Sunil Khilnani

Shilpa Gupta, a pioneering intermedia artist from South Asia and an iconoclast is interested in the threshold and liminal spaces, where distinctions are complicated. Refusing to be restricted to any identity, style or medium, Gupta has constantly probed and expanded the notions of borders, those on paper and within art practice. In the book 'Drawing in the Dark', we deep dive into her series on the Bengal Borderlands where she traces clandestine routes and flows that persist, despite the near completion of the world’s longest border fence between India and Bangladesh. Through interviews, photographs, records with incisions, smuggled everyday objects and drawings made from prohibited cough syrup and marijuana, Gupta’s incisive and poetic works unravel stories of desire, mobility, and ethics in the face of laws and censorship.

भारत के मिथकों, अनगिनत कहानियों और नैतिक महाकाव्यों के बावजूद भारतीय इतिहास एक ऐसा क्षेत्र रहा है, जिसमें व्यक्तित्व मौजूद नहीं है। सुनील खिलनानी की यह पुस्तक उस जनशून्यता को भर्ती है तथा विश्व के सबसे बड़े लोकतंत्र के अस्तित्व मैं आने की कहानी में मानव आयाम को जगह देती है। बहुत सुंदरता से चित्रित और गहराई इ शोध की गयी इस पुस्तक और इसके साथ ही बीबीसी रेडिओ 4 श्रंखला में खिलनानी पचास भारतीयों के जीवन का अन्वेषण कर रहे हैं, जिसमें आध्यात्मिक बुद्ध से लेकर पूंजीवादी धीरूभाई अम्बानी तक मौजूद हैं - ये जीवन भारत के समृद्ध, विविधतापूर्ण अतीत और उसके विचारों के सतत विकास को उजागर करते हैं। खिलनानी द्वारा किया गया शहंशाहों, योद्धाओं, दार्शनिकों, कवियों, सितारों और कॉर्पोरटे जगत के असाधारण व्यक्तित्वों (उनमें से कुछ तो प्रसिद्द हैं और कुछ को विस्मृत कर दिया गया है) का प्रभावी वर्णन भावनाओं, व्यंगपूर्ण हास्य और उन सामाजिक दुविधाओं की गहराई को सामने लाता है, जो प्राचीन काल से लेकर आज तक मौजूद रही हैं । भारत और उसके अतीत की यात्रा करते हुए खिलनानी मात्र इतिहास ही नहीं बल्कि उससे भी अधिक जानकारी हमारे सामने लाते हैं। रॉकेट लॉन्च और आयुर्वेदिक कॉल सेंटर में, बस्तियों के मंदिरों और बॉलीवुड स्टूडियो में, कैलिफ़ोर्निया के समुदायों और कीचड़ भरे बंदरगाहों में वे उन स्त्री-पुरुषों की निरंतर और अक्सर आश्चर्यजनक प्रसंगिकता का पता लगाते हैं, जिन्होंने भारत और विश्व को आकर दिया। ये कहानियाँ पाठकों को जानकारी देंगी, प्रभावित करेंगी और उनका मनोरंजन करेंगी।

A classic since it was first published in 1997, The Idea of India is a magisterial historical study that addresses the paradoxes and ironies of the world's largest democracy. When, in 1947, the British divided and departed their most prized imperial possession, they handed a huge, diverse, and poor society to a small nationalist elite. For decades this elite would uphold a political construct, an idea of India grounded in democracy, religious tolerance, economic development, and cultural pluralism. Sunil Khilnani investigates the fate of this idea, offering incisive portraits of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian founders and assessing the lively debates among them and their successors over who is an Indian, the meaning of modernity, and India's place in the world. In a new introduction written for this edition, Khilnani reflects on the book's striking relevance to the country's recent developments--from the rise of a new billionaire class to the election of a government with a more exclusivist conception of Indian identity. Throughout, he provokes readers and illuminates a fundamental question as urgent now as ever: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?

An entertaining and provocative account of India's past, written by one of the country's leading thinkers For all India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, bringing to life fifty extraordinary men and women who changed both India and the world. Journeying across India in pursuit of their stories--visiting slum temples, ayurvedic call centers, Bollywood studios, textile mills, and Mughal fortresses--Khilnani offers trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, artists, iconoclasts, and entrepreneurs. Some of these historical figures are famous. Some are unjustly forgotten. And all, Khilnani convinces us, are deeply relevant today. As their rich and surprising lives take the reader through twenty-five hundred winding years of Indian and world history, Khilnani brings wit, feeling, historical rigor, and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own. We encounter the Buddha not as the usual beatific icon but as a radical young social critic. We meet the ancient Sanskrit linguist who inspires computer programmers today. We hear the medieval poets, ribald and profound, who mocked rituals and caste and whose voices resonate in contemporary poetry. And we see giants of the twentieth-century Independence movement--among them Mohandas Gandhi; Ambedkar, the Untouchable lawyer turned constitution maker; and the legendary singer M. S. Subbulakshmi--not as cardboard cutouts but as complex and striving human beings. At once a provocative and sophisticated reinterpretation of India's history and an incisive commentary on its present-day conflicts and struggles, Incarnations is an authoritative, sweeping, and often moving account of a nation coming into its own.

'Incarnations makes the mind fly across time, place and history. You may smile as, mentally, you walk alongside Khilnani up some flinty slope. You will keep thinking about what he said long after' Daily TelegraphFor all of India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. Sunil Khilnani's Incarnations fills that space: recapturing the human dimension of how the world's largest democracy came to be. In this stunningly illustrated and deeply researched book, accompanying his major BBC Radio 4 series, Khilnani explores the lives of 50 Indians, from the spiritualist Buddha to the capitalist Dhirubhai Ambani - lives that light up India's rich, varied past and its continuous ferment of ideas. Khilnani's trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, poets, stars, and corporate titans - some famous, some unjustly forgotten - bring feeling, wry humour, and uncommon insight to social dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.As he journeys across the country, and through its past, Khilnani uncovers more than just history. In rocket launches and ayurvedic call centres, in slum temples and Bollywood studios, in California communes and grimy ports, he examines the continued, and often surprising, relevance of the men and women who have made India - and the world - what it is. Their stories will inform, move and entertain this book's many readers.

This is one of the key books on modern India, acclaimed as the definitive account, and now republished with a new introduction.The Idea of India was originally published to mark the 50th anniversary of India's independence and has since established itself as a uniquely valuable and authoritative book on a key subject. At the heart of India's self-image since independence has been 'the idea of India' - modern, technocratic, egalitarian, secular - but the tensions between the idea and the reality have become almost intolerable. This book shows how. Reviews:'A splendid - and timely - book ... Spirited, combative and insight-filled ... Khilnani has woven a rich analysis of contemporary India and its evolution since indepence. I am inclined to agree with [him] on the robustness and staying power of the secular idea of India' Amartya Sen, Times Literary Supplement'A masterful rebuttal to all cultural romantics and religious chauvinists ... [A] splendid book about definitions of the Indian nation' Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books'Especially brilliant is Khilnani's attempt to understand the changing nature of India by studying its urban constructs' Chitra Divakaruni, Los Angeles Times