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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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In The Presence of Greatness
The Telegraph 25th January 2014
Two friends recently praised me for my ‘bravery’: one when I suggested that the Congress should look beyond the dynasty; another when I called Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri stooges of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. In truth, both were rather ordinary and obvious things to say, requiring neither special knowledge nor exceptional courage. Far braver was the claim that I made some years ago in the columns of The Telegraph, to the effect that a certain Kota Shivaram Karanth was arguably as great an Indian as Rabindranath Tagore.
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Our Best and Worst Prime Ministers
The Telegraph 11th January 2014
In his recent press conference, Dr Manmohan Singh said he would leave it to history and historians to judge his tenure as Prime Minister. This column provides an interim verdict, by assessing his record against that of other men and women who have held the post.
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Historians and Newspapers
The Telegraph 28th December 2013
For a very long time, historians of modern India relied largely on government records—printed as well as unpublished. Files of different departments, deposited in state and national archives, were the staple source for the writing of dissertations, research papers, and monographs. Some historians innovatively tapped the private papers of politicians and social reformers; others reached out into oral history, conducting interviews with eye-witnesses or participants in important historical events. Yet the periodical press per se remained an under-utilized resource.
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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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