50 lives, 50 quotes!

Sunil Khilnani's "Incarnations : India in 50 lives" - A book that provides short yet deep profiles of fifty figures from history who,in the author's opinion,made India. The following excerpt provides one quote about every historical figure featured in the book. 

Buddha

To several of the fathers of the modern nation, the Buddha provided a rational faith that could be weaponized against the hierarchies that still warp Indian society.

Mahavira

The Jain analysis of reality was largely founded on anekantavada,the doctrine of many-sidedness,with it's inherent critique of the limitations of human understanding. On what basis,then, could Mahavira and his philosophy claim to speak from a position of omniscience?

Panini

So awesome was Panini's ability to articulate and compress the rules of Sanskrit that it was said he had managed to capture the ocean in a cow's hoofprint.

Kautilya

The ancient manuscript of Arthashastra would help Indian nationalists imagine a realpolitik for an aspiring India of the 20th century. Here was a self-help manual for a start-up nation.

Ashoka

His message,of moderation and restraint,remains in equal parts an admonition and an inspiration to Indians today.

Charaka

People turn to Ayurveda because it seems to promise them more recognition as individuals. Perhaps it does- but only in the quite specific sense of placing on each one of us a greater responsibility for our health,enjoining us to live as Charaka teaches : with a little more judgement.

Aryabhata

The Aryabhatiya also holds out the tantalizing promise that we are merely at the threshold of our understanding of early Indian scientific thought.

Adi Shankara

At the heart of Shankara's interpretation of Hinduism is an idea that remains as powerful as it is paradoxical - nirguna Brahman, a god without qualities.

Rajaraja Chola

Did he invent this cult of the leader in the Tamil lands ,or had he tapped into a current that was already,quietly,coursing through them?

Basava

'I''ll sing as I love':no high language,just an open invitation to all - including the unlettered. This informal,almost spoken quality,is why the twelfth-century guru speaks so powerfully to many writers in India today.

Amir Khusrau

The world of cultural amalgamation and mixing that some think Khusrau inspired can seem illusory,even unnecessary,to many people in power today.

Kabir

It's as important as ever to reject reverent incarnations of Kabir and recognize the edgier social critic and sceptic - the one whose verses are rightly woven into the long,rich,often-endangered tradition of dissent in Indian life.

Guru Nanak

Martyrdom is a current that runs deep in the Sikh tradition,as does a powerful sense of justice. But there's also that recognition of needing to return from the mountain realm of sages and purist visions : to live down here,in the world.

Krishnadevaraya 

Krishnadevaraya was a successful warrior ruling in a brutal age-  a fact that lent itself to an unsentimental,tactical and flexible approach to politics.

Mirabai

Is Mira a passionate religious inspiration ? An emblem of caste blindness and inter-caste friendship ? A potent symbol of feminism and self-transformation-a one-woman protest movement as much as a saint? History can't quite decide.

Akbar

He stands out in the global context of his times - questioning,doubting and reinventing faith in an age when many rulers stayed steadfast in their beliefs.

Malik Ambar

A persistent tormentor and nemesis of the Vast Mughal empire to the north, he helped set the contours of power in the subcontinent in the century before the dawn of the colonial era.

Dara Shikoh

What if Dara had not translated the Upanishads and other Sanskrit works? He might have been a more successful prince,even become emperor. But our minds would be narrower places today.

Shivaji

Some Indians likened him to the Italian Garibaldi. Others saw him as a saintly figure in the Bhakti tradition. For Hindus well beyond Maharashtra,he remains an important champion, and in Maharashtra,there's still no figure from history more beloved.

Nainsukh

Instead of the static brightness of the earlier Pahari style,we find intimacy and warmth,mystery and sly humour - individuality.

William Jones

He was an Orientalist in this more positive sense : a man who arrived in India and studied it's culture with humility,and then sought to awaken the West to it's riches. The irony is that he also awakened the East.

Rammohun Roy

Roy showed how, in dreaming up a past better than the fallen present, Indians might aspire to a fairer future.

Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi

What's troubling is that women who manage to excel in a largely male-dominated society are seldom construed as human,as examples capable of emulation. Instead,they's ascribed extra-human powers. Supposedly, this celebrates them,but in fact it denies the reality and thus the relevance of their experience.

