Incarnations: India in 50 Lives

Latest Episodes:

Chidambaram Pillai: Swadeshi Steam Feb 26, 2016

Show notes

Sunil Khilnani explores the thwarted revolutionary ambitions of Chidambaram Pillai.

Chidambaram Pillai was a feisty baby-faced lawyer from Tuticorin in southern India. His is one of the many, largely forgotten stories of failure that litter the path to independence. But it’s also a fascinating story, of an up-country lawyer without economic resource, social status or political power taking on the might of Empire. And he chose an unlikely way to resist the British: steam ships.

Featuring historian David Washbrook.

Producer: Martin Williams

Annie Besant: An Indian Tomtom Feb 25, 2016

Show notes

Sunil Khilnani explores the journey of Annie Besant, from late Victorian campaigner and social reformer in England to leader of India’s Congress Party.

Possessed of a self-belief some thought inappropriate for a woman, Annie Besant’s struggle against convention would make her an object of ridicule to many of her compatriots. So she escaped them: embarking on a life that would ultimately stretch across three continents and leave a mark on each of them

She became a polemicist for an array of ideas that challenged the complacencies of the Victorian age: atheism, the rights of workers and of women, birth control, free speech, Fabian socialism, Irish Home Rule. She became the first woman to study for a science degree at University College, London. She organized an infamous match girls strike. She advocated for more women in local government.

By the time she was forty, critics were calling her “Red Annie” and admirers were calling her one of the most remarkable women in nineteenth-century Britain.

By the time she had reached eighty, she had become one of the most remarkable women in twentieth-century India.

Producer: Martin Williams Executive Producer: Martin Smith

Original music composed by Talvin Singh.

Jamsetji Tata: Swadeshi Capitalist Feb 25, 2016

Show notes

Professor Sunil Khilnani explores the life and legacy of the industrialist Jamsetji Tata, one of a series of remarkable individuals who have made India what it is today. Tata played a vitally important role in establishing India’s manufacturing base and went on to create the conditions for the country’s future industrial development. Tata companies now constitute around five per cent of India’s gross domestic product from hotels to power generation and IT. In the days of empire, the British dreamed of ‘making the world England’; Tata helped to make the world more Indian.

Listeners can catch up with the series and see the list of remarkable Indians featured on the Radio 4 website. Producer: Mark Savage Readings: Sagar Arya

Vivekananda: Bring All Together Feb 24, 2016

Show notes

Sunil Khilnani explores the life and work of Swami Vivekananda, a social and religious reformer who became India’s first global guru, credited with introducing yoga to the west.

Vivekananda was a restless, baby-faced monk from Calcutta. And his image – arms defiantly folded, soft features hardened by a Napoleonic gaze – can be found all over that city today – on t-shirts, murals, posters and sculptures. It’s a ubiquity that is testament to both his contemporary influence – and to the way his essential message has been transformed.

In his lifetime, Vivekananda was a reformer who insisted that Hinduism’s moral force rested on its capacity to meet society’s practical needs. In order to meet those needs Vivekananda established the Ramakrishna Mission, which had no precedent among Indian religious institutions, and continues all across the country as a dispenser of education, health and social welfare.

But despite his practical, critical, universalist thinking, Vivekananda has today become one of Hindu nationalism’s leading spiritual lights.

Featuring Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

Producer: Martin Williams Executive Producer: Martin Smith

Deen Dayal: Courtier with a Camera Feb 22, 2016

Show notes

Professor Sunil Khilnani returns with Incarnations. In the first programme he profiles the pioneering photographer Lala Deen Dayal. Born in 1844, Lala Deen Dayal would go on to become the court photographer for the fabulously wealthy sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, who dubbed him the "bold warrior of photography". Earlier in his career, his images of the historic monuments and architecture of India had become a sensation, and a means by which Indian landmarks could be appreciated in the West. Over subsequent decades, Deen Dayal's carefully arranged portraits would open a window on a second aspect of a splendid, idealized India: the lifestyles of the late nineteenth-century elite. Though India had at this high point of the Raj become the world's leading stage for status display, which often involved the shooting of tigers, a person's status wasn't quite fixed unless the moment itself was shot – ideally by Deen Dayal himself. "Deen Dayal captured a particular moment of elite indulgence and excess," says Sunil Khilnani. "Just before it was swept away." Like many successful artists, before him and since, Deen Dayal became adept at selling his patrons the images of themselves they most wanted to see, and share. And his story might be simply a portrait of an artist as a public relations man, if his artistry wasn't so compelling and historically revealing. Without him, we wouldn't understand so powerfully the moment when India became the world's exotic, wondrous playground for the wealthy, before the modern world got in the way. Featuring interviews with artist Dayanita Singh and art historian Deborah Hutton. Producer: Martin Williams Executive Producer: Martin Smith Original music composed by Talvin Singh

Birsa Munda: Have You Been to Chalkad? Jun 12, 2015

Show notes

Prof. Sunil Khilnani profiles Birsa Munda, the young, charismatic healer who led his tribal community in revolt against the British and whose life, more than a century after his death, poses the question: 'Who owns India?'

