A potential pitfall of a book that seeks to tell the story of a country through 50 mini-biographies is that the stories won’t hang together and the sum of their parts will seem dull. But Khilnani avoids that trap and strives to connect the lives and ideas of his subjects to one another and to contemporary India. For example, he helps explain the role that the teachings of the Buddha played in shaping the thinking and choices of Ashoka, who established one of the largest empires in ancient India but gave up violence after a string of brutal victories that left many thousands dead. “Legends aside, Ashoka used the faith to create an exceptional doctrine of rule, one that may have stemmed from regret over his youthful aggression, but was also a shrewd response to the empire he controlled,” Khilnani writes in his chapter on the king.

The book also describes how Bhimrao Ambedkar, an architect of India’s Constitution and one of the most prominent leaders of Dalits, formerly known as the untouchables in the Indian caste system, embraced Buddha and renounced Hinduism. This makes the book a lot more than a collection of 50 loosely related biographical essays. Readers can dip in and out of chapters randomly without being confused, but “Incarnations” is most rewarding when read from start to finish.

There are, however, a couple of big, unexplained holes in this otherwise solid volume. There is no chapter on Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and, arguably, one of the country’s most consequential leaders. While Nehru appears prominently in chapters about other people, including one about his daughter, Indira Gandhi, another important prime minister, we never get a full portrait of him or Khilnani’s assessment of his place in Indian history. He acknowledges the omission in his introduction but never fully explains the reason. It could be that Khilnani is saving that material for his long-awaited biography of Nehru.

The other big gap is less obvious but just as important. “Incarnations” does not profile any of the right-wing Hindu ideologues and activists whose ideas are ascendant in India right now and are subscribed to by the country’s charismatic and controversial prime minister, Narendra Modi. One of those figures, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, has a cameo in the chapter on Gandhi, but Khilnani moves on pretty quickly without discussing in much detail how Savarkar and others like him developed the idea of Hindu nationalism. This absence is all the more strange when placed next to Khilnani’s keen interest in one of the central fault lines in Indian politics and public life: the tension between liberals, who celebrate the country’s diversity and advocate policies to protect minority rights, and Hindu nationalists, who reject secularism and insist that Hinduism should be the central organizing principle of the country and its government.