggle to understand itself, and by weaving backwards and forwards from the past to the present in exhilarating loops and whorls of time – linking the Buddha to the champion of the Dalits [Untouchables] Ambedkar, the ancient mathematician Aryabhata to the Indian space programme, or the 13th-century poet Amir Khusrau to Bollywood – Khilnani makes a powerful case for his different characters’ continued relevance and resonance: “I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present,” he writes, “and remind us of future possibilities that are in danger of being closed off.”
For nearly two decades, Khilnani has been battling to complete a monumental biography of his hero, Jawaharlal Nehru – a figure who, perhaps surprisingly, does not appear in Khilnani’s list of names. Yet despite his apparent absence, the shadow of Nehru falls everywhere in this book, and his ideas of India’s palimpsest-like plurality and multiplicity – as well as its “deep civilisational stratigraphy” – inform and shape Khilnani’s own vision of what it means to be an Indian. Writing at a time when that plural identity is under attack from the Hindu right, who sometimes appear to want to turn India into a Hindu version of Pakistan, Khilnani does not pull his punches and marshals the lessons of history to make an important political point about India’s infinite variety, and its “capacity to change itself, and to challenge its own dogmas”.
In contrast to the convictions of the current ruling party, the rightwing Hindu nationalist BJP, and its prime minister Narendra Modi, who promote a vision that India is at heart a “pure” Hindu nation. Khilnani argues through the lives of his characters that India has always been a messily hybrid, multi-ethnic, multi-religious place, where identity, the social order and religious convictions have always been in flux and open to challenge. After all, even as early as the third century BC, the Buddhist emperor Ashoka was the step-grandson of a Greek, and his edicts carved on stones and pillars across the subcontinent were written in Greek and Aramaic as well as Prakrit and Brahmi.
Khilnani’s heroes, such as the emperor Akbar and his great-grandson Dara Shukoh, tend to be those who build bridges between India’s varied communities and religions; his demons are those, such as Jinnah, who believe “that there was one key identity, religion, which could lock in all the others”. This, believes, Khilnani, is profoundly wrong: “Every dream of homogeneity stares at an infinite regress: there’s always some aspect of identity, some sect, some culture or language, that doesn’t fit it. To pursue homogeneity is to enter an endless life of purging, secession and self-destructive violence.”
Yet Khilnani is scrupulously meticulous, accurate and unromantic in his depiction of his characters – and never hesitates to show the flaws of even those he most approves of. For “by insisting that figures from India’s past be preserved in memory as saints”, he writes, “we deny them not just their real natures, but their genuine achievements”.
Thus in Khilnani’s telling, the Buddha is revealed to have been resistant to allow women into his order of monks, commenting that in ancient India even “the Buddha was not entirely immune from patriarchal attitudes”. Ashoka, the man who made Buddhism India’s principal religion for a thousand years, is revealed to be not only a former war criminal turned “monster of piety” but also “short, fat, and famously afflicted by bad skin – a bit of a lens-breaker as they say in Bollywood”. Even the Mahatma in South Africa is shown to be a closet racist “who never made common cause with Africans, who were subject to far worse discrimination than any Indian was… His efforts went into getting Indians classified and treated differently from Africans – to improve their position within the racial hierarchy, not to do away with the hierarchy altogether”.
Although this book started life as a Radio 4 series, Incarnations is no media quickie. Beautifully written with both scholarship and an enviably light touch, thoughtfully constructed and enviably erudite in its wide-ranging references, and as much at ease discussing higher mathematics and philosophy as politics and art, Incarnations is a major work by one of India’s most impressive minds, and the best possible introduction to both the complexities and the charms of Indian history.
Incarnations: Indian in 50 Lives is published by Allen Lane (£30). Click here to order it for £24
