PVK Blog Post. Essay ‘Waning Nanda, Waxing Manu / Waning Smrithi, Waxing Shruthi’
This is a look at how a chronicler of royal history has morphed into an ambassador of a theocratic state and its ruling ideology.
Years ago Manu Pillai told me an interesting story about his college days. He was doing a four year UG course in political science at Ferguson College in Pune and his department head handed him a copy of Meera Nanda’s ‘Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodernism, Science and Hindu Nationalism’ and asked him to see what it was about. Manu read Nanda carefully and later said that the book inspired him so much he decided to turn to social science and writing as a career. My heart warmed on hearing the story; for the department head’s judgement and his young student’s aspirations. Discouraged by the lumpenised campuses of colleges in Kerala, I took heart from this uplifting incident. At least there was one part of India where higher education in the humanities was being taken seriously.
Writing ambition could not have been built of sterner stuff than Manu is made of. He read voraciously, travelling widely to bury himself for weeks on end in archives and libraries around the world, forgoing food and sleep sometimes. He was like a medieval anchorite, preparing his mind for the rigors ahead by following a punishing schedule and never relaxing. He absorbed, he kept on at all the things a modern scholar must do to attain success and trotted up the ladder others take years to climb. From getting degrees to publishing. His first book, the monumental ‘The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore’ came out when he was just 25. It was followed quickly by ‘Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji: Tales from Indian History’, ‘The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin’, ‘False Allies: India’s Maharajas in the Age or Ravi Varma’ and, recently, ‘Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of Modern Hindu Identity’ Along the way, almost unnoticed, he earned a PhD from London working under the formidable Christophe Jaffrelot, widely recognized as one of contemporary India’s best historians. Manu also worked with Dr Sunil Khilnani and for the BBC in a series on India. If a proposed Netflix series had not sailed into adverse winds regarding funding, he may well have hit gold in the demanding world of commercial success. As it is, his books have done very well. The runaway success of his latest work in just one example. Columns, lectures and appearances have also helped him keep the home pot boiling. Losing his father, a pioneering management guru based in Pune, at a young age added to the burdens he had to carry. He looks after his grandmother, often travelling to Mavelikkara to spend time with her. Wherever in the world he is, he tends to the two women in his life, his mother and his grandmother.
I am guilty of a serious error of judgement. I agreed to be on stage with Manu at the Mathrubhumi festival of letters on its opening day. I should have declined offer to speak with Manu and nudged him to accept someone as mainstream as he is to do so. Someone who would have asked the right questions, to which he would have provided perfect answers and all would have been fine with the world. In assuming that one who had been inspired by Meera Nanda to turn to social science would stay the course or to have ignored his not glacially slow drift to the right was naivety.
Manu himself was naive, in some ways. He did not notice how sharp the criticism of his book was in a review that Frontline carried. He never asked for clarifications or why those remarks were made. He too read friendliness towards him for acceptance of his ideas, even though those ideas were far from the ideas he had endorsed a decade earlier.
He gave the impression of being anti-monarchy. This too is more granular than it appears. There were parts of the royal family in Travancore he would not praise, parts that he would. In his latest work, most Indian monarchs are objects to be praised because most rejected the coloniser, Muslim or Christian. If they collaborated with the coloniser it was because they did not have a choice or because it was part of a strategy of accommodation.
Somewhere along this journey Manu forgot ‘Prophets Facing Backwards’ and the rationality Meera Nanda so eloquently said India should recover. That Nanda’s influence has waned is not surprising. That a historian has forgotten the fight for enlightenment values is surprising and unnerving. Since roughly the time Manu was born, when a Toyota “chariot” was charging around India trying to rouse Hindus to demand the destruction of an old mosque, the religious temperature of the country has been going up. As opposed to the first forty years of India’s independence, when most people, barring a few zealots, were trying to lower the religious temperature.
