Khilnani is by no means to blame for the global ‘India racket’, but even well-meaning liberal-nationalism these days connects to an idea that bullies and assaults and arrests and kills
The east, as we’ve known at least since Edward Said’s Orientalism, is a career. And India, one feels now, reading Sunil Khilnani’s Incarnations, is a racket. In the age of toxic Hindu nationalism, India is an industry, a cult and a virus. The dominion of this India industry is wide, thriving at cosy, corporate-sponsored literary festivals as well as within the interrogation cells and courtrooms of the Indian state, where the “anti-Indian” is ruthlessly defined; manifesting itself daily in the homilies uttered by suited, suave India experts at western thinktanks and in the Dr Strangelovian, foaming-at-the-mouth, ultra-nationalist rants delivered by Indian TV hosts.
Khilnani’s book slides in at the liberal, middlebrow end of the noise, closer to the thinktanks and literary festivals than the violent denunciations, assaults and arrests that form the right flank of the India industry. It is beautifully produced, its short chapters broken up by full-page photographs as it moves in resolutely linear fashion from the fifth century BC of the Buddha to the present day of manic billionaires. Throughout, it attempts to offer the reasonable, moderate argument about what makes India a civilisation and nation sui generis, one of particular relevance to “the world at large”, even if by “the world”, Khilnani seems to mean – in a conflation typical of promoters of the India industry – the west.
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