Ramachandra Guha is a historian based in Bengaluru. His books include India After Gandhi, A Corner of a Foreign Field, Environmentalism: A Global History, and Gandhi Before India. He tweets as @Ram_Guha
Articles by Ramachandra Guha
A Corner of a Foreign Field: Read an excerpt on Dalit cricketer Palwankar Baloo
At the heart of Ramachandra Guha’s book is this forgotten hero. Read an excerpt on Baloo’s performance during the first All India Team tour of England, in 1911.
Updated on Sep 07, 2024 02:59 PM IST
Standing with Gandhi in Ahmedabad, writes Ramachandra Guha
Ahmedabad was once Gandhi’s city. Yet, in recent decades, Ahmedabad has wilfully, deliberately, turned its back on the legacy of its greatest resident
Updated on May 15, 2020 02:39 PM IST
Ramachandra Guha
Tracing Japan’s engagement with modern India
There is a stock, stereotypical, image of the Japanese tourist, who rushes to and through a monument or shrine in a foreign country, clicking away. Things were once different in the 19th and early 20th centuries when these came as seekers and pilgrims, rather than pleasure-seekers
Updated on Dec 29, 2019 08:23 AM IST
From Indo-Pak to Chindia and back to Indo-Pak, writes Ramachandra Guha
Since May 2014, there has been a rapid fall in India’s standing in the world — from being seen with China as an emerging global power to being coupled with Pakistan as an insular, inward-looking nation plagued by authoritarianism and religious bigotry
Updated on Dec 15, 2019 10:48 AM IST
Lucky is the country without a glorious history, writes Ramachandra Guha
What was notable about my trip to Canada was how little past achievements were invoked in the election campaign. No leader talked of Making Canada Great Again. Whosoever is the next PM is not going to promise to undo 800 years of slavery. Nor is he going to invoke World Wars I and II
Updated on Oct 19, 2019 08:45 PM IST
The cities that shaped Gandhi, the cities that Gandhi shaped
All through his Indian years, too, Gandhi’s life was deeply intertwined with the city
Updated on Oct 05, 2019 04:50 PM IST
A biographer’s journey: In search of the Mahatma
The Collected Works had all the known letters that Gandhi himself wrote; but virtually none of the letters that he received or responded to.
Updated on Oct 01, 2023 08:47 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Ramachandra Guha
The twelve Apostles of Gandhi
The men and women who — within the government, or as part of the Opposition and civil society — carried forward Mahatma Gandhi’s work. They humanised power and held it to account. They fought for economic self-reliance, equality and religious pluralism.
Updated on Sep 25, 2019 10:01 PM IST
Hindustan Times, New Delhi | Ramachandra Guha
The many tragedies of the Kashmiri Pandits | Opinion
Through the 1990s, as the Pandits sought, heroically, to rebuild their lives outside Kashmir, they found themselves facing a fourth tragedy—that they were becoming the cat’s paw of a rising Hindutva.
Updated on Sep 08, 2019 04:22 PM IST
Remembering Kamal Joshi: A hillman and a true national hero
Local heroes such as Kamal Joshi, who silently, self-effacingly, serve society, with no interest in fame or power or money, do not get the attention of the media. To be sure, they do not want it either. Yet it is these ‘local’ heroes who more truly embody the spirit of democracy and freedom in our Republic.
Published on Jul 27, 2019 07:05 PM IST
Here is my all-time India One-Day Eleven
In choosing this eleven, I exclude from consideration those whose careers ended before the first World Cup
Updated on Jul 13, 2019 06:57 PM IST
Writers who stood up for what they believed in
The correspondence between Rolland and Tagore makes for instructive reading now, a century after it was first initiated. One can absolutely appreciate writers being attached to the language, culture, and traditions of the country in which they reside
Updated on Jun 29, 2019 08:08 PM IST
Girish Karnad, the greatest Kannadiga of his age
His courage in standing up to fundamentalists has led some to celebrate Karnad as an exemplary ‘activist’ and ‘public intellectual’. This, to my mind, is a mischaracterisation. We should remember him rather as a great playwright and superb actor, and as a profoundly civilised human being
Updated on Jun 15, 2019 10:34 PM IST
Godse worship goes mainstream in India
The cult of Nathuram Godse is no more marginal. Its members include not only BJP MPs but also prominent Sangh ideologues. Its representatives sit in Parliament, and may even be in the Council of Ministers
Updated on Jun 01, 2019 06:09 PM IST
Meetings the patriots in deeds, not words
It was a privilege to have met patriots such as BS Pundir and Sher Singh Mewar; theirs was a quiet, understated patriotism, not a loud or hectoring one
Updated on May 04, 2019 04:47 PM IST
Elections in 1951-52 and 2019: Not much difference
Despite the passage of time, the increase in the size of the electorate, and the economic and social changes that have taken place in the intervening decades, much of what was observed in 1952 remains relevant to what we are witnessing in 2019
Updated on Apr 20, 2019 07:10 PM IST
Recovering the spirit of the Rowlatt Satyagraha, 100 years later
Notably, while the scale, intensity and character of the protests varied enormously, one feature was constant: the display of Hindu-Muslim harmony
Published on Apr 06, 2019 08:28 PM IST