The tyranny of hero worship

When the BBC 4 radio series Incarnations: India in 50 Lives was released in 2015, the medium imposed brevity on author and historian Sunil Khilnani’s biographical sketches. The book version was released in February, and it moves at a fair clip, all 636 pages. Particularly impressive are the frequent passages where Khilnani deftly works in current-day politics and social realities, revealing, among other things, that the suppressing of histories is by no means a recent phenomenon. Hero-worshipping mythologies thrives while humanising accounts tend to get buried along the way. Excerpts from a conversation with Khilnani:

What was the starting point for this book (and the earlier radio series), this exploration of figures who, in some cases, were as influential as, say, Gandhi, but not nearly as well-known?

I was very interested even in the figures that are notionally familiar, like Ashoka, like the Buddha, Gandhi, Jinnah and so on. I wanted to de-familiarise them for us, to show that the standard view that we have about them is not necessarily the human view. I wanted to de-mythologise them, in order to humanise them. But at the same time, I didn’t want to be gratuitously iconoclastic because that’s also a tendency we have. Especially in terms of people like Jinnah and Gandhi, that’s quite an interesting thing that we do: either they’re heroes or everything about them is terrible.

Another piece of popular wisdom about India is that we tend to speak no evil of the dead. In the case of someone like Amrita Sher-Gil, our cognisance of her extraordinary work took off only after her death: do you think this is a recurring pattern with us, that we tend to ‘correct’ our narratives by punctuating them with death?

I think there’s an element of that. It’s a bit like our fascination with artists or musicians who die young. The fact of their early deaths somehow dominates our understanding of them and their work. I don’t know if I’d say that we (Indians) speak no evil, because sometimes we speak a lot of evil about the dead. But we refuse to see them as human beings. And perhaps it happens more often with women: another case would be that of Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi. She was turned into a goddess figure, whereas she was this really interesting, eccentric ruler. By turning her into a goddess, we deny everything remarkable about her.

I’m from Ranchi, where Birsa Munda (one of the 50 profiles in your book) is ubiquitous: the airport, the secretariat, prominent crossings and so on. And yet, knowledge of his deeds and his history is quite superficial. How do you explain these parallel processes of veneration and effacing history?

I think that was one of the things that struck me about these people: we know their names, and we know some very basic story about them, but we don’t actually know who they were, we don’t know why they did what they did, we don’t know the kind of world they were struggling with. There are a number of reasons: we don’t teach our history very well in schools and colleges, for one. These figures are seized by political parties and then they become symbols. Birsa Munda did not live to turn 30, and yet he led this explosive life. He was a hero, a poet, a mobiliser. A remarkable man, and yet the history gets airbrushed. There aren’t that many images of him; the most used one is the one the British took, with him in handcuffs. If you go to the Lok Sabha and look at his portrait, it’s the same old British one, only the handcuffs have been airbrushed.

A lot of stories and accounts about India’s “glorious past” revolve around a perceived loss of credit, like the whole business about the so-called Vedic mathematics. We believe we should get credit for quadratic equations, modern surgery, robotics and god knows what else. How do we get out of this loop?

It’s a good question (pauses). I do think that there are a lot of over-exaggerated claims about the people I discuss in the book. It is essential that we stay objective if we are to engage with our history meaningfully. We need to have a kind of fine-grained discrimination rather than saying, ‘There used to be a golden era and now we have squandered it all’. I’m not looking to put forward a progressive history of India; I’m not saying that we have once again made everything better. I’m actually saying that there are many things that we haven’t resolved: caste, women’s rights, individual expression. If you were an Ethiopian looking to make a career in India, in many ways you would be better off in the 16th century than the 21st.

In the chapter about Dhirubhai Ambani, you mention that he said: “People who distrust the creators of wealth are destined to live in poverty.” You follow it up with an observation, about how Indians no longer mistrusted excess and inequality after that moment. Haven’t we always been okay with those things, as a people, all the way back to Ashoka?

I wonder, actually. I think there is a difference: even Ashoka was very concerned about providing for his subjects. Planting trees, providing water for travellers, security, and I think that was a strong leadership ethic in India. But let me skip ahead to Jamsetji Tata, who was also a founding figure of sorts. What’s interesting with him is his ability to combine short-term private interest with long-term public interest, and that’s something that characterises the empire he built. That’s not a spirit we find today.

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