History – Page 7 – ::Welcome to Ramachandra Guha.in::

THE WORLD’S FIRST ANTI-DAM MOVEMENT

The Hindu

Some fifteen years ago, when the Narmada Bachao Andolan was at its height, the ecologist Madhav Gadgil told me about that movement’s forgotten predecessor. Back in the 1920s, the peasants of Mulshi Peta, near Pune, had protested against the construction of a dam being built with government support by the industrial house of the Tatas. The [...]

EXTREMISM THEN AND NOW

The Hindu

Six weeks after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the (then undivided) Communist Party of India held a party congress in Calcutta. The General Secretary of the CPI was P. C. Joshi, who was of the opinion that the party must support Jawaharlal Nehru’s new Government. He believed that Nehru’s Cabinet represented a wide spectrum of public [...]

THE TATTERED IDEAL

The Hindu

My friend T. R. Ramakrishna, a sportswriter and sports buff of an uncommon intelligence and senstivity, recently sent me a book published in the past which speaks directly to the present. The book is called Mexico 1968, and it was written by Christopher Brasher, who had been a ‘hare‘ in Roger Bannister’s successful attempt to break [...]

THE CAREER OF A CONCEPT

The Hindu

In an interview given recently by the Pakistani cricketer-politician Imran Khan to Newsweek magazine, he said: ‘My vote bank is increasing’. To whom do we owe the term ‘vote bank’? I wager few readers of this column can answer the question. Nor can Imran Khan, although—like the rest of us, its use comes naturally to him. [...]

THE LUCK OF THE SOUTH

The Hindu

One of my all-time favourite places is the temple of Somanathapura. It is less visited than other famous Hoysala shrines such as Belur and Halebidu, in part because it lies off the beaten track. The words ‘beaten’ and ‘track’ need to be taken literally. For two-thirds of the way one drives along the (now fairly decent) [...]

THE DAY EDWINA DIED

The Hindu

The Indian public in general, and the Indian press in particular, has shown a keen and perhaps excessive interest in the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. That they were intimates is not to be doubted–but did the bonds ever move from the merely emotional to the tellingly physical? That one was the Prime Minister [...]

CHURCHILL PÉRE AND INDIA

The Hindu

In the last days of 1884, an English politician named Randolph Churchill landed in Bombay. Then in his mid thirties, he was a rising star of the Conservative Party, who had made his name by a series of withering attacks on the policies in Africa of the great Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Churchill was [...]

THE LAST QUAKER IN INDIA

The Hindu

On London’s busy Euston Road, opposite the even busier Euston Station, stands a stone building supported by two large pillars. This is Friends House, the headquarters of the Society of Friends, who are also known as the Quakers. Now, in 2007, the entry to the premises is through the garden at the side; but when Mahatma [...]

SCOTTISH INTERNATIONALIST

The Hindu

‘India lives in her villages’, said Mahatma Gandhi. This is an injunction that the environmental movement in India has taken very seriously indeed. Thus scholars and activists have argued about such matters as the commercial bias in forest policy, the disappearance of species, the drying up of village tanks, and the displacement of adivasis by large [...]

KASHMIR THEN AS NOW

The Hindu

Among the minor figures of modern Indian history, one who has long intrigued me is the civil servant and journalist A. D. Gorwala. Born in 1900, Gorwala studied in Bombay and England before joining the Indian Civil Service in 1924. He served in rural Sindh and in the Secretariat, acquiring a high reputation for efficiency and [...]