Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 2

Appreciating Ambedkar, The Telegraph

In my personal list of books every Indian must read, four stand paramount. These, in order of their year of first publication, are M. K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (1917), B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936), and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946). These works are both timely and timeless, speaking to the India in which they were published but continuing to speak to an India that would exist long after the writers themselves had gone.

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Chipko@50: A Legacy Scorned, The Telegraph

On the 27th of March 1973, a group of peasants in Mandal, a village in the upper Alakananda Valley, stopped a group of commercial loggers from felling a patch of ash trees by threatening them to hug them. These innovatively non-violent methods used in Mandal were emulated by villages in other parts of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, likewise seeking to protest forests in their locality.

It is now fifty years since the birth of what we know as the Chipko Andolan. Chipko was followed by a ...

India Against Gandhi, Financial Times, Weekend

Born in 1958, a decade after Gandhi’s death, I grew up in an atmosphere of veneration towards the Mahatma. One of my great uncles helped edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another founded a pioneering initiative in community health inspired by Gandhi. These familial influences were consolidated and deepened by the public culture of the time. Gandhi was the Father of the Nation, the leader of the struggle for freedom against British rule, whose techniques of non-violent resistance had wo...

Attenborough Revisited, The Telegraph

This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Attenborough’s papers are located in an archive an hour’s train ride from London. Visiting them recently, I found several files of reviews of the most significant (some would say only worthwhile) film that the director made. They included an assessment in The Telegraph, written by the young Tavleen Singh, who called Attenborough’s opus ‘easily one of the three or four greatest films I have ever se...

In Praise of Ian Jack, The Telegraph

In the course of my life, I have met many remarkable men, who have distinguished themselves as scholars, writers, artists, sportsmen, scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists. These men, almost without exception, have had a high sense of self-regard. As the Hindustani expression goes, ‘apne ko bahut samajhte hain’. Some are crudely boastful about their achievements; others practise one or other form of what is known as ‘humble bragging’. Either way, within minutes of first meeting y...

An Ecological Pioneer, The Telegraph

In 1922, a professor at Lucknow University named Radhakamal Mukherjee published a book called Principles of Comparative Economics. Reading the book one hundred years later, I was struck by the attention it paid to the impact of the natural environment on the social and economic life of Indian villages. Mukherjee was perhaps the first Indian scholar to recognize the vital importance of common property resources to the sustenance of peasant agriculture. While cultivated land was owned by individ...

The Fear of Free Thought, The Telegraph

At a conference last month, I met the Director of one of our prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. Himself a fine scientist and excellent administrator, he told me that no fewer than eight IITs were currently without Directors. In each case, the term of the previous incumbent had ended, and though a search committee had been constituted, in no case had the recommended candidate’s name been approved by the Government of India. This was because the personal and intellectual trajectories of ...

50 for 75 – An Independent India Reading List, The Telegraph

In an earlier column (The Telegraph, 13th August), I provided a brief analytical history of India’s democratic institutions since Independence. In this column, I offer a list of non-fiction books that I have myself found useful in understanding the complicated career of our Republic. I would have liked to choose seventy-five books, both in the interests of symmetry and because the reader would have had a greater range of choices. However, listing seventy-five titles and providing even the briefe...

The Real Game – The joys of watching cricket in whites, The Telegraph

As a member of the Karnataka State Cricket Association I have free entry to all matches played at the Chinnaswamy Stadium. However, I have never exercised that privilege in the case of the Indian Premier League. More or less my only IPL memory is from the first edition of the tournament, when, dining in a Bangalore restaurant sometime in 2008, I passed the television en route to the rest room, and found Shane Warne on the screen. The greatest of all spin bowlers had recently retired from Test cr...

Growing Old with the Telegraph, The Telegraph

Although I grew up in north India, the newspaper that came into our home was headquartered in a great city then called Calcutta. This was The Statesman, whose main edition was published in the first capital of British India, but which had a small subsidiary edition printed in the second and last capital of the Raj. It was this Delhi version of the newspaper that came into our home in Dehradun, arriving around noon via a transportation process that involved road, railway, human hands...