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A Couple and Their Country, The Telegraph

May 20th, 2023|

I have had a long-standing interest in South Africa, and in 1995 briefly contemplated moving there to work. The country had just had its first multi-racial election, and the great Nelson Mandela had been elected President. I was deeply curious to see, at first-hand, what the land and its people would make of their hard won freedom. In the event [...]

Appreciating Ambedkar, The Telegraph

April 8th, 2023|

In my personal list of books every Indian must read, four stand paramount. These, in order of their year of first publication, are M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (1917), B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936), and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946). These works are both timely and timeless, speaking to the India in [...]

Chipko@50: A Legacy Scorned, The Telegraph

March 15th, 2023|

On the 27th of March 1973, a group of peasants in Mandal, a village in the upper Alakananda Valley, stopped a group of commercial loggers from felling a patch of ash trees by threatening them to hug them. These innovatively non-violent methods used in Mandal were emulated by villages in other parts of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, likewise seeking to protest [...]

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’.