This chapter explores the American discourse surrounding three scientists/inventors: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein. All three are regarded as “great” in the areas of science and quantitative intelligence. Due to that, each is also elevated more broadly into wisdom curators, individuals who ought to possess great answers to questions beyond their expertise. These instances betoken Americans’ belief that greatness in one field ought to translate into some near-mystical sort of intuition in all others. In all three cases, greatness was remarkably compromised. America’s reaction and reassessment suggest something very important about the contours of great men in the United States.

Introduction

This chapter explores the question posed in its title: ‘Does populism challenge the expertise of academic historians?’1 It is well known that populists (or, to be more precise, people who have often been called populists, since at this point I have not suggested a definition of this term) make assertions about the pasts of their own countries and often about historical pasts more generally. In doing so, they are at least in part making knowledge claims about the past and not simply expressing feelings of attachment or aversion. To the extent that their claims have a cognitive content, one might think that this would put populists on a collision course with the narratives that academic historians produce. Moreover, it is well known that ‘the rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on scientific expertise’ (Collins et al. 2020: 1). One might think that this anti-scientific tendency, together with populists’ interest in making claims about the past, would lead them to challenge not just the narratives but also the expertise of academic historians.

But reality turned out to be quite different from what I originally supposed it would be. Although historians are interested in populists, populists rarely show interest in the academic work produced by historians. Even less are populists interested in, or even aware of, the expertise that academic historians claim, by which I mean the toolkit of methods and approaches by which academic historians formulate questions, search for and interpret evidence, evaluate that evidence, and construct accounts of the past well enough grounded to withstand the criticisms offered by their professional colleagues. The fact is, academic historians doing academic work rarely come into the range of view of populists. Even academic historians who step into an activist role and attempt to draw lessons for the present from their study of the past seem to have been barely noticed by populists. I think, for example, of Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny (Snyder 2017), written in the wake of the election in 2016 and Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States of America (USA), which circulated widely among academics and some other readers, but raised hardly a peep from populists.

Rubel was only eight or nine when he came to Dhaka. He took a train alone from the north, arrived at a station in the centre of the city and walked to a nearby bazaar where he has worked ever since. Memories of his family and village have blurred over the years, and today he is married with two children and stays in a basti (slum) elsewhere in the city. For people who have grown up on the streets of Dhaka, such stories are common. Some recall odd details of their home but have forgotten the name of their village and even family. Some ran away from poverty and cruelty, and described a widowed mother, a resentful stepparent, a neglectful father, mental illness, abuse at school or the madrasah. For some, the story of their arrival is bound up with a precise moment of fear, such as losing a prized asset and not daring to return home or a particularly brutal argument. For others, the streets have always been their home, growing up in makeshift shacks formed from tarpaulin sheets that dot stretches of pavement, and where even today some babies are born.

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one of the most densely populated cities on earth. People here live in a sprawling mix of apartment blocks, a few upmarket neighbourhoods and large bastis. Others skirt the edges of these in bazaars, transport terminals and pavements. Despite being one of the most populous cities on earth, it is little known in the so-called Global North, so much so that foreigners often pronounce it ‘Dakar’ after the Senegalese capital. As a city it is rarely deemed beautiful by outside eyes, unlike its iconic cousin Kolkata, nor does it boast obvious distinctions to draw tourists or wider interest. When Dhaka does appear in the world's media, it is sometimes in reference to its violent politics, the garment factories which sit at its edges or its frequent designation as one of the least liveable cities in the world. The only Western film to feature Dhaka – a recent Netflix production concerning the abduction of an Indian drug lord's son and a white mercenary hero – was filmed in India and Thailand, and its earlier title of ‘Dhaka’ scrapped for the more marketable Extraction.

This concluding chapter examines the phenomenon of list-making in the 1970s and beyond. In this period, Americans were no longer piqued by a single symbolic exemplar, a greatest of all time. Post-Vietnam and Watergate, Americans desired choices, not conclusions. The popularity of lists supported this cultural impulse. In this context, the cultural biography of Michael Jordan stands out as a curious exception. How Jordan served as the exception that proved the rule helps summarize the essential themes of the book.

Introduction

It is now accepted that the future of coal will be decided in the developing world. Even as Western countries transition away from coal, increased production and consumption of coal in India and China have meant that the share of coal in global energy production has remained constant for the past 40 years, despite attempts at decarbonization (Edwards 2019). Nevertheless, the West continues to produce high per capita emissions compared to developing nations (Lazarus and van Asselt 2018). In response, India has asserted its rights to equitable energy access in the international arena (Jaitly 2021). At the same time, questions of intra-country equity complicate India's position, with many arguing that India must pursue low-carbon pathways to protect its poor and vulnerable groups (Bidwai 2012).

After Independence, coal became an enduring symbol of national development in India (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The coal industry has deep political roots, engaging powerful stakeholders at different levels (Bhattacharjee 2017). In recent years, coal investments have lost their appeal due to unrest over their environmental impacts as well as a dynamic downward trend in the demand for thermal power (Rajshekhar 2021). Even so, production targets for the state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) – responsible for over 80 per cent of India's coal production – were increased to 1 billion metric tonnes by 2024. The central government is actively looking to sell more coal blocks to raise money, despite the lukewarm response to recent coal block auctions. Coal imports have simultaneously increased, engendering a new coastal coal geography controlled by private actors (Oskarsson et al. 2021). That renewables cannot substitute for coal, despite policy support from the state, is accepted. Analysts expect coal-fired generation to continue to grow to meet electricity demand growth even if 350 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy (RE) capacity is installed by 2030 (Tongia and Gross 2019). New energy forms, including renewables, are, historically speaking, energy ‘additions’ rather than ‘transitions’ (Oskarsson et al. 2021). Importantly, this perception is not typical of India alone, as the global energy system remains locked into high coal energy use in the midst of an RE boom (Oskarsson et al. 2021).

Arguably, the Mahabharata is India's most influential political text. Kautilya's Arthashastra may seem a close contender, but it never attained the epic's social depth and was, in any case, forgotten for a millennium before its rediscovery in 1905. The Constitution of India certainly plays a more important role in shaping the modern Indian state, but, as a text, it hardly permeates popular consciousness in the way the Mahabharata does. For over two millennia, the Mahabharata has shaped Indian politics. It has nourished the statecraft of Hindu rajas and Mughal emperors, stirred anti-colonial nationalism and peasant rebellion, moulded Dalit–Bahujan and feminist activism. Beyond India, it has profoundly shaped political cultures across Southeast Asia, inspired pan-Asian thinking in China and Japan, activated the philosophical imagination of European and Arab thinkers, and conversed with Iranian nationalism.

Like one of its protagonists, the divine statesman Krishna, the Mahabharata exists in multiple avatars. The Sanskrit text, ascribed to Vyasa, coexists with versions in several Indian and extra-Indian languages. For many decades now, scholars have written about these textual traditions as well as about the popular appeal of Mahabharata stories. Historians, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and philosophers have all written about the epic. Admittedly, much more has been said about the pre-modern lives of the Mahabharata than about its modern incarnations – but even on the latter the scholarship is rich and growing.

In this milieu, why is a new book needed about the epic? We offer two compelling reasons. First, there exists no single volume that engages with the Mahabharata's role in shaping modern social, political, and religious thought.