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Ramachandra Guha is an author and columnist based in Bangalore. Born in Dehradun in 1958, he studied at St. Stephen’s College, the Delhi School of Economics, and the Indian Institute of Management at Kolkata, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the history and prehistory of the Chipko movement.
Now a full-time writer, he has previously taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Sundaraja Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science.
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| ABOUT The Website |
| This website presents a selection of Ramachandra Guha’s essays and columns. The writings are placed into five categories: |
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History |
| History reproduces columns that analyse interesting or important events and controveries of the 19th and 20th centuries. |
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Politics And Current Affairs |
| Politics and Current Affairs reproduces writings on secularism, modernity democracy, diversity, and other contentious themes in contemporary India. |
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Biography |
| Biography presents word-portraits of a range of fascinating or forgotten individuals in India and beyond.
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Culture |
| Culture presents reflections on such non-serious but non-trivial matters as music, literature and travel.
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Longer Essays |
| Longer Essays features a selection of Guha’s more reflective and extended articles (5,000 words or more) on history and politics.
Drawing on writings of the past decade-and-a-half, this website of Ramachandra Guha’s writings will be continuously updated to include his columns as they appear. Through these rich and varied essays, Guha seeks to capture the modern history of what he terms the ‘most interesting country in the world’.
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Carpets Red and Green
Hindustan Times 20th July 2014
Shortly after the Trinamool Congress came to power in West Bengal, I was invited to speak at a university convocation in that state. I flew in the day before the event, and was met at Kolkata airport by the university’s Registrar. A three hour drive to our destination followed. I was then taken on a tour of the campus, concluding with a visit to the auditorium where the convocation was to be held. Shortly before dinner the Registrar dropped me at the guesthouse, saying he would pick me up at 9.30 a.m., half-an-hour before the convocation was to start.
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Paranoia and Triumphalism
The Telegraph 12th July 2014
In his recent book, History in the Making, J. H. Elliot makes an interesting distinction between two different kinds of nationalist ideologies. On the one hand, there is the ‘chosen nation’ syndrome, where a country is said to have special ‘spiritual, biological, [or] racial’ characteristics’ that shall make it dominant in global affairs. On the other hand, there is the ‘victim nation’ syndrome, where a poor or defeated country tends to attribute its ‘misfortunes to others and to ignore or disregard failings closer to home’.
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Four Lankan Masters
The Telegraph 28th June 2014
In forty years of watching international cricket, one of the absolute highlights was an innings I saw by the stocky Sri Lankan Duleep Mendis. This was at Delhi’s Ferozeshah Kotla ground, in the first week of November 1975. Sri Lanka, who had not yet been awarded Test status, were touring India, and playing the North Zone in preparation for the unofficial ‘Tests’ to follow.
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A Writer’s Comments
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Samanth Subramanian
In India, where the model of a liberal society has been fantastically and precariously crafted by the nation's founding fathers, there are few more vigilant monitors of liberalism than Ramachandra Guha. His work as a historian is simultaneously erudite and accessible; his writing on cricket is ardent and, for devotees of the sport, highly enjoyable; his magazine and newspaper articles provide perspective and insight.
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In Praise Of Ramachandra Guha
Look hard enough, and you can find certain similarities between Niall Ferguson, the current holder of the Philippe Roman chair at the LSE, and Ram Guha, who, it was announced last week, will succeed him in September. Both men like to engage audiences wider than the nearest senior common room; both have a pronounced impishness; and neither shirks from controversy (Guha has described the polemics of Arundhati Roy as "ventures into social science ... self-regarding and self-indulgent ... and also self-contradictory"). But Guha, in both career and writing, is a far more various creature than most of his predecessors.
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