Sunil Khilnani

A grim year, which at its best moments felt like the boring holidays of my Delhi youth: nothing much to do but fiddle with the shortwave radio—and read. I began the year trying to catch up in fields I had neglected, and was particularly gripped by a book published well over a decade ago, TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (Yale University Press). It’s effectively a log-book of Clark’s daily observations, over months, of two paintings by the 18th-century French master, Nicolas Poussin. Setting aside the certainties of art historical scholarship, Clark plunges into the dubieties we experience when we look closely at anything, in this case, paint on canvas: things missed at first or second, or even twentieth, sight, but which one day—as, perhaps, a cloud scuds across the sky, altering the light on gallery walls—pierce our field of vision, and transform our understanding of the work in front of us, sometimes even of the painter’s entire oeuvre. Reading Clark is a perfect a way to test and train one’s eye, in our image-saturated age. This was especially so for me, as I was lucky enough to be reading him while at the Getty Center, a courtyard’s walk away from where I could view one of the Poussin paintings Clark writes about. During that idyll, I enjoyed also learning about the work of the Chandigarh-based architect and thinker, Aditya Prakash, the subject of a new book by his son, the architectural historian Vikramaditya Prakash. One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash (Mapin) is an intimate portrait of Prakash’s career and resonant ideas: initially a member of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s team, he was never an ideologue of modernism, but chose instead to figure out his own eclectic humanist sensibility, enrooted in values of an era when architecture was—even more than a profession—a vocation.

It’s inspiriting to see that ethical pursuit of a vocation, rather than the grim clamber for professional preferment which is modern academic life, still animating some of our younger scholars. So, even as public discussion about our politics and history drift further from the shores of reality and truth, we should be grateful for the rich recent stream of high-quality political and historical work written for a broad public. Madhav Khosla’s deeply considered and subtly articulated India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Harvard University Press), foregrounds the sheer radicalism that emboldened India’s founders to launch the new nation on an experiment in democratic self-invention; Vinay Sitapati’s Jugalbandi: The BJP before Modi (Viking), an illuminating and fluent narrative charting the rise of the BJP, reveals the labile, deeply political quality of that founding democratic experiment. Sitapati explains the BJP’s rise less as a triumph of grandiose ideology, more as grounded in an understanding and deft manipulation of electoral politics by the party’s two founding shapers, AB Vajpayee and LK Advani (his book is useful primer for Christophe Jaffrelot’s prize-winning study of Modi, forthcoming soon in English translation). Dinyar Patel’s authoritative biography Naoroji (Harvard University Press)—a name often, invoked but whose career has rarely been examined—brings to life the capacious human sympathy and staggering intellectual vigour of one of our greatest public intellectuals. Delving back into India’s ‘early modern’ history, Manan Ahmed Asif’s The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press), effects a striking recovery of the rich precolonial language of ‘Hindustan’—more than just a name for the subcontinent, the term embodied an entire cultural history and imagination. Yet it was obliterated by colonial historians, who substituted their own term, ‘India’—adopted, Manan Ahmed argues, with self-harming effects by Indians themselves.

I took time also to re-read some classic texts, warming up for a new course I will be teaching at Ashoka University. Particularly striking in the current moment was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Vintage)—I was yet again amazed by its unblinking analytic drive, explosive today as ever (asked late in life about her book’s continuing power, de Beauvoir agreed, wryly regretful that the book remained as entirely relevant as ever).

Also entirely relevant, a clutch of books published this year: David Bell’s Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—a study of the aura of power, from George Washington via Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint Louverture to Simon Bolivar, which shows how modern democracy, even as it rid itself of the divine halo, once claimed by rulers, found it necessary to re-anoint its new leaders with superhuman qualities. The ballot box and the martial strongman became symbiotically linked, Bell argues, in a historical study that has depressingly contemporary resonances.

An enjoyable example of the current mode for group biographies is Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians (Allen Lane), an account of the 1920s, a turbulent decade in which four thinkers—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger—crossed intellectual and actual paths, as they each developed their original philosophies of language, time, and meaning. Alex Ross’ Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (Fourth Estate) is a study that, in its heft and tightly choreographed meandering over the entire terrain of late 19th and 20th-century European history, appears to mirror Richard Wagner’s own signature ambition of creating a gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’. Ross traces how Wagner’s life and work served as a foil for the emergence of the unruly, unstable cultural politics of 20th century modernity.

And finally, another gem from the great Irish historian RF Foster: On Seamus Heaney (Princeton University Press) is a brief and brilliant study that weaves together the life and work of the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet. Foster shows Heaney’s profound connection to and pride in the Irish landscape, ways, and life—and makes equally clear Heaney’s refusal of nationalist vanities and pieties, in favour of a dissident cosmopolitanism. Looking ahead, I have my reading list prepared for any future pandemic lockdowns or end-of-the-world hole-ups: just grant me the Kolkata-based Seagull Books list, which by some editorial magic keeps finding new treasures to add to its magnificent catalogue. The end may be nigh, but I shall happily devote my remaining minutes to reading my way through all their titles.

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