December 2003 – ::Welcome to Ramachandra Guha.in::

CHURCHILL IN BANGALORE

The Hindu

In October 1896 Winston Churchill reached Bangalore, then not a bustling megapolis but a small, sleepy, cantonment town. He liked the climate: ‘the sun even at midday is temperate and the mornings and evenings are fresh and cool’. He liked the house alloted to him: ‘a magnificent pink and white stucco palace in the middle of [...]

RECONCILING THE NAGAS

The Telegraph

Since its birth, the Indian nation-state has been challenged by rebellion and insurgency. In the late forties it was the Communist Party of India, who launched a countrywide insurrection claiming that the freedom we got from the British was false (in their evocatively pernicious slogan, ‘Ye Azadi Jhoota Hai!’). In the fifties, it was the Dravidians [...]