Sunil Khilnani explores the life and work of India's master of the short story Saadat Hasan Manto.

Readings by Sagar Arya.

Producer: Martin Williams

Professor Sunil Khilnani, from the King's India Institute in London, looks at the life and legacy of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Descriptions of his early life do not sound like someone who would go on to lead India's Muslims: he spoke English, dressed impeccably in Western clothes from Savile Row, smoked cigarettes and, according to some accounts, consumed alcohol and ate pork. Yet it was Jinnah who, along with others, publicly assented to the partition of India which, carried out in haste, would give roughly half of India's Muslims political autonomy, cause around a million deaths, displace some 14 million people and transform the geopolitics of the world.

Professor Sunil Khilnani explores the life and legacy of the Mahatma Gandhi: lawyer, politician and leader of the nationalist movement against British rule in India. He is generally admired outside India, but is the subject of heated debate and contention in his homeland. Some view him as an appeaser of Muslims, and blame him for India’s partition. Others regret Gandhi’s induction of Hindu rhetoric and symbols into Indian nationalism, revile him for his refusal to disavow caste, believe he betrayed the labouring classes, and are appalled at his views on women. “It’s unsurprising that Gandhi provokes such a barrage of attacks,” says Professor Khilnani. “His entire life was an argument – or rather, a series of arguments - with the world.”

Sunil Khilnani explores the life of political leader and freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose.

Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the painter Amrita Sher-Gil – 20th century India’s first art star – who died under shrouded circumstances in 1941 at the age of just 28.

Sher-Gil left a vortex of stories behind her: about her narcissism and her love affairs. But even more compelling than the stories are the canvasses she left behind.

Drawing from European artists like Cezanne, Gauguin, and Brancusi, and from Indian ones – the makers of the Buddhist wall paintings in the caves of Ajanta, and the minature painters of the Pahari tradition – Amrita Sher-Gil managed to do something radical within Indian culture: to declare her own vision – a woman’s vision – vital in the history of art.

She endowed successive generations of Indians with something scarce in the culture: an example of an autonomous, creative female.

Featuring interviews with artists Bharti Kher and Vivan Sundaram.

Readings by Sheenu Das.

Producer: Martin Williams

Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the poet and philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal.

One of India’s most patriotic, eloquent writers, Iqbal is also celebrated as Pakistan’s national poet. In his spare time, he wrote one of the first Urdu textbooks on economics; earned a doctorate in philosophy, which he studied for in Lahore, Cambridge and Germany; and became a barrister in London.

It was during his time in the west that Iqbal formulated his Islamic critique of Western society that would eventually become famous in Europe, India and the larger Muslim world.

To Iqbal, the West’s problem was one of love and desire. Like the devil, the West seemed consumed with an insatiable appetite. But the devil’s failing, like the failing of Milton’s Satan, was that he ‘declined to give absolute obedience to the Almighty Ruler of the Universe.’

In the same way, the West, by turning away from God and the human brotherhood preached by Christ, had become a terrible inversion of the ideal society. Its desires, severed from the highest things, had become purely material.

Iqbal’s vision inevitably brought him to loggerheads with those, including the British government and the Congress movement, whose aspirations for India did not extend to an ideal Islamic polity.

Partly as a result, although he died almost a decade before its creation, Iqbal’s work has often been read as a forceful argument for Pakistan.

Featuring Professor Javed Majeed.

Readings by Sagar Arya.

Producer: Martin Williams

Sunil Khilnani tells the story of EV Ramaswamy Naicker, known to his followers as Thanthai Periyar: the Great Man – a self-conscious dig at his nemesis Gandhi, the Great Soul.

Periyar is best known in India as an anti-Brahmin activist, a rationalist and a take-no-prisoners orator. He campaigned actively and energetically for decades against religion, against the caste system and for the equality of women.

Where Gandhi and his followers wore white, Periyar instructed his supporters to dress in black. Where Gandhi massaged the religious beliefs of his audiences, Periyar called his listeners fools, insulted their beliefs and caste practices, and threatened to thwack their gods and idols with his slippers. And where Gandhi wanted to build a national Indian movement, Periyar revelled in the Dravidian south.

‘I've got no personal problem with God,” Periyar once said. “I’ve never even met him, not once”. Occupying conventional political office never interested Periyar, but he left a massive imprint on modern south Indian politics.

Producer: Martin Williams

Sunil Khilnani explores the life and work of engineer, planner and politician Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya.

Visvesvaraya was a frail bureaucrat who walked hunched, as if the burden of state-building literally pressed down on his shoulders. But in the popular imagination he turned an engineering degree into a superhuman world-fashioning prowess. He changed the Indian nation with practical and enduring improvements for millions of people, including innovations in sanitation, statistics, flood control, drainage and irrigation.

Austere to the point of dourness, but audaciously hopeful, Visvesvaraya sought to frog-march India into modernity.

Featuring Bangalore-based social scientist Chandan Gowda.

Producer: Martin Williams

Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the Bengali writer and thinker Rabindranath Tagore.

Born in 1861 To a prosperous Bengal family, Rabindranath Tagore went on to win India’s first Nobel Prize, for literature, in 1913.

While India has often been framed in terms of competing groups – whether traditional institutions like caste, religion, and patriarchal families, or imperial subjecthood, or contemporary mass movements for nationalism – Tagore cut through these collectivities and tried to create a space for individual choice that stood apart from imposed groupings.

In a nationalist age when many of his contemporaries were preoccupied with independence, Rabindranath Tagore preferred to speak of freedom.

But he wasn’t a radical individualist, his conception of freedom was related to expressivity, connection, and that deepest of human experience: love. Becoming who you are, he recognised, is not something you do on your own.

Featuring Professor Supriya Chaudhuri.

Readings by Sheenu Das.

Producer: Martin Williams

Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

We are accustomed to mathematicians as enigmatic beings, but the case of Ramanujan, one of the most important mathematicians of the twentieth century, is particularly mysterious. His life seems to be have been spun from the stuff of fiction and film. It’s told most often as a tale of a deeply religious, largely self-taught savant, rescued from an obscure south Indian town and brought to Cambridge by a don – where, just as his world changing potential was being unlocked, he died at the age of 32, leaving his greatest insights still secret.

This idealistic narrative – cut with various quantities of exoticism and the miraculous, depending on the teller – even involves some lost notebooks, dramatically rediscovered decades later, and a cryptic but ultimately revelatory deathbed letter.

In most re-tellings, the maths are merely a backdrop to the drama and tragedy. But Ramanujan’s theoretical discoveries are recognized today as being at the forefront of the discipline: with implications for scientists at the cutting edge of cancer research as well as physicists trying to understand the deepest structures of the universe.

Featuring Professor Ken Ono.

Readings by Sagar Arya.

Producer: Martin Williams