Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 4

Where the Hard Right Meets the Hard Left, The Telegraph

I have been reading the memoirs of Dora Russell, a pioneering British feminist and educationist. These were published in three volumes, of which I have just finished the first. This covers her upbringing in Edwardian England, her education at Cambridge, the development of her views on gender equality, an experimental school she established, and the years of her marriage to the brilliant and controversial philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Like others of her generation, Dora Russell was profoundly in...

Why Modi and Shah Fear Young Activists, NDTV.com

Why would the Indian state arrest a twenty-one-year-old woman activist who seeks a cleaner and safer planet? Should not the country want young people to look beyond their narrow personal interests to the interests of society at large? Why did our Government lock up a young citizen seeking to build a better future for herself and her compatriots? And why in such a draconian manner, with a police party flown down from Delhi to whisk her away from her home in Bengaluru to the capital? How could a ...

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 A Week with Gandhi. This was based on a visit Fischer made to India in the summer of 1942, in the course of which he had conversations with Ambedkar, Sav...

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 spend a couple of days a week in the NMML, exploring its repository of private papers of major (and minor) figures in modern Indian history, and digging deep into its holdings of old newspap...

A Man to Match His Mountains, from the Introduction to The Chipko Movement by Shekhar Pathak

I first came across Shekhar Pathak’s name in the files of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow. The year was 1983, and I was working on a dissertation on the social history of forests in the Uttarakhand Himalaya. In those days the U.P. State Archives were well run; the files one ordered came to one’s desk fairly quickly, and with all their pages intact. On the inside back cover of each file was a list of all the scholars who had seen that particular document before. Studying the records o...

Making Indian Cities Habitable – The Legacy of Patrick Geddes, India Forum

‘India lives in her villages’, said Mahatma Gandhi, and that maxim of his has been resolutely followed by Indian environmentalists. From celebrated popular struggles like the Chipko Andolan and the Narmada Bachao Andolan to quieter, more low-key work in rehabilitating village tanks and pastures, the environmental movement in India has been substantially focused on the countryside. Resisting the destructive impact of the urban-industrial economy on rural livelihoods, and restoring those livelihoo...

Lessons in Leadership from Satish Dhawan, The Telegraph

The late A. P. J. Abdul Kalam liked to tell stories with morals. A story he was particularly fond of related to the launch of a satellite by the Indian Space Research Organization in July 1979. Kalam was in charge of the project at ISRO; and when some members expressed reservations about its readiness he overruled them and ordered it to go ahead. The launch failed; instead of going into space, the satellite plunged into the Bay of Bengal. As team leader, Kalam was humiliated by the failure, and ...

5 Reasons Why Rahul Gandhi Cannot Take on Modi for PM, NDTV.com

Those who oppose Hindutva seek to recover the founding principles of the freedom struggle, such as religious and linguistic pluralism, gender and caste equality, a critical attitude to state power, and an open-ness to other cultures and civilizations: all principles which Hindutva threatens to abandon or overthrow. But the closer one gets to 2024, the battle against Hindutva will also become a battle of personalities. For general elections in India are now increasingly presidential. Can the pers...

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 the cult of personality built around Stalin had a damaging influence on the party and the country. It was, remarked Khrushchev, ‘impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leni...

The Perilous State of Press Freedom in India Today, The Telegraph

In 1824, the Government of Bengal (which was then in the hands of the East India Company) issued an Ordinance placing strict curbs on the freedom of the press. This gave the government the powers to cancel a newspaper’s license without any explanation. The Ordinance provoked outrage among the intelligentsia of Kolkata, active in editing and publishing periodicals in English as well as Bengali. A petition to the Government asking them to rescind the Ordinance was drafted by Ram Mohun Roy, who obt...