Answer:
Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audience of this India of ours, of Hindustan and of Bharata, the old Sanskrit name derived from the mythical founder of the race. I seldom did so in the cities, for there the audiences were more sophisticated and wanted stronger fare. But to the peasant, with his limited outlook, I spoke of this great country for whose freedom we were struggling, of how each part differed from the other 59 and yet was India, of common problems of the [End Page 345] peasants from north to south and east to west, of the Swaraj that could only be for all and every part and not for some.
Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India1
The afterlife of the successful BBC Radio 4 Series Incarnations is a book by the narrator himself. Sunil Khilnani, Director of King's India Institute in London, has written a hefty 656 pages chronicling '50 remarkable lives' that have shaped India over the last 2,500 years. Employing light and skilful prose aided by some lovely and rare photographs, Khilnani skilfully brings to life the stories of forty-four men and six women of bygone eras from different areas of the Indian subcontinent. Sunil Khilnani gathers together the stories of 'kings, religious thinkers, and freedom fighters, as well as poets, painters, mathematicians and radical social reformers', and tells us of their salience to present-day India.2
Incarnations is a timely read, responding to several political, academic and social imperatives. The book presents itself as a counter-narrative to current political times in India, where dissenting or oppositional figures, historical and otherwise, are being silenced or erased altogether from public life by those in power.3 Khilnani, whilst not naming the enemy outright, argues that the country is undergoing a particularly repressive 'moment when some in in India seek to transform the ferment of ideas over what India is and should be into a singular religious concoction'.4 Therefore, the men and women who appear in Incarnations are selected for their challenges to political and social orthodoxies, people whose afterlives continue to offer resistance to racism, sexism, religious and caste bigotry, and all that ails India. Khilnani suggests that a study of the different and often daring positions taken by the individuals in this book shows India as a 'place open to radical experiments with self-definition'.5 India's past and future continue to be an ongoing debate, full of possibilities, despite attempts to shut it down.
The distortion of historical facts to galvanize communal sentiments in India led scholars to call for the rehabilitation of biography as a way of bringing depth and context to popular understanding of Indian history. In a recent interview, Professor Richard Eaton, who wrote a social history of Deccan plateau through the lives of eight people, spoke of the urgent need for 'serious biographies or accessible, narrative history for wider audiences' in India because of a growing chasm between historians and the 'people and political class'.6 Although there have been some excellent biographies written by South Asian historians over the years, it remains a woefully underdeveloped form.7 Ramachandra Guha, the Indian historian and biographer of Gandhi, declared: 'we know how to bury our dead with reverence and bury them by neglect but not how to honor or judge them'.8 There are several explanations for this. One is a long-standing distrust of the biographical form among some historians, their sense that the life of a single individual is too limited, essentializing and over-deterministic to explain the [End Page 346] more complex and dynamic ideas, structures and politics that develop over a period of time. Additionally, some have argued that the biographical is problematic for non-western subjects, who possess a different sense of the ontological self, time and linearity.9 Finally there is the issue of sources: archives that have been neglected or deliberately destroyed or were never amassed in the first place owing to a lack of written documentation.
