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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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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For a very long time, historians of modern India relied largely on government records—printed as well as unpublished.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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The Cricketing Traditions of Gandhi's Kathiawar
The Telegraph 30th November 2013
When, in September 1888, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi travelled to London to study law, he was carrying letters of introduction to four people. One was Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, who also hailed from Kathiawar. Gandhi did not meet Ranji then, nor did the two come across each another in subsequent decades, when one became a major political leader, and the other a famous cricketer and ruler of a princely state. So far as I can tell, these two Kathiawaris did not meet face-to-face—but they did meet in after-life, in the pages of a novel by an Englishman which cast them both as students in Rajkot, with the wily bania—playing for the plebeian Kattywar High School—bowling googlies against the aristocratic batsman representing the Rajkumar College.
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The Man Who Knew Almost Everything
The Nation 30th November 2013
Eric Hobsbwam, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century. Little, Brown and Company. 213. Pp xv+319.
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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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