Scattered across the subcontinent, India's tribal peoples or Adivasis, match in size the populations of Germany or Vietnam. Yet the land rights of India's original inhabitants are regularly overridden in the name of development. One of history's great defenders of Adivasi rights was Birsa Munda, born in the late 19th century in what is now the north-eastern state of Jharkhand. At a time of famine and disease across northern India his community looked to the Birsa for healing and leadership. The young man who claimed he could turn bullets to water led a rebellion against the British, their Indian middlemen and Christian missionaries.

The question 'Who owns India' takes Sunil Khilnani to a tribal community who are losing their land and access to food, fuel and water with the growing encroachment of luxury housing complexes - second homes for city dwellers. We also hear from author and political activist Arundhati Roy. "The fact that Adivasis still exist," she says, "is because people like Birsa Munda staged the beginnings of the battle against the takeover of their homeland.

Though he died at the age of just 25, Birsa Munda has become a lasting symbol of tribal resistance. He's the only Adivasi whose portrait hangs in the Indian Parliament. "His was a firework of a life," says Sunil Khilnani, "but a life whose embers still burn".

Producer: Jeremy Grange Executive Producer: Martin Smith Original Music composed by Talvin Singh.

Jyotirao Phule: The Open Well Jun 11, 2015

Show notes

A portrait of the social reformer and anti-caste campaigner. Professor Sunil Khilnani, from the India Institute, King's College London, visits Pune where Jyotirao Phule set out to educate women and promote the cause of the lower-caste members of Indian society. Phule and his wife were castigated for challenging the caste system. In a defiantly symbolic act, he allowed all comers to drink from the well at his house, in an age when members of the lower castes were barred from drinking water used by the upper castes. Today there are many government funding schemes for schools which bear either Phule's or his wife's name but discrimination against the Dalits, then known as Untouchables, hasn't gone away. "Phule wanted to rock the system," says Professor Khilnani "not just to create tiny islands of equality".

Produced by Mark Savage Researcher: Manu Pillai Listeners can catch up with the series and see the list of remarkable Indians featured in the series on the Radio 4 website.

Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi: Badass Queen Jun 10, 2015

Show notes

Prof. Sunil Khilnani explores the life of Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, the queen who fought against the British and became a heroine of India's 1857 Rebellion.

"The Rani was certainly no ordinary queen," he says of the woman who was listed by Time magazine as one of its 'Top Ten Badass Wives'. A typical day for Lakshmibai involved weightlifting, wrestling and steeplechasing - all before breakfast. Yet, despite her physical prowess, she was a reluctant rebel. She was drawn into the uprising only when the British annexed Jhansi after her husband died. The legend goes that, when the Rani's fort was under siege from the British, she mounted her horse, her young son holding on tight behind her, and leapt to freedom from the ramparts.

The most iconic image of the Rani of Jhansi is at her last stand, in battle: again on horseback with her sword held high and the reins of her horse between her teeth. It's an image that evokes powerful Hindu goddesses like Kali and Durga. However, Sunil Khilnani argues that, by ascribing its heroines extra-human powers, supposedly to celebrate them, India is in fact denying the reality of women's experience.

Producer: Jeremy Grange Executive Producer: Martin Smith Original Music composed by Talvin Singh.

Rammohan Roy: Humanity in General Jun 09, 2015

Show notes

Prof. Sunil Khilnani profiles Rammohan Roy, the Bengali scholar and reformer who became a worldwide intellectual celebrity and campaigned against Sati, the suicide of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres.

Rammohan Roy was part of an international set of radicals and reformers attacking established religion and ruling despots in the early 19th century, including the East India Company. He urged Indians to judge their society and behaviour by universal values at the very moment these values were emerging in the Enlightenment West. "And ever since Roy," Sunil Khilnani says, "Indians have been part of the global argument about the nature of justice, rights and freedom"

He is best known for his advocacy for women and his opposition to Sati, the Hindu rite in which widows died on their husbands' funeral pyres. His campaign converged with the birth of an international concern with human rights.

With contributions from Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and from the late Prof. Christopher Bayly, Sunil Khilnani's examination of Rammohan Roy's life takes him from the Sati ghats of Calcutta to a quiet cemetery on the outskirts of Bristol, Roy's last resting place.

Producer: Jeremy Grange Executive Producer: Martin Smith Original Music composed by Talvin Singh.

William Jones: Enlightenment Moghul Jun 08, 2015

Show notes

Professor Sunil Khilnani looks at the contribution Sir William Jones made to our understanding of Indian history and culture. Jones set sail for India at the end of the 18th century where he became one of the greatest advocates for studying the glories of India's past. Already a master of many languages, he learned Sanskrit which he declared "more perfect than the Greeks, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either". He introduced a radical idea: that Sanskrit and Europe's classical languages were all tributaries of a single, lost linguistic river. Professor Khilnani describes Jones as "a man who arrived in India and studied its culture with humility and then sought to awaken the West to its riches. The irony is that he also awakened the East".

Produced by Mark Savage Researcher: Manu Pillai

With a recital of an Indian composition on harpsichord, from the Oriental Miscellany by Jane Chapman.

Listeners can catch up with the series and see the list of remarkable Indians featured in the series on the Radio 4 website.