Jyotirao Phule

The irony is that,if it were not for the usurping East India company and the new order it established, one of the 19th century's great radical humanists might have been just another unknown vegetable supplier.

Deen Dayal

Without him,we wouldn't understand so powerfully the moment when India was the world's exotic,wondrous playground for the wealthy- before the modern world got in the way.

Birsa Munda

His was a firework of a life - he was dead by the age of 25- but the embers of his struggle still burn.

Jamshetji Tata

He showcased an entrepreneurial art in short supply lately - the ability to balance short-term,private interest with a far-sighted sense of public purpose.

Vivekananda

In what amounted to a novel and radical argument,he insisted that Hinduism's moral force rested on its capacity to meet society's practical needs.

Annie Besant

Through her writings,action and politics, Besant groomed an elite and created,in skeletal form, a much wider basis for political mobilization of those elites than had existed previously.

Chidambaram Pillai

Pillai came closer than most Swadeshi Movement leaders to bridge the fault lines of Indian society -until he encountered the other element that ensured the movement's failure : the retaliatory hand of the British.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

I think that even for Ramanujan himself,his process and purposes remained a mystery-so many motes of blown chalk,suddenly forming constellations to those gifted enough to see them.

Tagore

In a nationalist age when many of his compatriots were preoccupied with independence, Tagore preferred to speak of freedom.

Visvesaraya

Austere to the point of dourness,but audaciously hopeful, he sought to frog-march India into modernity.

Periyar

The more I learn about this gruff idol-breaker with a stiletto tongue and a furnace of a brain, the more I wonder : if only other regions of India had had similar legacies, would our Democratic Republic of Indian Females be in better fighting shape today?

Muhammad Iqbal

Against fascist discourses of racial and national superiority, he advocated submission to a far higher power.

Amrita Sher-Gil

She survived what are often the most arduous years for a woman artist-finding her identity as a young woman in a patriarchal art world,and then achieving some stability in her family life-but failed to reach the sustained period of focused creativity that the second half of a woman's artistic life often allows.

Subhas Chandra Bose

His decision to partner with two of the titanic powers of his time- with the Soviets seemingly next - helped entrench a post-independence resistance to military pacts and great-power alliances.

Gandhi

Unlike a Stalin or a Mao, who tried to change the imagination of their people by wielding state power,Gandhi used imagination to try to change the nature of power and the state.

Jinnah

He articulated one powerful strand in the dreams of modern nationalism : for homogeneity. But to pursue homogeneity is to enter an endless life of purging,secession and self-destructive violence.

Saadat Hasan Manto

His visceral response to experience matched a historical moment that needed it.

Ambedkar

Alone of all India's founders, he recognized the importance of fraternity as fundamental to the creation of a political community. Without fraternity,Ambedkar reminded his fellow Indians,'equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.'

Raj Kapoor

The solutions he posited to a collective,post-1947 let-down had little to do with politics,and a lot to do with love.

Sheikh Abdullah

The treatment of Kashmir was 'an open book',he said,hardly hidden to history. 'Let every Indian search his own heart.'

V.K.Krishna Menon

Isaiah Berlin decided Nehru was the T.S.Eliot to Menon's Ezra Pound- ''The same beliefs at much lower tension,milder,more compatible with respectable life,but deriving from the same constellation of values; gently,tolerantly,decently anti-Western.''

M.S.Subbulakshmi

As in many other stories of exceptional,hard-working women,their own ambition is denied a role in their achievement.

Indira Gandhi

Being able to vote so dominant a leader out of office in 1977 gave voters a sense of the power they now held-and in subsequent decades,Indians participated in elections and politics at higher rates than ever before.

Satyajit Ray

"It's the truth in a situation that attracts me", he told his actors."And if I've been able to show it,that's enough for me."

Charan Singh

While Russia produced more than a dozen agrarian intellectuals, and China produced a few, Singh may have been independent India's one and only.

M.F.Husain

It's gutting to consider that,by present standards, exile may have been a lucky fate for Husain. Today,India's writers and intellectuals are being murdered for their beliefs.

Dhirubhai Ambani

One reason we no longer have much suspicion of excess and inequality,or those who facilitate it, is because,when compared to men like Gandhi or Ambedkar, Dhirubhai Ambani was just as he'd claimed to be- the bigger shark.