An entertaining and provocative account of India's past, written by
one of the country's leading thinkers
For all India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian
history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil
Khilnani fills that space, bringing to life fifty extraordinary men and
women who changed both India and the world. Journeying across India in
pursuit of their stories--visiting slum temples, ayurvedic call centers,
Bollywood studios, textile mills, and Mughal fortresses--Khilnani offers
trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, artists,
iconoclasts, and entrepreneurs. Some of these historical figures are
famous. Some are unjustly forgotten. And all, Khilnani convinces us, are
deeply relevant today. As their rich and surprising lives take the
reader through twenty-five hundred winding years of Indian and world
history, Khilnani brings wit, feeling, historical rigor, and uncommon
insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.
We encounter the Buddha not as the usual beatific icon but as a radical
young social critic. We meet the ancient Sanskrit linguist who inspires
computer programmers today. We hear the medieval poets, ribald and
profound, who mocked rituals and caste and whose voices resonate in
contemporary poetry. And we see giants of the twentieth-century
Independence movement--among them Mohandas Gandhi; Ambedkar, the
Untouchable lawyer turned constitution maker; and the legendary singer
M. S. Subbulakshmi--not as cardboard cutouts but as complex and striving
human beings. At once a provocative and sophisticated reinterpretation
of India's history and an incisive commentary on its present-day
conflicts and struggles, Incarnations is an authoritative, sweeping,
and often moving account of a nation coming into its own.
