This series of essays is ambitious. In its choice of individuals, it cuts across time, place and theme. In the description of each individual, it attempts to encapsulate in a few pages their origin, personality, contributions and impact. I split my analysis into categories because the nature of Khilnani's writing changes subtly depending on the topic. Several characters transcend these boundaries, Tagore and Gandhi to name a couple, but in general they hold true. It is also true that favoured topics evolve as you progress through time: for instance, early chapters depicting the founders of religion, kings and warriors contrast with later chapters describing film-makers and champions of industry.

Religion: Earlier chapters include ascetics and founders of religions, including the Buddha, Mahavir and Guru Nanak. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism are broadly represented as movements created to overcome the inadequacies, or chauvinistic interpretations, of Hinduism. These are instructive to those new to the breadth of South Asian religions, both across and within them.

Royalty: We have a cross-section of kings, emperors and warriors. Most blurred into insignificance, so I've looked them up again: Ashoka, Rajaraja Chola, Rani of Jhansi. These are almost mythological entities, you are relying as much on Khilnani's imagination as historical records. I didn't find these interesting, as I could see little, if any, impact of these figures evidenced in India today

Art: In this category, I include artists, film-makers, poets and authors. You have the expected, Kabir and Tagore; the specialists, Iqbal and Manto; and the popular, Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray and MF Hussain. Personally, not having experienced the works of many of these artists, I struggled to appreciate their significance. Khilnani does a good job of describing their emotional impact through select scenes and excerpts. It encourages me to plan some reading Manto and watching Satyajit Ray.

Scholarship: Indian scholarship is underrated. I believe this is partly due to the understandably narrow emphasis on industry-relevant jobs, which mean that top Indian students and educators reside in management and science departments. Thankfully, Khilnani corrects this impression by including Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian; Charaka, a founder of Ayurveda (albeit with mocking undertones); Aryabhata, the classical mathematician-astronomer; William Jones, the linguistic scholar / judge; and Ramanujan, the self-taught maths prodigy (with references to Kanigel's excellent The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan). I highly recommend these essays.

Politics: The later chapters pay particular attention to recent Indian history. I found many of these a bit dry. They assume a certain amount of prior knowledge, some of which I could recall from Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, the rest I found akin to an unwanted history lesson. This broad category includes: Subhas Chandra Bose, Gandhi, Jinnah, Ambedka, Sheik Abdullah, VK Krishna Menon, Indira Gandhi. Of these, I really appreciated the renegade Subhas Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Dalit-inspiring Ambedka and contentious Indira Gandhi.

Other figures are also covered with some success, such as mystics, philosophers, freedom fighters and industrialists. What would I have changed? Target the layperson, not the scholar. Khilnani's style, and sometimes choice of content, seems aimed at the well-read and well-informed Indian. Among the words I had to look up: iconoclastic, excoriate, vernissage, excrescence, syncretism, labile, palimpsest, stratigraphy, solipsistic, quisling, peripatetic, anodyne, epigones, fealty, counterfactual, aesthete, parvenu, dervish, dargah, tropes, arrantly, hagiography. Khilnani should take a leaf out of Orwell's writing, e.g. his A Collection of Essays. If you know all the aforementioned words and wish to expand your knowledge of Indian historical figures, you will doubtless enjoy this work. Otherwise, it feels like hard work, albeit well rewarded in the end.

The choice of pictures could have been improved. I didn't glean much from pictures of Iqbal, Jinnah, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Menon lounging about. I did enjoy the sculptures, paintings and poster-art. Choose the Kindle option if you, like me, need to frequently look up unnecessarily technical words. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful attempt at covering India in 50 lives through well-researched and broadly standalone essays. ( )

An engrossing look at 50 people whose lives exemplified major trends in the last 2500 years of Indian history, politics and culture. This is not a history book, per se, and it would help the reader to have a little grounding in the country's past. The personalities portrayed here include some who are well-known and some who will be completely unknown to most readers, and there are some expected names deliberately left out. So we have Mahatma Gandhi, Jinnah, and Indira Gandhi, but not Indira's father, Nehru. Vivekanada is in here but not his guru, Ramakrishna. There are political, economic, spiritual and industrial leaders, artists, filmmakers, and authors. Together their lives and accomplishments limn the directions taken in Indian history.

