Iconic Indians: 75 Extraordinary Individuals Who Inspired the Country

by Sanjeev Sanyal, Rajesh Singh

‘…by Sanjeev Sanyal and Rajesh Singh is a fitting tribute to 75 iconic Indians, some lesser known, who have shaped modern India.’ —BIBEK DEBROY

The India that we see today is the result of 75 years of effort by a large number of remarkable men and women spanning across different generations, geographies and fields of endeavour.

Iconic Indians: 75 Extraordinary Individuals Who Inspired the Country celebrates 75 Indians who played an important role in transforming an impoverished former colony into an increasingly confident and rapidly growing nation. Chosen from diverse fields such as politics, sports, arts, defence, business, entertainment, science and environment, this collection of essays examines the personal journeys of these exceptional individuals, including not just their successes but also their self-doubt, failures and even their disagreements with each other.

While many of them are household names, several are remarkable characters who made major contributions in their time but have faded from public memory. Through these narratives, the book simultaneously tells the wider story of how India traversed the first 75 years of Independence.
An excellent primer on the stalwarts who have made the nation what it is today, this book is a must-read for every person interested in the past, present and future of India.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

360 pages, Hardcover

Published October 5, 2022

About the author

Sanjeev Sanyal is an economist, urban theorist and writer. He grew up in Sikkim, Kolkata and Delhi before heading off to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He spent the tumultuous summer of 1993 in South Africa as it transitioned from apartheid, and then extensively travelled through Guatemala as it emerged from civil war. These experiences made him a keen observer of rapidly changing societies, an interest that reflects in many of his varied writings.

Sanjeev spent most of his adult life battling international financial markets, a few years in Mumbai and many in Singapore. One day in 2008, mostly on a whim, he decided to move back to India and travel all over the country with his family. This resulted in his hugely popular second book, Land of the Seven Rivers. Then in 2011, again for no particular reason, he went back to finance and took up a role as the global strategist of one of the world’s largest banks. He also spent the next few years exploring the Indian Ocean rim—Oman, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, Vietnam, Indonesia, and up and down India’s coastline. These travels resulted in The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History.

Currently Sanjeev lives in New Delhi where he serves as the principal economic adviser to the Indian government.

Reviews

[Ganesh V · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of short biographies of 75 amazing individuals who had a long-standing impact on India and her position a power to reckon with in the modern world. Individuals across the varied spectrum of Politics, Sports, Music, Social Issues, Movies & Military heroes make up for the book.

This book is highly recommended to young readers to draw inspiration from and to chart their own course to contribute to the great nation, India.

[SUBRATA DATTA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years ago I read - and enjoyed - Simon Sebag Montefiore's Titans of History. (Time permitting, I wish to re-read it. Incidentally, Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography is one of my all-time favorite books.) Reading Titans left in me a lingering desire, if there was a book like Titans of Indian History!

Sanjeev Sanyal and Rajesh Singh's book partially quenches that thirst. Partially because the scope and ambition of Sanjeev-babu and Rajesh-ji's book is much limited. And also because the authors have concentrated only on those Indians whose active working life spanned last seventy five years.

Still, the book makes for absorbing reading.

Predictably, any list of "iconic" individuals is bound to be subjective in its choice. All of us will have some of our heroes who are missing in this book. All of us will find some individuals whose exclusion we would not have minded. Authors are, admittedly, aware of that limitation. But we will largely, if not wholly, agree with their choices.

The list starts with the country's first Prime Minister and ends with the current incumbent.

It has individuals who will be in any Indian's list like Lata Mangeshkar or Amitabh Bachchan or Sachin Tendulkar. 

It has individuals whom we respect but, today, do not know much about their life and work like, say, Homi Jehangir Bhabha or Sam Manekshaw.

And it has individuals we have forgotten about, like Mihir Sen whom Guinness Book calls 'world's greatest long distance swimmer' or the scientist Sambhu Nath De, who discovered cholera toxin and was nominated for the Noble Prize in Medicine multiple times.

The photo that accompanies each sketch has enhanced the attraction of the book. Some are indeed heart-warmimg. Like the 1958 photograph of Indira Gandhi. The grace and elegance of the former Prime Minister will give any latter-day tinsel town diva a run for her money. Or the photo of the down-to-earth Sachin karta with baby Rahul in arms.

A humble suggestion. Whenever you feel a little down pick up this book and read a few of the little life-sketches here. It will make you feel good about yourself.

