The Idea of India Book

Today's newspaper had this news of a disabled man being abused at a multiplex (verbally with snide remarks) for not standing up during national anthem. Yes, our Supreme Court has this weird obsession towards assertion of patriotism in inappropriate places. Like Amartya Sen rightly expressed: "Indian identity is a combination of internal pluralism and external receptivity", and efforts to homogenize by coercion leads to perversions like this. The idea of India has been contested and validated over time, and now, we are more interested and invested in who we want to be in this world than who we are. Still, after 20 years of publication, Khilnani's trenchant analysis on this open, often revised idea of India is germane to our society in many ways.

Sunil Khilnani is an erudite scholar, and it is often reflected in his writing. On levels that it poses strict competition to Veronica Roth in finding jargons for Divergent factions. And language of this book is a bit baroque, if I may use words of his lexicon. Many things were rhetoric and repetitive in that narrative, well, they were hidden so deep in his elegant prose that they rarely came up as irritants. Though written during the time of disillusionment following Nehruvian socialism and emergence of Third Front in politics, it would be wrong to consider this book as rapporteur of things that has happened till then or as an irrelevant journal in light of events happened thereafter. For, the arguments in this book are coherently articulated along the long history of India as a civilization than a nation state.

I have mixed feelings towards this book and obvious disagreements, and a consolidated review is rightly beyond my capacity. Still would love to mention one portion that I enjoyed most -Indian modernity through architectural history of imperial capital. New Delhi was designed in hexagonal grids with housing segments distanced from central acropolis in descending gradient of 'rank', concreting the exclusive tendencies of Indian society. I found this precedence extremely helpful in understanding Gandhian economy and self-determination in villages against Ambedkar's strong distaste for the same. Gandhi renounced colonial idea of city for village cosmology of Ashrams with his sartorial humility as 'half naked fakir' against British imperial pomp. To him, simple Indian occupation of departed English designs didn't represent true freedom, and Gandhi advocated villages as sanctuary for civilizational powers through democratic dialogue. To Ambedkar, one who had first-hand experience of superstitious oppression, villages were beyond redemption and nothing but a sink of narrow mindedness and communalism.

Nehru on the other hand was more pragmatic in his approach to modernity, where he drew a distinction between inauthentic modernity, represented by colonial city and genuine modernity, that India should be rational not to reject. Khilnani further illustrates this with development of city of Chandigarh, and its intended International appeal by renouncement of both colonial imagery and nationalist monuments in design. Well, the city never achieved the cosmopolitanism it craved for, and it's something for us readers to contemplate on. And story of Bombay, the foremost modern city of India, construes a centripetal narrative towards parochialism from its cosmopolitan past. Khilnani has a wonderful take on Shiv Sena's narrow efforts to annex and distribute the benefits of modernity to one closed community against Bombay's congestion which make it impossible for rich to flee the poor or any other selectivity to sustain in first place. Bombay might not be as cosmopolitan now as we can observe in Manto's pre-independence stories, but it still isn't that communal like author feared it would be 20 years back, which to me, is a silver lining.

In this extremely difficult job of consolidating an Idea of India, this reader, like author, also finds solace in tourism board poster caption that paraphrase Tagore, "India is a state of mind".
'One way of defining diversity for India, is to say what the Irishman is said to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or plural, he said, "Singular at the top and plural at the bottom".'
Khilnani hyphenates this quote by A.K. Ramanujan into his idea of India's nationalism, which is plural equally at top as well as bottom, like a 'dothi' with endless folds (Hear, hear!).