Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 7

In Praise Of the Dalai Lama, The Telegraph

In the last week of March 1959—exactly sixty years ago—the Dalai Lama fled to India, after a rebellion by his fellow Tibetans had been brutally crushed by the Chinese military. He entered what is now Arunachal Pradesh, and was then known as the North East Frontier Agency. He was riding a yak, and suffering from acute dysentery. The Indian officials who welcomed him included a Sikh, Har Mander Singh, and a Hindu from the South, T. S. Moorthy. This was highly symbolic; for while the Communists...

Celebrating Club Cricket in Bengaluru, Hindustan Times

In 1992, I published a book on India’s favourite sport. One reviewer, a Mumbaikar named Rajdeep Sardesai, commented in exasperation that ‘Guha’s sometimes excessive love for the cricketers of Karnataka may lead to another Cauvery dispute’. A decade later, in an article in a national newspaper, I wrote that ‘I do not care whether India wins or loses, so long as Dravid scores runs and Kumble get wickets’, receiving a stream of angry mails in response.

In truth, the state of Karnataka has a seco...

Dr Martin Luther King’s Dalit Correspondence, Hindustan Times

In February 1959, Dr Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta arrived in India on a three week visit. The American civil rights leader’s pilgrimage to the land of Gandhi has been extensively written about. However, while working in the papers of Dr King at Boston University, I found a fascinating footnote that deserves rehabilitation.

Among those who read about Dr King and his travels through India was a person named M. K. Achutan. Originally from Tamil Nadu, he was then working as a technical...

Why Mahatma Gandhi Would Not Have Wanted A Grand New Temple in Ayodhya, Hindustan Times

In 1932, a young Christian priest named Verrier Elwin was thrown out of his Church. Educated at Oxford, Elwin made his home among the Gonds of central India. He sought to bring education and health care to the adivasis, but refused to take the Gospel to them, out of respect for their own spiritual traditions. For this, he was expelled from the priesthood by his Bishop.

Verrier Elwin knew and admired Mahatma Gandhi. When he wrote to him about his excommunication, Gandhi wrote back: ‘Your pulpi...

Congress Lawyers Past And Present, Hindustan Times

On an April evening in the year 1917, a lawyer named Vallabhbhai Patel was playing bridge at the Gujarat Club in Ahmedabad. This was, for him, a routine affair; every day, after his work at the Bar ended, he headed straight for the card table.
This evening in April 1917 was different. Earlier in the day, in distant Bihar, another Gujarati lawyer had been detained for refusing to obey an official order to leave Champaran. As the historian David Hardiman writes, when the news of Gandhi’s defian...

Three World Cities, Hindustan Times

Ten years ago, in the now sadly defunct Mumbai edition of Time Out magazine, I wrote an essay arguing that there were only three properly world cities; London, New York, and Mumbai itself. They all had an extraordinary diversity of religious, ethnic and linguistic groups; all were great centres of trade, finance, and entrepreneurship; all had an effervescent cultural life in publishing, theatre, and the arts. I considered other claimants to the title, and rejected them. Thus Paris was too nar...

Lessons From Kerala, Hindustan Times

I first went to Kerala in 1993, in the company of the ecologist Madhav Gadgil. We had been asked to speak at a meeting organized by that remarkable peoples’ science organization, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad. We were received at Ernakulam Railway Station by the zoologist M. K. Prasad, a doyen of the KSSP. Despite his high status in society, Professor Prasad had come by bus, and he dressed very simply, in bush shirt and rubber chappals.

I have been back to Kerala many times. As a histori...

A Jewel of Bengaluru And India, Hindustan Times

Once, when some of his fellow Hindus were glorifying the practice of sati, Mahatma Gandhi remarked that ‘self-immolation at the death of the husband is not a sign of enlightenment but of gross ignorance’. If she truly loved her deceased husband, said Gandhi, the wife would not commit sati but dedicate her life to the fulfilment of his ideals ‘for his family and country’.

Gandhi’s remarks come to mind when considering the career of the great actor and institution-builder Arundathi Nag (née Rao...

Speaking Satire To Power, The Telegraph

Milan Kundera once spoke of the importance, for subjects of a totalitarian regime, of  ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ As important, to the  citizens of a (professedly) democratic regime, is the struggle of satire against power. Rahul Gandhi has been the butt of jokes ever since he entered politics, and, more recently, Narendra Modi has found himself mocked in private, on social media, and in print. His frequent references to himself in the third person, the astonishing suit with...

When The State Took A Poet To The People, The Telegraph

In some Western countries, copyright to an author’s work lapses seventy-five years after his or her death. In India, the time period is slightly shorter; sixty years. Thus, until 2001 the copyright in Rabindranath Tagore’s writings vested with Santiniketan; till 2008, it was Navajivan Press which controlled access to Mahatma Gandhi’s oeuvre. The copyright in Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings will be with Sonia Gandhi until May 2024.

The most remarkable exception to this rule occurred in the state o...