(July 29, 2025) One of India’s most compelling young historians, Manu S. Pillai, has carved a niche for himself by breathing life into dusty archives, reviving lost legacies, and challenging dominant historical narratives. With an engaging blend of scholarly depth and literary elegance, Pillai’s work bridges the gap between academic rigor and popular storytelling.
His journey from a history enthusiast to a bestselling author reflects his passion for the past and his determination to uncover stories that mainstream history often overlooks. Author of five books, the chronicler of lesser-known narratives, and a historian adept at decoding India’s layered past, he is all about making history accessible, relevant, and powerfully human.
A historian born of curiosity
By his teenage years, Pillai, had already developed a strong interest in history. “I was very interested in history. It took a life of its own from there,” he tells Global Indian. Still, the idea of becoming a professional historian didn’t fully materialise until his twenties. His formal education included international relations at King’s College London and a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh. But arguably, his real training came in more eclectic ways, working with Dr. Shashi Tharoor during his stint in the Ministry of External Affairs and later with Sunil Khilnani on the BBC series Incarnations.
Manu S Pillai
Even as a student, the 35-year-old was never drawn to the ivory tower of academia. “Although I have a PhD, I’m not a teaching academic,” he clarifies. “I try to create my own space where I’ve got the credentials of an academic, but I’m interested in taking history to the public.”
Writing as excavation
It was The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (2015) that brought Pillai national recognition. At just 25, he published an 800-page tome on Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, the last queen of Travancore—a woman erased from history despite having modernised the state and ushered in key reforms.
“She didn’t self-advertise,” he says. “To this day, I think women are often much more understated about their accomplishments than men. If a man has three accomplishments, he’ll jump on the rooftop and shout about it. If a woman has seven, she will still hesitate.”
For the author, history isn’t simply about grand battles or sweeping dynasties. It’s about nuance, contradictions, and the quiet revolutions of those who didn’t get to write their own narratives. “Any written piece of paper is ultimately someone’s account of what happened. It’s like two newspapers today with different ideologies reporting the same event differently,” he explains. “The job of the historian is to interpret, to read between the lines.”
The historian as a storyteller
The historian’s follow-up, Rebel Sultans (2018), was born out of a single moment in Hyderabad when he visited the Golconda fort. “Usually in Hyderabad, people talk about the Nizams,” he says. “But I thought the Qutb Shahis were more interesting… slightly brushed under the carpet.” With that, he set out to reconstruct the Deccan’s turbulent medieval past, ruled by kings who were at once warriors, patrons of the arts, and shrewd diplomats.
His third book, The Courtesan, the Mahatma, and the Italian Brahmin (2019), is a mosaic of 60 essays, spotlighting a motley cast, from eunuchs and diplomats to rebel queens. It is unified by one core belief: history is not a linear story of kings and conquests. It’s a collage of forgotten voices. “Everything that survives from the past, artistically or otherwise, is raw material for a historian to chew on,” he says.
That belief also informed his book, False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (2021), where Pillai re-evaluates the role of India’s princes, often caricatured as colonial stooges or decadent sybarites. Through the prism of Raja Ravi Varma’s art, Pillai instead finds individuals negotiating modernity, nationalism, and cultural identity under colonialism.
In his latest book, Gods, Guns, and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity, he explores how colonialism and Christianity played a vital role in shaping modern Hindu identity. “We often focus on Hindu-Muslim binaries,” he says. “But the impact of Christianity, particularly during colonial rule, has been disproportionately underexplored. My curiosity led me there. It’s a missing piece in the puzzle.”
Is he worried that he will get into legal trouble for his views? “Well, so far, no one’s chosen to be offended. But if someone wants to be offended, they can be offended anytime. Seven years later, someone may decide to dig out a line and take offense,” he replies matter-of-factly.
History through art
Increasingly, Pillai has turned to art as a historical lens. In his talks, he explores how artifacts, buildings, and even public statues communicate social and political realities. “Art tells us not only about the people who made it but also the conditions in which it was made,” he says. “Even today, when governments build statues, it says something about the narrative they want to project.”
Far from being just relics, he sees heritage structures as living witnesses to our past and sometimes to our negligence. “There is a general irreverence in our country and for multiple reasons,” he observes. “On the one hand, we have so much history around us. You walk a mile and you hit something historically important. But at some level, we are culturally almost inured to it. We don’t even notice or value it because we have so much of it. Whereas countries that have less tend to treasure what little they have.
This neglect, he says, isn’t limited to one city or town; it’s universal. “In Hyderabad, in Gulbarga, around old Qutb Shahi and Bahmani sites, you’ll find people living in or building around ancient tombs. These are historical processes that led to this, yes, but it also reflects a certain chalta hai attitude towards monuments, which to historians is unfortunate.”
On research, relevance, and WhatsApp history
Perhaps what makes Pillai’s work stand out most is his commitment to looking where others don’t. Whether it’s gendered erasure in chronicles or overlooked figures like Ibrahim Adil Shah of Bijapur, a Muslim king who worshipped Saraswati and patronized the arts, the author is drawn to complexity. “He was a Sunni Muslim but also a devotee of Saraswati. He mixed it all up through pure intellectual curiosity,” he says of Adil Shah and jests. “I would have enjoyed meeting him.”
Pillai is candid about the challenges of his craft. “There is a lot of dusty archival work, but once you get used to it, it doesn’t intimidate,” he says. Research in India, however, is hampered by chronic underfunding. “Two of my books were supported by the Sandeep & Gitanjali Maini Foundation. But there aren’t that many private foundations interested in funding books.”
And in an era where Instagram reels and WhatsApp forwards shape public memory and historical perception, where does serious research find its footing? “It’s like this,” he explains. “If you want to get to the bottom of anything, you have to go to a book. That said, I won’t vilify Instagram. If scholars are willing, technology can be a great way to reach wider audiences.”
Pillai is uniquely positioned to comment on this digital deluge. Straddling two eras, he’s a millennial who remembers a world before Google and a historian navigating one after it.
“Absolutely. My generation of millennials, almost all born in the year 2000, grew up without the internet. And then there’s a sudden explosion. So we’ve seen the difference,” he reflects. “And for this generation who’s grown up with the internet, it will probably take a while to figure out that, hold on, there is pause and there is a different kind of world out there.”
Despite the noise online, Pillai remains optimistic about the future of research. “There are still researchers doing fabulous work. There are young scholars doing very, very stellar research on history and other subjects as well. The question is whether we’ll keep valuing it and whether the funding will follow.”
The next chapter
What’s next for the historian who has already reshaped how India reads its past? “Everyone’s asking me that,” he grins. “My last book came out in November, and since then I’ve been promoting it nonstop. My final event in the UK was on June 29. So now, I’m taking six months off.”
And deservedly so. Over the past decade, Manu S. Pillai has reanimated the lives of countless forgotten figures and opened up new avenues in the public understanding of Indian history.
Yet even as he pauses, the questions he asks and the ones he encourages us to ask remain deeply relevant. Who gets remembered? Who gets written out? And what does our past look like when we have the courage to read between the lines?
- Follow Manu S Pillai on LinkedIn
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