Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 6

History Against Sectarianism, The Telegraph

In December 1947, the annual Indian History Congress was held in Bombay. The President-elect that year was Professor Mohammad Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University, a historian of early medieval India, known especially for his studies of the Delhi Sultanate. From the late 1930s, many students and faculty at AMU had been active supporters of M. A. Jinnah and his Pakistan movement. Mohammad Habib was not one of them. He was resolutely committed to an inclusive Indian nationalism, whereby...

The Cities That Shaped Gandhi, The Cities That Gandhi Shaped, Hindustan Times

Mahatma Gandhi famously claimed that ‘India lives in her villages’. The focus of his political and social work, and his philosophical writings, was that India was essentially an agrarian civilization, and that it must remain that way.

In fact, India had always lived in her towns too. Our epics spoke of the fabled cities of Ayodhya and Indraprastha. Banaras claimed to be the oldest living city in the world. In medieval North India, the Mughals developed the cities of Delhi, Agra, and Lahore;...

Searching For Gandhi, Hindustan Times

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) run to one hundred volumes. Many years before I read these volumes, one by one, their Chief Editor, Professor K. Swaminathan, had satirised scholars like myself in verse:

Hundred hefty haystacks
Cluttering up the landscape
Hold within their entrails hidden
Half a dozen needles.
Researchers of the future
With fine-toothed combs
And salaries to earn
May perch on each pile,
Attack it and ransack it
And search, search, search
For the passages that...

Gandhi and The RSS: The Historical Record, The Telegraph

This column appears days before the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. That anniversary shall be observed at a time when a former pracharark of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh is the country’s Prime Minister, and when the RSS exercises a hegemonic hold over our political and social life. On 2nd October, nice things will be said about Gandhi by the Prime Minister, and by other people affiliated with the RSS as well. It is therefore important to alert readers to the historical record, t...

The Multiple Tragedies of The Kashmiri Pandits, Hindustan Times

When the ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits took place, I was based in Delhi, working at the Institute of Economic Growth. The IEG’s Director was the eminent sociologist Triloki Nath Madan, who had been born and raised in the Valley, and gone on to write a classic ethnography of Pandit life. Professor Madan’s brother, himself a much admired Principal of the Gandhi Memorial College in Srinagar, was made to flee their homeland. Their ancestral house was vandalized, with the family’s price...

The Liquid That Will Determine Our Future, The Telegraph

Many years ago, I came across this striking definition of ecological responsibility: ‘If we produce everything we want from within a limited area, we are in a position to supervise the methods of production; while if we draw our requirements from the ends of the earth it becomes impossible for us to guarantee the conditions of production in such places’.

This aphorism was coined in 1948, shortly after Independence, by J. C. Kumarappa, an economist who was part of Mahatma Gandhi’s inner circle...

Why Sonia Gandhi Should Read Ibn Khaldun, The Telegraph

In January 2013, when the Congress was in power at the Centre and General Elections were more than a year away, I published a column on Rahul Gandhi in the Telegraph. After reviewing his political career over the past decade, I wrote: ‘The nicest thing one can say about Mr Rahul Gandhi is that he is a well-intentioned dilettante. He has shown no signs of administrative ability, no desire to take on large, important responsibilities, no energy or commitment to solving — as distinct from merely...

Godse Worship Goes Mainstream, Hindustan Times

In the early 1990s, the veteran Gandhian Dr Sushila Nayar, was in the temple town of Ayodhya, on a mission to promote communal harmony. At an inter-faith prayer meeting she led the singing of a hymn much beloved of the Mahatma, ‘Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram’. When she came to the line ‘Ishwar Allah Tero Naam’, a group of protesters marched to the stage and stopped the singing. The elderly Dr Nayar, seeking to placate them, said: ‘Hum Gandhiji ki taraf sé aaye hain’, We have come on behalf of (th...

The Modi Government’s War On The Intellect, The Telegraph

A term greatly beloved of the Modi Government is ‘surgical strike’. It was first invoked in September 2016, after a cross-border raid undertaken by the Indian Army on camps in Pakistan. In November of the same year, the Prime Minister’s sudden, catalysmic, withdrawal of the Rs 1000 and Rs 500 currrency notes was also termed a ‘surgical strike’ (against black money) by spokespersons of the ruling party.

The surgical strike against terror was ineffective. For our security forces have continued...

Jallianwala Bagh In Memory And History, The Telegraph

On 13th April 1919—exactly a hundred years ago—a British Brigadier-General named Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a crowd gathered in a place called Jallianwala Bagh, not far from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Close to five hundred people were killed in the firing. Folklore has magnified the figure to a thousand, and more. But a few hundred was, and is, awful enough, since those who were shot at were unarmed and utterly peaceful. Dyer’s madness was enabled and compounded by the ac...