'Magisterial' - The Financial TimesAn updated edition of Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi with new material that explains the major events, policy shifts and controversies of the past decade, placing them in their proper sociological and historical context and setting out the author's justifiable concerns for the decline of democracy in India.Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of...

Mahatma Gandhi wordt algemeen beschouwd als een van de invloedrijkste figuren uit de wereldgeschiedenis. Wie was deze kleine, op het eerste gezicht onaanzienlijke man, die als eerste het verzet tegen de racistische, onderdrukkende politiek in Zuid-Afrika leidde, die het machtige Britse Rijk op de knieën wist te krijgen en op geweldloze wijze de onafhankelijkheid van India wist af te dwingen?In het eerste deel van deze grootse biografie weet historicus Ramachandra Guha een levendig b...

Here is the first volume of a magisterial biography of Mohandas Gandhi that gives us the most illuminating portrait we have had of the life, the work and the historical context of one of the most abidingly influential—and controversial—men in modern history.Ramachandra Guha—hailed by Time as “Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler”—takes us from Gandhi’s birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London and his two decades as a lawyer ...

De geschiedenis van 's werelds grootste democratieHet is een wonder dat India zich sinds zijn onafhankelijkheid in 1947 als grootste democratie ter wereld staande heeft weten te houden, ondankds armoede en burgeroorlog, kastentegenstellingen, de vele talen en de verschillende godsdiensten.Ramachandra Guha, een van India's meest vooraanstaande schrijvers, geeft een uiterst boeiend beeld van het moderne India. Het is een geschiedenis die getekend is door oorlogen, natuurrampen...

De ‘halfnaakte fakir’, zoals Churchill hem minachtend noemde, trotseerde in zijn eentje het Britse Rijk en vocht tot aan het eind van zijn leven voor tolerantie, geweldloosheid en de waardigheid van ieder mens. Nog steeds is hij een groot voorbeeld voor velen die weigeren te zwichten voor geweld en onrecht.Gandhi: De legendarische jaren is het tweede deel van de monumentale biografie over een van de meest gezichtsbepalende personen van de twintigste eeuw. Guha beschrijft de...

Opening in July 1914, as Mohandas Gandhi leaves South Africa to return to India, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1918 traces the Mahatma’s life over the three decades preceding his assassination. Drawing on new archival materials, acclaimed historian Ramachandra Guha follows Gandhi’s struggle to deliver India from British rule, to forge harmonious relations between India’s Hindus and Muslims, to end the pernicious practice of untouchability, and to nurture India’s e...

It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring.The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir.It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, whe...

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY‘A narrative of startling originality … As discussions of Britain’s colonial legacy become increasingly polarised, we are in ever more need of nuanced books like this one’ SAM DALRYMPLE, SPECTATORRebels Against the Raj tells the little-known story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 1...

An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence—the little-known story of seven foreigners to India who joined the movement fighting for freedom from British colonial rule.Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colo...

A tribute to the finest writers on the game of cricket and an acknowledgement that the great days of cricket literature are behind us. There was a time when major English writers – P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alec Waugh – took time off to write about cricket, whereas the cricket book market today is dominated by ghosted autobiographies and statistical compendiums. The Picador Book of Cricket celebrates the best writing on the game and includes many pieces that have been o...

I call myself a Nehruvian Indian [and] I like to think that the term "Nehruvian Indian" captures more than my own c.v.', says Ramachandra Guha in his Introduction to this sparkling collection of essays. His book is a meditation on how a large area of contemporary India's cultural and intellectual life has in fact been fashioned by exceptional individuals who have, in diverse ways, imbibed the spirit of liberalism, secularism, personal integrity and social commitment—values which Guha assoc...

“Inside every thinking Indian there is a Gandhian and a Marxist struggling for supremacy”, says Ramachandra Guha in the opening sentence of this wonderfully readable book of ideas, opinions and reflections. A substantial portion of the book expands on this salvo: it analyses Gandhians and pseudo-Gandhians, Marxists and anti-Marxists, Nehruvians and anti-Secularists, Democrats and Stalinists, scientists and historians, environmentalists and cricketers in short, it examines and discusses all th...