It feels great that we share this country with these remarkable men and women (of course, there are many more). Because, seventy five years after 1947, they have, each in his or her unique way, contributed in making what we are today. Whether it is Verghese Kurien or APJ Abdul Kalam. MS Subbulakshmi or Mohammed Rafi.

Iconic Indians: 75 Extraordinary Individuals who Inspired the Country is an excellent read.

[Sumith Velayudhan]

75 Iconic Indians told in a brief. A Good book to understand some of the greatest individuals to be born in this blessed land.

[Chitralekha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here i complete yet another book by Sanjeev sanyal written on the occasion of completion of 75 years of bharats independence.. The book is an overview of 75 extraordinary bharatiya who influenced and inspired the country..The book gives crisp and "to the point" summaries and unbiased overview of their biography and  achievements..The unique peculiarity of sanyals books is always the" easy to grasp"language and concise but important written matter..which makes the reader easily finish the books fast yet imbibe a lot of knowledge which the reader would be never aware of.. The authors have covered individuals not only from politics but also from wide areas like art, literature, sports, entertainment, science and environment, and most importantly military and defence.. Have you ever heard of padmanabh Gautam, yogendra singh yadav, Mahendra nath mulla, sagat singh..who played important role in our battles against our neighbours like Kargil wars.. The summary of each of these personalities is not more than 4 pages which makes reader easy to read the book.. The book is a review of the course of 75 years post independence through the narrations and review of these 75 people.. It tells about those people who made remarkable contributions during that time but  names faded from public memory..

The book is an excellent overview of the important contributors who have made the bharat what it is today post independence..

The book can be read during one's leisure times.it is an excellent book also for students who want to know Indian history post independence..Read the book so that our future generations are aware of these personalities before the names get erased from the minds of future generations..

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had given a brisk read to this book early last year. And I returned to this tome with a different attentiveness after understanding the conditions under which the book came into being. Knowing the constraints, the exclusions, the arguments, and the sheer editorial anxiety behind the list changes how the book reads. It no longer feels like a confident declaration of who mattered most; instead, it reveals itself as a negotiated artefact, shaped by hesitation, compromise, and an acute awareness of incompleteness. This knowledge does not weaken the book. If anything, it deepens it.

From the outset, what becomes apparent is that this is not a book written from a position of omniscience. The struggle to arrive at seventy-five names is not concealed but embedded into the spirit of the project. India is too large, too crowded with achievement, and too thick with memory for any such list to be innocent. Every inclusion is shadowed by an exclusion. Every name chosen quietly summons the ghost of another left out.

The authors seem fully conscious of this, and that awareness lends the book a rare humility. One senses that the list is not an assertion of final judgement but a carefully argued proposal, offered with the expectation of disagreement.

That expectation is justified. Even as a reader sympathetic to the project, I found myself instinctively asking the very questions the authors anticipate:

1) Why this person and not that one?

2) Why does a towering figure from music or classical arts not appear, while someone less visible but institutionally significant does?

But this irritation gradually transforms into something more productive. The book subtly asks the reader to interrogate their own criteria for inspiration.

1) Is inspiration the emotional resonance of art, the visibility of celebrity, or the longevity of fame?

2) Or is it something quieter: structural change, risk-taking, institution-building, or intellectual disruption?

The decision to avoid the predictable dominance of politicians, film stars, and sports icons is one of the book’s quiet triumphs. By deliberately widening the frame to include soldiers, scientists, administrators, entrepreneurs, historians, reformers, and thinkers, the book challenges the popular economy of recognition. It reminds us how unevenly admiration is distributed in public life, and how much of a nation’s transformation is carried out by figures who rarely become household names. In doing so, it also resists a shallow understanding of inspiration as spectacle.

Many of the people featured here inspired the country not through charisma but through competence, persistence, and strategic imagination.

Equally significant is the temporal boundary the authors impose on themselves. By restricting the scope to individuals whose principal contributions occurred after Independence, the book avoids collapsing modern India into the freedom movement alone.

This is not an act of disrespect toward pre-1947 giants, but a deliberate effort to focus on the country’s postcolonial evolution. India after Independence was not merely inheriting freedom; it was inventing itself—often clumsily, often under pressure, often without precedent.

By anchoring the book in this period, the authors foreground the intellectual, administrative, cultural, and strategic labour required to turn an idea of India into a functioning reality.