To be able to conflate spirituality with knowledge and to equate India’s wealth, both historic and contemporary, with its spirituality is easy for an Indian. But it is only possible in a realm untouched by any of the ideas Meera Nanda has been fighting for.
There is a degree of intellectual simplicity in Manu Pillai that only intense reading and comprehension can remove. To put it a little less politely, there is a lot that is stupid in Manu Pillai. He has little grasp of the fact that classical Hinduism is so very different from the Renaissance Hinduism that now rules the roost. Neo Hinduism as Renaissance Hinduism is called is a puritanical, dogmatic religion shaped by western Christianity particularly the Protestantism of the 19th century, the one aggressively pushed by English missionaries. It has lost the expansiveness and plurality of classical Hinduism.
Pillai seems unaware of the contributions to knowledge, particularly to theories about knowledge and logic, that Buddhists and Jains and Charvakas made before westerners had set foot in India. A dip into teachings of Nagarjuna or others in the materialist ontology school would be educative for every seeker of knowledge of Indian systems of thought.
In Poona lives one of the great scholars of classical and recent Indian thought, Pradeep Gokhale. His work has brought many of these aspects of Indian thought to the reach of contemporary readers. In systematically sound modules and in lucid English Prof Gokhale has traced the fascinating story of Indian logic. While Poona and Maharastra is at the heart of Pillai’s attitude to nationalism, it has not nudged him into getting familiar with the nuances of India logic and epistemology. This is a gap that has to be filled. Otherwise we will continue to watch the word knowledge being misapplied to metaphysics as opposed to logic. In knowledge driven environments, like some western universities, even the smoke of metaphysics and theology has left the general atmosphere and taken its rightful place in departments of theology. Where a lot of very sophisticated work takes place but where there is a realisation that the work is on theology and that it is a distinct field.
Meera Nanda, astute student of Indian thought, is mystified that while studying Indian nationalism, anyone can ignore the ideas of Perry Anderson. While examining in detail how foreigners have described Indians in notes, letters and books how can one ignore Amartya Sen’s brilliant analysis of western descriptions of India or A K Ramanujan’s insight into what is typical of Indian ways of thinking? This pushing aside of theories with explanatory value is all the more mystifying because Pillai does not offer a tenable alternative. Just a vaguely posited we-are-like-this-only type response. Rajmohan Gandhi has pointed out a similar gap in that Pillai has not taken into account nationalisms that have risen and are flourishing in countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and in much of the West, including the USA. Pillai has a ready answer; he has not touched anything after India’s independence.
Perhaps he will in future. As theocracy gets even more entrenched in India and the secular space vanishes, commentators and historians will find more and more material to celebrate in religious India. So, Nanda will continue to wane and Manu will keep waxing.
Manu Smrithi will overwhelm Nanda Shruthi. Sad, but true.
A footnote: When I wrote this essay, I was optimistic that Manu Pilla would learn. Now, I am not so sure. He is so entrenched in his cocky world view, so narcissistically inclined, so ‘I Me Mine’ so drunk on the adulation of the fellow ‘shanghis’ I have no hope he will gain a true historian’s perspective of the present or the past.
The ‘pilla’ is so smug, so drunk on his own “success” he will not, I am certain, ever see the folly of his ways of thinking and writing.
In Trivandrum Malayalam there is a lovely word ‘appi’. It means both a baby and some shit, say, seen on a beach. In both ways, Manu is an “appi”. A baby and a piece of ordure. Since he will never take his thumb out of his mouth, he will never learn.
So, his readers and admirers will suffer from a condition they will not even recognize ‘Cognitive Dissonance’.
So be it. Any hopes that India will cease to be ancient or medieval is misplaced. Except parts of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the rest will be fertile fields for nut cases like Manu to sow seeds of discord while pretending to be scholars and “researchers”.
Shame on you, Manu, you piece of ordure, you thankless, worthless gasbag.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
profpvk@gmail.com
Thank you. Nandri. Namaskaram.
PVK 81/June/2026.
PVK's Book mark 