Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 22

Uttar Pradesh Past and Present, The Telegraph

In his charming memoir, Lucknow Boy, Vinod Mehta writes of the leisurely pace of life in his home town. Like most students of his class and generation, he paid little attention to books and exams, spending his time rather in the streets and cafés of Lucknow. A Punjabi Hindu, Mehta numbered two Muslims among his closest friends. The early chapters of his book feature Parsis, Christians, Sikhs, and South Indians too. Reflecting on this experience, Mehta writes that 'Lucknow bestowed on me one p...

Fanatics And Heretics, The Telegraph

In the early 1980s, while coming out of a Marxist phase, I came across The God that Failed, a collection of confessional essays by once hard-core Communists who had left the party and renounced its creed. The book was rivetingly readable, in part because of the quality of the writing (Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Louis Fischer were among the contributors), in part because erstwhile fanatics are often the most insightful heretics. Thus Terry Eagleton and James Carroll have written...

The Pen Over The Sword Always, The Telegraph

In a recent essay in Frontline magazine, Ghulam Murshid writes of the ups and downs of Tagore's reputation in Bangladesh. So long as it was East Pakistan, the poet was not looked upon very favourably-in part because he came from a upper-class landed family, in larger part because he was a Hindu. As the Tagore centenary celebrations approached in 1961, newspapers supported or funded by the Pakistani government ran many articles villifying the poet.

State propaganda could not quench or...

Reading For The New Year, Hindustan Times

Late last year, seeking to make sense of the conflict between the Anna Hazare movement and the Central Government, I turned to an essay by the Indian scholar I most admire, the sociologist André Béteille. Published some years ago in the Economic and Political Weekly, this set out a distinction between two forms of democratic functioning, which Béteille termed 'constitutional democracy' and 'populist democracy' respectively. As the sociologist put it:

'Constitutional democracy acts through a p...

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A Plague On All Our Houses, Hindustan Times

The Republic of India has a billion (and more) citizens who, at any given time, are involved in a thousand (and more) controversies. Knowing which controversy is the most significant is always hard, and often impossible, to judge. Even so, we can be fairly certain that 2011 will go down in Indian history as the year of the Great Lokpal Debate, just as 1962 was the year of the war with China, 1975 the year of the Emergency, 1991 the year the license-permit-quota-raj was first undermined, 1992 ...

The west places too much faith in Singh - Financial Times

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Financial Times
[image error] The west places too much faith in Singh
Financial Times
When the Indian government announced the opening up of the retail sector to foreign direct investment late last month, there was immediately an intense and sharply polarised debate. Passionate editorials for and against the plan ...

and more »

Read the fine print - Hindustan Times

[image error] Read the fine print
Hindustan Times
A short list of OUP authors would include Shahid Amin, Kaushik Basu, Andre Beteille, Partha Chatterjee, Veena Das, Jean Dreze, Ranajit Guha, Irfan Habib, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Girish Karnad, Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashis Nandy, Sumit Sarkar, Amartya Sen, ...

'India must first restore and renew the dignity of Parliament' - Newsbullet

[image error] 'India must first restore and renew the dignity of Parliament'
Newsbullet
New Delhi: When Anna Hazare went on a fast at Delhi's Ramlila Maidan this past August, excitable television anchors announced that we were witnessing India's Tahrir Square. They were wrong. The Indian equivalent of the protests in Egypt (and elsewhere ...

and more »

Degrading democracy - Calcutta Telegraph

[image error]
Calcutta Telegraph
[image error] Degrading democracy
Calcutta Telegraph
When Anna Hazare went on a fast at Delhi's Ramlila Maidan this past August, excitable television anchors announced that we were witnessing India's Tahrir Square. They were wrong. The Indian equivalent of the protests in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Arab ...

and more »