This choice inevitably produces difficult omissions. The absence of figures whose moral authority looms large over the national imagination is striking, even jarring.

Yet that discomfort serves a purpose. It forces the reader to confront a subtle truth: inspiration in a mature nation cannot rely indefinitely on foundational myths. At some point, the story must shift from origin to evolution, from liberation to construction. ‘Iconic Indians’ occupies precisely that uneasy middle space, where the nation is no longer being born but is still struggling to define what it wants to become.

The effort to distribute representation across geography, disciplines, and decades is another defining feature of the book. The authors are candid about the difficulty of this task. Some regions inevitably dominate national consciousness because of historical, economic, or institutional concentration. Correcting that imbalance entirely would mean distorting reality in another way.

The book settles for a compromise: not perfect equity, but visible effort. As a result, the list feels neither parochial nor artificially inclusive. It reflects the unevenness of India itself, while still pushing back against metropolitan monopolies of recognition.

One of the most revealing tensions in the book emerges around collective achievement. Modern India is full of moments shaped by teams, alliances, and shared decisions. Yet a book structured around individuals must, by necessity, reduce collective processes to representative figures.

The authors acknowledge this discomfort openly. Choosing one name to symbolise a larger historical episode is an act of condensation, not erasure. It is a judgement call rather than a moral verdict. Understanding this makes the book easier to read generously. It becomes clear that absence does not imply insignificance, and inclusion does not claim exclusivity.

What gives the book emotional coherence, despite its list-based structure, is the way these lives begin to speak to one another across pages. Read sequentially, the profiles accumulate into something larger than biography. They offer a ringside view of India’s post-Independence transformation, not by siloing politics, economics, culture, and science, but by letting them overlap.

The same decades recur from different angles. Decisions in one domain ripple into others. Personal rivalries, collaborations, disagreements, and mutual influences surface quietly, reminding us that history is not a set of isolated achievements but a dense web of interactions.

It is particularly striking how often these figures knew one another, argued with one another, or actively opposed one another. Inspiration here is not sanitised by harmony. Disagreement, even bitterness, is part of the story. This refusal to smooth over conflict is one of the book’s most humanising qualities. These are not icons frozen into symbolic poses; they are people with egos, blind spots, rivalries, and contradictions. Their greatness lies not in moral perfection but in consequence.

Stylistically, the book resists becoming a tome. The authors are transparent about the limits of their expertise and the unevenness of available material. Some lives are richly documented; others survive only in fragments.

Rather than pretending to exhaustive authority, the book opts for credibility and clarity. References are provided where necessary, but the tone remains accessible. This balance keeps the book readable without diluting its seriousness. It invites engagement rather than deference.

What surprised me most, however, was the way the book reshaped my sense of Indian history. By forcing a break from categorical thinking—political history here, cultural history there—it creates a holistic narrative that conventional textbooks often fail to achieve.

The story of modern India emerges not as a sequence of events but as a mosaic of personal journeys. Institutions appear as extensions of temperament. Policies feel inseparable from personalities. Achievements are revealed as the outcome of persistence rather than inevitability.

Knowing the labour behind the book—the fact-checking, the disagreements, the editorial negotiations, the struggle with incomplete archives—adds another layer to its reading. It underscores how fragile historical memory can be and how dependent it is on acts of curation.

The acknowledgements, often skimmed by readers, take on greater significance here. They remind us that even a book about individuals is ultimately a collective effort, shaped by editors, researchers, archivists, photographers, and institutional support. Inspiration, once again, reveals itself as a shared enterprise.

In the end, ‘Iconic Indians’ does not ask to be accepted as a definitive canon. It asks to be read as a conversation starter, a provocation, and a lens through which to reconsider what it means to matter in a nation as complex as India. Its greatest achievement is not the list itself, but the unease it generates—the productive discomfort of realising how contingent recognition is, how many lives intersect with history without being fully absorbed into it.

The book leaves you with an urge not to memorize names, but to argue with them, supplement them, and rethink them.

It subtly shifts the question from “Who inspired India?” to “How do we recognise inspiration at all?”

And in doing so, it offers something more durable than reverence: a habit of critical admiration.

Most recommended.

[bhavya kapoor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Big picture:
Short biography / achievements of 75 extra-ordinary Indians
Have covered icons from all walks of life - Politics, Sports, Literature, Defence and Bollywood to name a few

Review:
Should be shared with young Indians as a quick primer of key influencers that have shaped India post-independence
Brief summaries making it an easy read