For the longest of time, book-lovers, historians, lit-fest wallahs, book launch regulars have been waiting for the second book of Sunil Khilnani. The long interregnum (about 15 years after his mind-shattering debut The Idea of India) was spent on guessing what his second book would be about. Many insiders said he was hard at work on a Nehru biography, a natural progression of Idea of India. For a few years now the guess work too stopped as Khilnani gave no clues. Finally and breathlessly and with drum-beating by the excited publisher, we have Incarnations, a hard-back priced out of the reach of the above-mentioned categories of people (this writer included).
Because of all this murmur that surrounded Khilnani’s second book and the load of expectations, Incarnations is a bit of a disappointment. Firstly, it is just a by-product of a bigger and typically British venture, a BBC radio documentary, aimed at constantly intervening and interpreting the India story, now an industry in itself. Secondly, the big history book is after all just a ‘listicle’, the new journalistic sub-genre that has come to dominate news aggregating websites (BuzzFeed, ScoopWhoop etc.).
Yet, if at all anyone had to capsule about 5,000 years of Indian history and attribute faces to our history it had to be Khilnani, now professor at King’s College, Oxford. His wife Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, celebrating the Mumbai slumdog spirit, had created a bit of a stir two years back making them the India-interpreting power couple. Khilnani is precise in keeping with the format and mostly accurate and moderate with occasional slingshots at rabid nationalism.
More explanatory than interpretative (limitations of a radio-documentary), Khilnani goes about his task of turning India from a “curiously unpeopled place” (really?!) into a smilie-filled kaleidoscope with gusto. But sometimes he carelessly falls into simplistic and throw-away surmises like when he compares Ambedkar and his followers’ conversion into Budhism as an attempt to reinvent Buddha “a little like the scrap-shop workers just behind the Mumbai slum temple, sifting through their bags for something of continuing value”. Maybe burdened by the scale of his venture and its documentary nature, Khilnani doesn’t seek to set straight many myths that substitute or have replaced history. In the chapter on Shivaji, there is no effort to unveil the real Shivaji from the layers of myth and half-truths.
Critics have quibbled about his choices but that is the author’s call. There are some daring choices, including photographer Deen Dayal who has finally been given a rightful place in the nationalistic narrative. Nehru is missing too but then who knows a bigger Nehru might be on the way from the Khilnani desktop.
Will a reading of Incarnations leave you with the feeling that finally you have India within your grasp? Possibly yes. There are more elaborate books on each of the 50 incarnations that Khilnani lists, so history students should look elsewhere too.
Khilnani’s scale of erudition and depth of vision will be the subject of envy. South Indians can preen because it has finally been established that Tamil Nadu has made the most contribution to the creation of today’s India, not Bengal or Maharashtra as we might think. In the Kautilya chapter, there is the wonderful anecdote of Arthashastra palm leaf manuscript in the Mysore library being coated with citronella oil as preservative. This citronella oil of immortality may not cover Khilnani’s book but he has indeed given us a lot of our past to ponder over.