::Welcome to Ramachandra Guha.in::

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.
READ MORE.....

ABOUT The Website

This website presents a selection of Ramachandra Guha’s essays and columns. The writings are placed into five categories:

History

History reproduces columns that analyse interesting or important events and controveries of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Politics And Current Affairs

Politics and Current Affairs reproduces writings on secularism, modernity democracy, diversity, and other contentious themes in contemporary India.

Biography

Biography presents word-portraits of a range of fascinating or forgotten individuals in India and beyond.

Culture

Culture presents reflections on such non-serious but non-trivial matters as music, literature and travel.

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’.

Nehru's Nationalism - and Ours
The Telegraph 16th November 2013

One of the books I read as a boy was the autobiography of the mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. I grew up in Dehradun, in a home with fine views of the lower Himalaya. From the nearby hill station of Mussoorie—which we visited often—one could see the great snow peaks of Nanda Devi, Trishul, and Bandar Poonch. As an asthmatic child, I couldn’t climb steep slopes myself, which may be why I read Tenzing’s memoir over and over again. READ MORE.....

Gandhi's English Housemates
The Independent 26th October 2013

In April 1931, Mohandas K. Gandhi attended an inter-faith meeting in Bombay. He had just been released from one of his many terms in prison. Now, while listening to Christian hymns and Sanskrit slokas, he had as his companions the Admiral’s daughter Madeleine Slade (known in India as Mirabehn) and the Oxford scholar Verrier Elwin. Thus, as Elwin wrote to his family afterwards, ‘this “Enemy of the British Empire” sat for his prayer between two Britishers!’ READ MORE.....

Some African Gandhians
The Telegraph 05th October 2013

I have been reading the memoirs of the Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. Here Ngugi writes of how, as a little boy in the 1940s, he saw pictures of a mysterious bespectacled man in the shop of an Indian merchant near his village. A schoolteacher told Ngugi of who that man was and what he meant READ MORE.....

A Writer’s Comments

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.
READ MORE....

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.
READ MORE....