by VINAY LAL
Murtaza Nizam Shah II, ruler of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate, and Malik Ambar (left)
Incarnations: India in 50 Lives by Sunil Khilnani, London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 2016. 636 pp. + xvii.
“India’s history”, Sunil Khilnani argues, “is a curiously unpeopled place. As usually told, it has dynasties, epochs, religions and castes—but not many individuals.” The colonial scholar-administrators who governed India through the first half of the 19th century, and their largely pedestrian successors, were firmly of the opinion that the individual as such did not exist in India. By the second half of the 19th century, colonial anthropology peopled India with “types”; in short time, India was then rendered a land of collectivities, where religion and then caste reigned supreme and the individual as an atom of being remained unknown. That, in good measure, would become the origin of ‘communalism’.
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