Sunil Khilnani

Sunil Khilnani gained his PhD in Social and Political Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge, UK. From 2001 to 2011, he was Starr Foundation Professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C., USA, and Director of South Asia Studies at SAIS. Currently he is holder of the Avantha Chair and Director of the India Institute, which he established at King’s College in 2011.

His publications include: Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (1993); The Idea of India (7th edn. 2016); with Sudipta Kaviraj, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (2000); with Nandan Nilekani, Pratap Mehta etc al., NonAlignment 2.0: a Foreign Policy for India in the 21st Century (2013); with Arun Thiruvengadam and Vikram Raghavan, Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia (2013). His most recent book is Incarnations: India in 50 Lives (2016), which accompanies his 50-part podcast and radio series broadcast on BBC Radio4 in 2015–2016.

Sunil Khilnani’s research interests lie at the intersection of various fields: intellectual history and the study of political thought, the history of modern India, democratic theory in relation to its recent non-Western experiences, the politics of contemporary India, and strategic thought in the definition of India’s place in the world.