Professor Sunil Khilnani currently teaches at King’s College London, where he supervises several Ph.D. students who are studying contemporary Indian history. He is also the director of the King’s India Institute. He has previously taught at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. Besides being an accomplished academician and historian, he is also a prolific writer. His latest book, Incarnations: India in 50 Lives was published in 2016. Excerpts from an interview.
The Cambridge journey
I spent around 10 years at Cambridge — first, I was an undergraduate student at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, then I did my Ph.D. at King’s College, Cambridge. Finally, I was a research fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. I started out studying English literature, then I changed to what was then called social and political sciences.
Essentially, I got interested in the political and social context of literature, and I started reading a lot of French philosophy. Within Cambridge, in the English department, there was a big debate between old-style English literature, and study of literature through French structuralism. I felt the traditionalists in the department won against the innovators, so I changed majors to political philosophy. And my Ph.D. was about France; particularly, French political philosophy.
Lessons from college
Cambridge taught me how to ask the right questions. It also teaches you how to conduct disciplined individual research. It leaves you on your own to find out how you want to research a topic, and what you want to write. It doesn’t spoon-feed you.
You have the freedom to ask any question, and to draw on any relevant sources, rather than write down everything that your teacher tells you and then memorise. That gave me the confidence to do independent research and the freedom to think independently. On a lighter note, being away from home taught me to become a better cook and to cook Indian food.
Favourite mentor
The most important teacher to me was a brilliant political philosopher called John Dunn. He’s written about politics all over the world, and in my view, he’s one of the finest thinkers we have today in politics. I hope I learned something from him; he certainly influenced me a lot.
Counsel for students
Trust your independent thinking. Find your own sources, your own facts, your own data. Don’t always rely on what’s given to you. Your teachers can be wonderful figures, and you have a lot to learn from them, but it is important to go one step beyond that — to find the facts, the truth, the data and the questions that they haven’t thought about.