Education:
Past Can Help Us Make Wiser Choices
About Future: Prof. Sunil Khilnani

Prof. Sunil Khilnani

A well known scholar, political thinker, and social scientist on India, Professor Sunil Khilnani was one of the 15 prominent Non Resident Indians to receive the prestigious Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award in January 2005. Prof.

Khilnani, who began his academic career at Birkbeck College, University of London (where he taught from 1989- 2002), is currently Professor of Politics and Director, South Asia Studies, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, in Washington DC. Khilnani was chosen to receive this award for his contribution to political thought and for fostering the understanding of India through his scholarship.

Born in New Delhi and educated at Trinity Hall and King's College, Cambridge, where he gained his Ph.D, Dr. Sunil Khilnani was formerly a Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has also been a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, a Visiting Professor at Seikei University, Tokyo, has held a Leverhulme Fellowship, and was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC.

In an interview with this writer, Dr. Khilnani said, he gives much of the credit to his prominence as a political thinker "to the excellent education I received at Cambridge University in the UK. There is no place than can compare with it for inspirational teaching and for all round development."

Among his achievements, he considers "my scholarly work" as the most remarkable. "I have sought to contribute to public debate and argument in India - about the country's political choices and future. It is important for me to feel that I am part of such debates, and have something to offer to fellow Indians."

During a debate aired by PBS TV, Sunil Khilnani said: "Introduced initially by a mincingly legalistic nationalist elite as a form of government, democracy has been extended and deepened to become a principle of society, transforming the possibilities available to Indians. They have embraced it, learning about it not from textbooks but by extemporary practice."

Aperson of great modesty, he considers himself an ordinary being despite his awards and fame. "I would not claim that I am special or unique. I have been lucky to have had educational and other opportunities, which have opened many doors for me." P r o f . S u n i l Khilnani has a number of publications to his credit, the most recent being ‘Idea of India,' where he has argued in favor of unity in diversity for India. He is the author of Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale University Press, 1993); and co-editor (with Sudipta Kaviraj) of Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and (with Paul Hirst) of Reinventing Democracy (Blackwell, 1996). He has written the ‘Introduction' to Gandhi's Autobiography, published as a Penguin Modern Classic (2001). He is also engaged in long-term research on democratic politics in India.

In The Idea of India, the scholar writes, "If India was weakly united, it was also weakly divided: there were no politically significant regional identities that could either obstruct unification or direct it."

The author argues that the creation of modern India as a nation state was essentially an act of political imagination * it resulted from the commitment of handful of outstanding nationalists to an idea of India at once moral and practical. Chief among these nationalist intellectuals was the peerless Jawaharlal Nehru. Mahatma Gandhi's confidant, Nehru was an alumnus of English public schools and Cambridge University, and intellectually a child of modernism and rationality * which placed him in a complicated and fruitful relationship to Indian tradition. A sensitive liberal, Nehru philosophically saw India as potentially a grand fusion of different cultures and politics, of the West and the East, of equality and development, of ancient craft and modern science.

Khilnani's prognosis on India? "Ultimately, the viability of [its] democracy will rest on its capacity to sustain internal diversity, on its ability to avoid giving reason to groups within the citizen body to harbor dreams of having their own exclusive nation states. Such dreams of partition and domestic purity are animated by the fantasy that all problems begin and end at the border; they do not. There is no ideological or cultural guarantee for a nation to hold together. It just depends on human skills." In 200 pages, Khilnani tells us more about India, past and present, than most other heftier books on the subject.

During a presentation at the seminar on India in the Emerging Global Order: strains, threats and possibilities, at FICCI, New Delhi, in December 2003, he said, "At the moment when India wishes for a more active presence on the world stage, the world's sense of India, of what it stands for and what it wishes to become, seems as confused and divided today as is India's own sense of itself. But we cannot rely on economics and economic development of itself to do our political thinking for us, either in the short or long term." He went on to add that India needs to affirm clearly to the world that it stands for modern, rational worldview-and not for religious bigotry and strife.

In his analysis of India and its current situation, the social scientist has this to say: "I see three important lines of division and conflict in the coming decades: those of the regions and regional states, of caste, and of religion. These represent competing conceptions or visions of India, each of which is challenging the vision set in place by the founders. As such they suggest alternative images of what this nation might hope to be."

Prof Khilnani is working on a major biography of Jawaharlal Nehru. At a time when now-familiar concepts of "multi-culturalism," did not exist, Khilnani sees Nehru's political strategy as a bold one for the 1940s and 50s. As a result of Nehru's wise choices, Khilnani suggests, democracy has "irreversibly entered the Indian political imagination."

Being away in foreign land during much of his life, Prof. Khilnani is still attached to his mother land. "I remain a citizen of India, and carry an Indian passport," he says. "I return to India at least 3 or 4 times a year, and stay for 6-8 weeks each year. This is important to me both personally, and for my research and writing." Dr. Khilnani is married to a journalist and writer, Katherine Boo, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize.

-By Ajay Ghosh