/Ramachandra Guha

About Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), which was chosen by The Guardian as one of the ten best books on cricket ever written. India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007; revised edition, 2017) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and as a book of the decade in the the Times of London and The Hindu.

Constitution@75 Ambedkar’s Warnings


The Telegraph

Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is, that Man was vile. B. R. Ambedkar, speaking to the Constituent Assembly of India, November 1948 The Indian Constitution came into force on 26th [...]

Warts and All


The Telegraph

Shortly before he demitted office as Prime Minister in 2014, Manmohan Singh said that history would judge him more generously than the media was then doing. Now, reading the outpouring of adulatory tributes to Singh after his passing, this historian is led to wonder—are these eulogies altogether merited? Was he the wise, all-knowing, and apparently flawless [...]

Baba’s Family


The Telegraph

The first time I knew myself to be in the presence of greatness was while sitting under a shamiana in New Delhi’s Modern School sometime in the last quarter of 1974. I had recently joined college, and a group of friends had taken me along to hear a music concert. The performers were Ali Akbar Khan, [...]

Nehru’s Patel


The Telegraph

In about a week’s time we shall mark the sixtieth anniversary of the death of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This column focuses on one key aspect of Nehru’s political career, his collaboration with Vallabhbhai Patel. These two men worked shoulder-to-shoulder during the freedom struggle and in the early years of Independence. They had their [...]

Among the Mizos


The Telegraph

Last month I spent several stimulating days in Mizoram. I had some knowledge of the state’s political history, met numerous Mizos in the course of my life, but never visited the state before. I flew first to Guwahati, where I caught up with some old friends, gloried in my sightings of the Brahmaputra, and spoke on [...]

A Secular Saint


The Telegraph

An Indian I greatly admire is the social worker and pioneer of the Chipko movement, Chandi Prasad Bhatt. My first meeting with him, when I was in my early twenties, had an transformative impact on my life. I have met him many times since; each encounter providing fresh insights into the moral, political and environmental challenges [...]

In Praise of Madhu Dandavate


The Telegraph

The Indian socialist tradition is now moribund, but there was a time when it had a profound and mostly salutary influence on politics and society. Yet few people now know of its past vigour and dynamism. The Congress, the Communists, the regional parties, the Ambedkarites, and (especially in recent years) the Jana Sangh and the BJP—all [...]

Hindutva as Pop Culture


The Telegraph

In recent years, a stream of books and articles have appeared seeking to analyse the theory and practice of Hindutva. They have sought to alternatively explain, critique, or justify the rising influence of the BJP and the RSS. Some have focused on organizational questions, on the building of social networks on the ground and how they [...]

Caring for the Earth


The Telegraph

The climate crisis has brought human ill-treatment of nature forcibly to our attention, though of course India’s environmental problems are by no means the product of global warming alone. The staggeringly high rates of air pollution in the cities of Northern India, the ongoing devastation of the Himalaya by carelessly planned roads and dams, the depletion [...]

A Godson Remembers: Thammu Achaya and Indian Food History


The Telegraph

My first editor, Rukun Advani, once described himself as ‘a composite hybrid of the Indian and the Anglo-European’, who sought to reconcile ‘within himself those varying cultural influences which chauvinistic nationalists could only see as contradictions.’ This self-characterization I might avow as my own. One mark of the Anglo-European in me is that, unlike members of [...]