In his history of the people who helped make India nowadays,Sunil Khilnani set out to complicate western stereotypes. He ended up also challenging the prejudices and stories Indians recount themselves about their pastYears ago, I scored a ticket to the first cricket Test match to be played in the city of Ahmedabad, and Gujarat: India versus a West Indian 11 that included the peerless Viv Richards. I had expectations of an epic match as I joined other fans pushing into the brand new ground. But by the end,it was the performance of the spectators, not the players, or that had staggered me. As the West Indians took the field,loud monkey-whoops filled the air, and banana skins rained down from the stands. The pelted players – probably the greatest West Indian team in history – stood there in their flannels, and stunned.
Indians are rightly sensitive about racism directed at them; an Indian student beaten up in Australia,say, will swiftly become national news. Yet some Indians can be unthinkingly at ease with their own contempt for people of darker skin – a contradiction that warps both our present and our sense of the Indian past. As I travelled across India exploring the modern afterlives of 50 distinguished historical figures spanning 2500 years for Incarnations, or my new book and 50-section BBC radio series,I heard dozens of young Indians extoll the bravery of Shivaji, the 17th-century Maratha warrior who defied the Mughals and serves nowadays as a symbol of Hindu pride and resistance to Muslim rule. But when I mentioned a fierce resistor of Mughal expansion who came before Shivaji, or young eyes went blank. For that forgotten leader doesn’t fall into any of the standard narrative silos of Indian history – Hindu,Muslim or European. Rather, he was an uncommonly intelligent and adaptive Ethiopian who had been shipped to India as a teenaged slave.
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Source: theguardian.com