Lunch with BS: Sunil Khilnani

The man who chronicled India

When I was told I was the one picked to do a Lunch with BS with Sunil Khilnani, author of Incarnations: India in 50 Lives and The Idea of India, I let out a moan of dismay. Lunch with a Serious Intellectual about a book that is 600-plus pages and mostly about dead guys?

I wasn't able to fully convey to Khilnani my sense of wonderment and growing delight as I began reading. Stretching over a few thousand years of Indian history, politics and philosophy, the book looks at the lives of 50 Indians who have given India some of its most important ideas. You feel like a child wandering in a forest holding Khilnani's finger as he decisively cuts a path through the thorny thickets of history and politics, pausing to admire complexity but never oversimplifying it.

I stammer slightly as I try to convey this to Khilnani as we sit down at Naivedyam restaurant in Delhi's Hauz Khas Village. He has chosen the venue because he likes south Indian food, especially at lunch. I order a thali that I proceed to wolf down almost as soon as it arrives. He plays with the idiappam and coconut milk he has asked for.

The food is forgettable.

Khilnani is a polymath. He grew up in Africa and Europe where his father was posted as an IFS officer. He went up to Cambridge in his late teens - "on scholarship, of course; in the 1980s, my family couldn't possibly have afforded to pay for foreign education" - and went on to do a PhD in French philosophy and political thought in the 20th century. While he speaks with affection of his teachers and time spent in Cambridge, it is Paris, where he did most of his research, that he has wonderful memories of, especially the 6X6 feet flat off Rue Bonaparte where "the shower was in the bedroom".

He taught in England for a while but moved to Washington DC - "to follow the woman who would be my wife, Katherine Boo" - to set up a South Asia programme at the School of Advanced International Studies (Sais) in Johns Hopkins University. "I arrived in the United States on September 1, 2001," he says. "Being in Washington, more specifically at Sais, at that time meant you were at the heart of the Bush project." US President George Bush's deputy Pentagon chief and a driving force behind the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Paul Wolfowitz had been dean at Johns Hopkins. "I got a ringside view of US policy while building the South Asia programme. It was a time of unique India-US engagement, the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement negotiations, for instance, and the changing perception of India in the US," he says.

Khilnani lived in the US for almost 10 years. In 2011, he moved back to London to set up the India Institute at King's College. This was a chance to set up an institute to study contemporary India exclusively, rather than all of South Asia. You can hear the pride of an institution-builder in his voice when he says the research programme has 30 PhD students guided by a young faculty. We engage in a short lament on the slow death of area studies in political science, the rise of research dominated by empiricism - regression analysis and suchlike - and the unbelievable smugness of a certain kind of academic.

"Writing this book (Incarnations) has been a separate education for me," he says with rare candour. "There are so many fields I was unfamiliar with - archaeology, epigraphy, history of science...." He is talking about his profile of Charaka, the man who laid out the principles of Ayurveda practice and told the world there was more to the human body than the circulation of blood and a beating heart. It must have taken months of research and thinking to winkle out the principles, internalise them and write so that people like me can understand what he's talking about. Or his wonderful profile of Lala Deen Dayal, who captured a phase of India's life in photography from his unlikely vantage point of draughtsman in the public works department of the princely state of Indore.

I mention that I like Malik Ambar because so little is known about slavery in India, what the dynasts gave to the country and the global connections India had in that era. At the end of the book there's also a chapter on Dhirubhai Ambani, who went to Aden to earn money and do business knowing no language other than Gujarati, who taught himself to earn money just by controlling and leveraging the environment around him and for whom information was knowledge. "Dhirubhai represented a different ethical and moral stance - in the same way as the Buddha. I begin the book with the Buddha and end it with Ambani," he says. He talks about the life of Jamsetji Tata, who made money leveraging such international disruptions as the civil war in the US at a time when globalisation wasn't even a word and yet ploughed some of the money back into India by operating an Indian manufacturing base. The parallel is how the robber barons in the US helped fund what have become some of the most enduring institutions of liberal democracy. It is the coalescence of private interest and public purpose and there isn't enough of it in India today.

I ask him about the pictures. There's a whole lot of black and white pictures, some never seen before, like the one of M S Subbulakshmi and T Balasaraswati, both wearing striped pajamas and flaunting unlit cigarettes, captivating for their naughty innocence; or the picture of Bazardiha in the heart of Varanasi, where the Ansari community lives, to illustrate the chapter on Kabir (Khilnani took the picture himself). The book was initially a script for BBC Radio about India but became a search to understand the many strands of thought that India is today: nationalism, anti-nationalism, sedition etc.

I ask him about his wife. Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has written Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a book about globalisation and poverty in India, researching in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai. "What do you like most about your wife," I ask artlessly. If he is startled, Khilnani doesn't show it. "Her fierce intelligence... and her fierce passion," he says slowly. Who does the making up when you fight, I ask, mentioning that I had asked Mrs Manmohan Singh the same question when her husband became the prime minister of India and her answer was, "Doctor Saab". He laughs. "Me, I'm like a petulant schoolboy. I sulk. She's more generous and forgiving," he says.

I mention that when he writes a sequel 50 years later, he might consider including two other threads that knit India together: Tipu Sultan and somebody from the Board of Control for Cricket in India. We're talking when the lights go out. "I hope that will find a mention in your article," he jokes. They come on almost instantly. Thankfully, the cloud of diesel fumes has been dispelled as we leave the restaurant - he in search of an ATM that works; and I, trudging back to office.