Vidya Dehejia’s story of India is told not through monarchs and battles but through material objects
The Hindu
If you had to tell the multi-layered story of India through material objects, which would you pick? A new book by the cultural scholar tries to do just that and comes up with some breathtaking pieces
In his landmark book The Idea of India (2007), Sunil Khilnani argued that ‘the presumption that a single, shared sense of India — a unifying idea and concept — can at once define the facts that need recounting and provide the collective subject for the Indian story has lost all credibility.’ He noted that despite ‘all its magnificent antiquity and historical depth, contemporary India is unequivocally a creation of the modern world’. That’s still not the end of the story, however, for ‘it is too simple to see India as pure invention, a complicitous by-product of the opportunities presented by the British Raj and the interests of an aspiring nationalist elite. It is less radically novel’. Khilnani’s view was that ‘the dissimilar agrarian regions of pre-colonial India did share intelligible, common cultural forms, derived from both Brahminic traditions and non-Brahminic sources. The storehouse of shared narrative structures embodied in epics, myths and folk stories, and the family resemblance in styles of art, architecture and religious motifs — if not ritual practices — testify to a civilizational bond, that in fact extended well beyond the territorial borders of contemporary India’.More Related News