A very rewarding read for anyone interested in Indian past or present. ( )

I spent the last week on a lightning trip around India, covering seven cities in seven days and attempting to absorb, in the brief intervals between dragging my bags on and off an endless series of SpiceJet Bombardiers, some sense of my surroundings. So this book, which darts with similar impulsiveness around India's vast historical and geographical expanse, was a welcome travel companion.

The format really appealed to me: a history of the country in fifty brief biographies, from Buddha to the Bombay billionaires. Khilnani dedicates seven or eight pages to each person – enough to introduce you to people you aren't familiar with and to review the importance of those you are, but short enough that no one outstays their welcome. And his writing is suitably snappy and idiomatic, sometimes almost to a fault (he sees an ‘Instagram-like familiarity’ to Nainsukh's miniatures, for example).

Many of the figures he turns up throw fascinating sidelights on Indian history – like Malik Ambar, one of the main resistors of Mughal expansion into the south in the early seventeenth century, who, as an Ethiopian slave, does not fit into any of the usual narratives of Hindu v. Muslim v. European.

My favourite, though, was the extraordinary social reformer Periyar, whom I hadn't previously been aware of at all. A fierce activist against the caste system, religious authority and traditional gender roles, he went everywhere with a scruffy little dog (‘to scare away Brahmins, who consider dogs unclean’) and was in the habit of opening his speeches with an unbelievable diatribe against religion, a sort of anti-shahada:

There is no God. There is no God.
There is no God at all.
He who invented God is a fool.
He who propagates God is a scoundrel.
He who worships God is a barbarian.

This is in India! In the 1920s and '30s! Periyar also took a combative stance on women, arguing that they should be responsible for their own sexuality and reproduction and telling the women in his audiences that they must seize their freedoms instead of waiting for men to emancipate them. ‘Have cats ever freed rats?’ he asked. ‘Have foxes ever liberated goats or chickens? Have whites ever enriched Indians? Have Brahmins even given non-Brahmins justice? We can be confident that women will never be emancipated by men.’

This is one of the themes that Khilnani follows throughout the book and about which he clearly feels strongly. ‘It's sobering to see what a tripling of India's GDP since 2000 has not done for its women,’ he concludes, and there has obviously been an effort to see that women are well represented in the subjects he's chosen. I was particularly pleased to get a good introduction to Amrita Sher-Gil, the great Indian painter who died at 28, apparently from a botched private abortion. ‘[A]ll art, not excluding religious art, has come into being because of sensuality,’ Sher-Gil said, a line that could have come straight out of Camille Paglia.

http://blog.artsome.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/amrita_sher_gil-sleeping-woman...
Amrita Sher-Gil, Sleeping Woman, 1933

Another artist that allows Khilnani to expatiate on India's problems is MF Husain, who, as a Muslim who chose to paint Hindu deities and religious symbols, became more or less persona non grata in his own country and died in exile in London. Indeed his friends and family have not even been able to bring his body back to be buried. ‘Whoever has insulted Bharat Mata [Mother India], who has shown her naked – we will never allow him even six feet of her soil,’ says one of Khilnani's interviewees from the regional Hindu party Shiv Sena. So, you know, fuck that guy.

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MF Husain, Bharat Mata, 2006

Occasionally you feel that he hasn't quite got the measure of his subject – clearly (if understandably) he doesn't have much of a grasp on Ramanujan's work, for instance. But most of the time he's very good, getting to the heart of what makes these people so representative of their time and place. He has a knack for summarising complex arguments in pithy phrases, pointing out, for instance, that when it came to independence, ‘there was no Indian Lenin,’ a fascinating throwaway remark that could take you off in all kinds of directions. Similarly on the significance of Gandhi:

Unlike a Stalin or a Mao, who tried to change the imagination of their people by wielding state power, Gandhi used imagination to try to change the nature of power and the state.

As jumping-off points, these précis are excellent. When he comes to his final entry, the dodgy slumdog-turned-billionaire Dhirubhai Ambani, he writes piercingly that the tycoon had ‘a gift for maximising and monetising inequality’ – and indeed, reflecting on the meaning of Ambani's story after the figures that have come before, Khilnani does seem somewhat downbeat. ‘Indians came to hunger less for equality,’ he concludes resignedly, ‘than for growth.’ ( )