Illustrated. 449 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

Save a few giants like the Buddha, Akbar and Gandhi, the great figures of Indian history are little known outside the country, and some are little remembered inside the country, either. “Whether it’s arts, business, politics or sports, we have no biographies,” Ramachandra Guha, one of India’s most respected historians, said at a recent book event in New Delhi. Sunil Khilnani’s new book, “Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives,” admirably tries to remedy that paucity by casting light on some of those obscured men and women.

Khilnani, who is the director of the India Institute at King’s College London, provides a whirlwind tour of roughly 2,500 years of Indian history in 50 fast-paced chapters. Each is a biographical sketch of an important personality from Indian politics, art, culture and economics, starting with the Buddha and ending with Dhirubhai Ambani, the son of a teacher who ended up building India’s largest and most successful corporations.

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