Book excerpt: For all of India’s myths, stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world’s largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars and corporate titans—some famous, some unjustly forgotten—bring feeling, wry humour and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.