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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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Democracy and Violence: in India and Beyond
Economic and Political Weekly 06th April 2013
In about a year’s time, the citizens of India will vote in their sixteenth General Elections. The last such exercise, held in May 2009, showcased a bewildering variety of parties and politicians. Some 700 million adults were eligible to vote; about 400 million actually voted, to choose five hundred and forty-three members of the national Parliament. The Republic of India also has twenty-eight states, in which elections are likewise held on a five-year cycle. Altogether, many more Indians have freely chosen their political representatives than have citizens of Western democracies of far greater antiquity.
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The Miracles of Mao
The Telegraph 06th April 2013
Marxism claims to offer a materialist approach to history, where class relations and the forces of technology are given more importance than the doings of individuals. In practice, however, political regimes based on professedly Marxist principles have indulged in an unprecedented worship of their leaders. Communist parties the world over brook no criticism of the Holy Trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. No Prime Minister or President of a bourgeois democracy has ever experienced the slavish adulation enjoyed by Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s.
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Patriarchy & Prejudice
The Telegraph 16th February 2013
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
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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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