One would normally not blog about a book when only halfway through it. Rules, however, are meant to be broken and exceptions are important.
So here is a
post on Incarnations -- A History of India in Fifty Lives by historian Sunil
Khilnani.
Khilnani
attempts to sketch a picture of 2500 years of Indian history through the lives
of fifty significant figures in the history of the subcontinent. Fifty lives from
the Buddha to Dhirubhai Ambani via Adi Shankara, Rajaraja Chola, Basava, Iqbal,
Jinnah, Subbulakshmi and a host of others give the reader a fascinating, colourful
and immensely educative picture of the flow of life and its accompaniments in
this part of the world.
It can be
argued that less than ten pages, on average, for each such significant life is
hardly enough -- libraries have been written about the Buddha and many a tome
on the others, but Khilnani’s experiment in history telling is different,
intriguing and enormously successful. He is focused not just on the past but,
very effectively, on the way that the past has created the present. He makes
the connections so clearly and incisively that the book could conceivably have
been named The Men and Women Who Made India What It Is -- A Guide to Understanding
Who We Are and Why.
One studies
the past not just as an interesting curiosity, but as the principal determinant
of the present; and the best introduction to India’s past that I have read is
Incarnations. Full disclosure demands here that I clarify that I have not studied
history as an academic discipline in college. So, for a layperson interested in
India’s past, present and future, this book is a must read. It has to be read and
absorbed slowly and is an ideal fixture for
one’s bedside table — one life a day to cover 2500 years of Indian history. Also,
in these times of short attention spans, this would make a great gift for one’s
children -- a serious education in easily digestible bites for the Twitter and
Insta generation.
Happy reading.
