India: the essential lives

Founded Madhyamaka Buddhism and its logic of emptiness.

Sanskrit's supreme dramatist; Shakuntala reached Goethe.

Gave place-value, an accurate π, and a rotating Earth in 499 CE.

First to treat zero as a number and define rules for negatives.

Systematised Advaita Vedanta and reorganised Hindu monasticism.

Founded Indian heavy industry and the philanthropic corporate model behind it.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

Physician of Unani medicine who built its modern colleges and led the Indian National Congress.

Turned nonviolent resistance into a working political technology.

Founded Arya Vaidya Sala at Kottakkal and industrialised classical Ayurvedic pharmacy.

Self-taught genius whose notebooks still yield theorems a century later.

Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.

Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.

Bose–Einstein statistics; the boson is named after him.

Led the campaign that won Ayurveda statutory recognition in independent India.

Worked out at nineteen why some stars must collapse into black holes.

Exported Transcendental Meditation and revived classical Ayurveda as a global health programme.

Turned yoga into a precise therapeutic method taught in clinics and studios worldwide.

The century's most celebrated pulse diagnostician; chaired India's central Ayurvedic council.

Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.

Pioneer of reverse pharmacology, translating classical formulas into clinical trials.

Founded the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico and trained the first Western practitioners.

Endocrinologist turned global voice of mind-body medicine; contested by clinical researchers.

Philosopher of seed sovereignty and critic of industrial agriculture.

Freed tens of thousands of children from bonded labour.

Made yoga and Ayurveda a mass movement and a corporate empire; repeatedly censured over health claims.