ICONS: MEN AND WOMEN WHO SHAPED TODAY’S INDIA Edited by Anil Dharker, Roli, Rs 395

Bertolt Brecht pitied a nation that needs a hero. Those who believe in Marxist ideology, which Brecht subscribed to, love to hate the idea of heroism which lends itself easily to mythification and idolatry. But even the staunchest Marxist cannot deny that human history has consistently spawned heroes who have changed its course. Heroes provide points of reference that are crucial for a nation’s construction of its ‘self’. In fact, how a nation thinks of itself depends largely on the ways in which it views its heroes. India’s many religions and creeds with their pantheon of gods and godheads find reflection in its democracy.

The book focuses on twenty gods, or ‘icons’ of independent India. In one of the essays, Dom Moraes, while comparing Gavaskar and Tendulkar in their approaches to cricket as well as life, takes occasion to declare, “in this country, Gods are a necessity”. It is a terse, aphoristic remark, highlighting an important aspect of the Indian reality.

Anil Dharker, the editor, mentions that the choice of icons for the book was based on their being living legends and also on their representing different fields of activity so that excellence in every sphere is accorded recognition. The volume is not, nor could it ever hope to be, exhaustive, and it would be pretty naïve to complain about that. Even so, some questions are difficult to suppress. For example, why should Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, both representing politics in general and the Congress in particular, together get handpicked for discussion? Exactly what achievements or qualities are taken into consideration for them to be clubbed with the likes of Amartya Sen, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Maqbool Fida Husain or N.R. Narayanamurthy, one wonders. The projection of Salman Rushdie as an Indian icon may also not go down well with some readers.

Some of the twenty articles in the volume are tainted by hagiographic overtones, but, thankfully, they stop short of becoming effusive eulogies. Ranjit Hoskote’s two articles on Deepak Chopra and M.F. Husain combine insight and good prose. Srinivas Laxman on A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is richly informative. Prem Shankar Jha brings out the philosopher deliberating human freedom behind Amartya Sen’s economist persona. Rahul Singh’s piece on Khushwant Singh gives a new taste to the reader, simply because it tempers the critic’s judgment with the very personal views of a son about his father.

The profiles of twenty illustrious individuals offer twenty vignettes of modern India. They also explore the various strands of the fabric called Indianness. A nation, after all, is, in many ways, what its heroes make it. Marxists may disagree, but can they completely dismiss this view?