He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he took a first in Social and Political Sciences, and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he gained his PhD in Social and Political Sciences. Sunil Khilnani is holder of the Avantha Chair and Director of the India Institute, which he established at King’s in 2011.īorn in New Delhi, he grew up in India, Africa, and Europe. Throughout, he provokes readers and illuminates a fundamental question as urgent now as ever: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes? In a new introduction written for this edition, Khilnani reflects on the book's striking relevance to the country's recent developments-from the rise of a new billionaire class to the election of a government with a more exclusivist conception of Indian identity. Sunil Khilnani investigates the fate of this idea, offering incisive portraits of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian founders and assessing the lively debates among them and their successors over who is an Indian, the meaning of modernity, and India's place in the world. For decades this elite would uphold a political construct, an idea of India grounded in democracy, religious tolerance, economic development, and cultural pluralism. When, in 1947, the British divided and departed their most prized imperial possession, they handed a huge, diverse, and poor society to a small nationalist elite. A classic since it was first published in 1997, The Idea of India is a magisterial historical study that addresses the paradoxes and ironies of the world's largest democracy.

The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani