THE PAST IS POROUS
In his tales from India’s history, Manu S. Pillai pokes some holes and patches others
At first, reading historian Manu S. Pillai’s The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin feels like falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, though with better-researched and more engagingly written articles (some first appeared in a newspaper column). Pillai—whose previous books are a thick history of royal Travancore and an introduction to the medieval Deccan through its leaders—flits here between north and south, medieval and early modern, and even myth and fact. Social reformers like the Phules sit next to socially repressed Ammachis; the Mappilas of Malabar jostle with the Mughal emperor Jahangir.
In an e-mail interview, Pillai said the book “reflects three major themes I tend to work on in general: gender, caste, and human quirk”, and, indeed, as in his previous work, political history mixes refreshingly with the politics of sexuality to provide a more nuanced, often less patriarchal view of the past. There are moments when jumps in time or geography can be disorienting, but the loose structure—the book is divided only into pre-Raj and Raj sections—ultimately reflects a decentralised, pluralistic idea of the nation itself. A pattern emerges, with each brief account of a person, place, community, language or legend darning a bit of the somewhat frayed idea that India represents unity in diversity (not just in adversity against a common enemy). At the same time, Pillai doesn’t hide rough seams or tears in the social fabric.
“We often fall into the trap of looking at Indian history as entirely, unequivocally syncretic, or altogether ‘communal’,” Pillai says. “Depending on the context, the same king could act in different ways. In a territory under conquest, he could declare jihad, smash temples that legitimised his enemy, and demand conversion… Meanwhile, without irony, in his own settled territories, he could employ the same ‘infidels’, support their religious establishments, and act in a completely different manner.”
Context—the idea that people have their reasons, even terrible ones—tends to defang history’s wolves and dethrone its heroes. “This is people being people,” Pillai says, “and yet demonstrating imagination in a way that we don’t generally understand when thinking of our ancestors as pious and proper and tediously correct always.” Even critical chapters employ a slightly eulogistic tone—a respect for acknowledging the past, good or bad.
This respect is bolstered by a few ‘What if…’ chapters, in which Pillai wonders, for example, what India may have looked like without the Raj, or had Gandhi lived longer. Speculating, “not out of a sense of nostalgia or to glorify the alternative,” Pillai says, “but out of a genuine curiosity”, he demonstrates the futility of the logic of those who seek to erase history entirely.
Pillai wants to “persuade readers who find history too distant or difficult to give it a chance, by telling them they could dip in and out of the book without getting lost or overwhelmed”. The format may be popular, but Pillai’s humour is almost exclusively dry, and his arguments restrained, growing more forceful only as the book progresses. “Once an interest has been generated and the reader is safely in, you can get more serious,” Pillai says. “In a time when history is daily perverted, if you can’t communicate sensible perspectives well, why even claim to be outraged by the drivel that is offered in its place online and elsewhere?”
Pillai ends the book with a subtle dig at Indians who appropriate Trump’s MAGA motto to boost their own jingoism. What emerges through the book is a different idea of “greatness”, a persistent, if sometimes weak, uniquely subcontinental strain of liberalism. At a time when the philosophy is often attacked for being westerncentric, an accessible but more complicated picture of the past is invaluable. ■