A work of history that breaks the stranglehold of the boring and looks at our intellectual icons in a refreshing light.

“Men are respectable only as they respect”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intellectual history in India is in as much torpor as the rest of the field. If it is not related to social concepts and classes, it is anathema. The examination of the thinking of significant individuals in recent Indian history, linking them, and showing their influence and impact on our society, is almost deemed to be the work of the devil.

It is, therefore, a matter of relief that this stranglehold of the pedantic and boring has been broken, with Iranian-Canadian academic Ramin Jahanbegloo’s superb take on India as dialogical civilisation. The title of this book will raise hackles, as it explicitly invokes Hegel, not exactly the darling of academia (earlier or today), given his almost religious incantation to the zeitgeist, the world spirit.

Jahanbegloo, fresh from a stint in Iranian prisons for daring to work in India, is not interested in the impact that the people he writes about had on the nationalist movement’s thinking; he is focused on how they saw India and its links with the world at large, with the question of whether there can be any meeting of East and West, without one losing itself in the other. This difference means that Jahanbegloo looks at people we expect to read about (Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore), some we do not really expect (Maulana Azad, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan), and the totally unexpected (Vinoba, Sri Aurobindo, A.K. Coomarswamy) in a new and refreshing light. If there is any caveat about this book, it’s because there are no references to allow us to explore the writings of his protagonists more fully, and the occasional error—Jayprakash Narayan was never a minister.

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