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The Moral Evolution of Mohandas K Gandhi

The Telegraph

The American writer Louis Fischer is best known for his book The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, which Richard Attenborough drew upon while making his award-winning film of 1982. Fischer’s book was published in 1949, a year after Gandhi’s assassination. Seven years previously, he had written a much slimmer (and now far less well known) volume entitled [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2021-03-28T22:05:17+00:00January 28th, 2021|Categories: History|Tags: A Week with Gandhi, Henry Polak, Independence movement, Jinnah, Kasturbha Gandhi, Louis Fischer, Millie Graham, Narayana Guru, Sonja Schlesin, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, ambedkar, caste, gender, race|

In Praise of Archives and Archivists

The Telegraph

In the third week of January 2020—exactly a year ago—I was in New Delhi, working in the collections of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I first discovered the archival riches of the NMML in the early 1980s, and explored them most fully while living in Delhi between 1988 and 1994. In those years I would [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2021-03-28T21:40:28+00:00January 16th, 2021|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Abhishekh Choudhary biographer of Atal Behari Vajpayee, Akshata Mukul biographer of Jayaprakash Narayan, B R Nanda, Hari Dev Sharma, NMML, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Rahul Ramagundam biographer of George Fernandes, Ravinder Kumar|

A Brief History of Cults of Personality

The Telegraph

The term ‘cult of personality’ is thought to have been first used with regard to the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Stalin died in 1953, after more than two decades in power; three years later, in a speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, his successor Nikita Khrushchev spoke of how [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-10-27T18:44:21+00:00August 1st, 2020|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: BJP, Dictatorship, Indira Gandhi, Narendra Modi, democracy, emergency|

Get The Best Minds on Board

Hindustan Times

Years ago, working in the archives in New Delhi, I came across a brief, handwritten, letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to C. Rajagopalachari. It was dated 30th July 1947, and it read: ‘My dear Rajaji, This is to remind you that you have to approach Shanmukham Chetty—this must be done soon. I have seen Ambedkar and he [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-05-05T23:20:57+00:00April 5th, 2020|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: B N Rau, B R Ambedkar, C H Bhabha, C Rajagopalachari, Covid 19, Jean Dréze, N Gopalaswami Ayyangar, Narendra Modi, Nehru, Reetika Khera, S P Mookerjee, Shanmukham Chetty, Sukumar Sen, Tarlok Singh, V P Menon, Virus pandemic, bipartisan|

The Fourth Crisis of The Republic

Hindustan Times

As I have written before, if India had been a start-up in August 1947 not even the most venturesome of venture capitalists would have invested in it. No new nation was born in more inhospitable circumstances. The Partition of the country had been awful enough, in the scale of its violence and the mass displacement of [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-03-25T21:35:48+00:00January 26th, 2020|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Anis Kidwai, Constitution, Nehru, Sardar Patel, ambedkar|

The Cities That Shaped Gandhi

The Cities That Gandhi Shaped

Mahatma Gandhi famously claimed that ‘India lives in her villages’. The focus of his political and social work, and his philosophical writings, was that India was essentially an agrarian civilization, and that it must remain that way. In fact, India had always lived in her towns too. Our epics spoke of the fabled cities of Ayodhya [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-10-17T01:47:58+00:00October 6th, 2019|Categories: History, Biography|Tags: A Frank Friendship, Achyut Yagnik, Ajaml Khan, Brijkrishna Chandiwala, C Rajagopalachari, Charles Freer Andrews, Eric Itzkin, G A Natesan, Gandhi In Bombay, Gandhi In London, Gandhi's Johannesburg, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, Howard Spodek, James Hunt, John Ruskin, Kenneth Gillion, Sandhya Mehta, Suchitra Sheth, Unto This Last, Usha Thakkar, non violence, pluralism|

Searching For Gandhi

Hindustan Times

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) run to one hundred volumes. Many years before I read these volumes, one by one, their Chief Editor, Professor K. Swaminathan, had satirised scholars like myself in verse: ‘Hundred hefty haystacks Cluttering up the landscape Hold within their entrails hidden Half a dozen needles. Researchers of the future With [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-01-27T17:00:03+00:00October 2nd, 2019|Categories: History, Biography|Tags: "The greatest man ever", Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Deepa Bhatnagar, Dr N Balakrishnan, Hari Dev Sharma, Isa Sarid, John Haynes Holmes, Joseph Doke, Kallenbach Papers, Louis Fischer, Mahadev Desai, NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Pyarelal, Sonjna Schlesin, Supriya Gandhi, archives list for Gandhi, biography, the second most important person in India’s freedom movement|

Gandhi and The RSS: The Historical Record

The Telegraph

This column appears days before the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. That anniversary shall be observed at a time when a former pracharark of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh is the country’s Prime Minister, and when the RSS exercises a hegemonic hold over our political and social life. On 2nd October, nice things will be said [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-10-17T01:30:22+00:00September 28th, 2019|Categories: History, Politics and Current Affairs|Tags: Bunch of Thoughts, Hindu Mahasabha, M S Golwalkar, communalism|

Twelve Apostles Of Mahatma Gandhi

Hindustan Times

Many years ago, while working in the Manuscripts Section of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, I found a postcard by an unknown Tamil to that great Indian, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, ‘Rajaji’. Written in the late 1950s, it described Nehru, Patel, and Rajaji as being the ‘heart, hand, and head’ of Mahatma Gandhi respectively. This was so [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2020-01-27T16:54:17+00:00September 1st, 2019|Categories: History|Tags: Acharya Kriplani, B R Ambedkar, C Rajagopalachari, Indian independence, J C Kumarappa, Jawarlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan, Kamladevi Chattopadhyay, Madeline Slade, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Mira Behn, Mridula Sarabhai, Prabhavati Devi Narayan, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel, democracy, environment, ‘I have no Constitution. All that is left are Amendments’|

Jallianwala Bagh In Memory And History

The Telegraph

On 13th April 1919—exactly a hundred years ago—a British Brigadier-General named Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a crowd gathered in a place called Jallianwala Bagh, not far from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Close to five hundred people were killed in the firing. Folklore has magnified the figure to a thousand, and more. [...]

By Ramachandra Guha|2019-05-02T17:11:48+00:00April 13th, 2019|Categories: History|Tags: Imperialism, Kalinath Ray, Mahatma Gandhi, Martydom to Freedom: 100 Years of Jallianwala Bagh, Ramesh Ramachandran, Tribune, british rule|