Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. Born in Dehradun, he studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, did a Master’s at the Delhi School of Economics, and obtained his doctorate from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Yale and Stanford, a Senior Associate Member of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. Among the prestigious professorships he has held are the Arné Naess chair at the University of Oslo, and the Sundaraja Visiting Professorship in the Humanities at the Indian Institute of Science.
Ramachandra Guha is acknowledged as a world authority in three distinct fields of scholarship. His first book, The Unquiet Woods is a social history of the Himalayan forests from the nineteenth century down to the celebrated Chipko movement. This book pioneered the field of environmental history in South Asia. It was recently issued in a twentieth anniversary edition, with appreciations of Guha’s work by scholars from three continents. He is also the author of Environmentalism: A Global History, the first cross-cultural study of the green movement, and of two books on Indian ecological conflicts co-authored with Madhav Gadgil: This Fissured Land and Ecology and Equity. These books have all been widely reprinted and translated. Guha has also authored several landmark essays on environmentalism: thus his essay ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation’ (first published in Environmental Ethics in 1989) has been reprinted in more than thirty anthologies.
Ramachandra Guha is also a pioneer in the field of sports history. His book A Corner of a Foreign Field, opened up new vistas in the study of the links between sport and nationalism. Cricinfo ranked the book as the second most influential ever written on cricket. Guha is also the editor of the popular anthology, The Picador Book of Cricket, and of an anecdotal fan’s history entitled The States of Indian Cricket.
Guha’s most recent work is a landmark, ground-breaking, history of Indian democracy entitled India after Gandhi. Widely acclaimed all over the world, India after Gandhi was chosen as a Book of the Year by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Outlook, Time Out, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The writing of India after Gandhi inspired Guha to set up the New India Foundation, praised in the Economist for its nurturing of new scholarship on Indian economics, history and politics.
Guha has now been commissioned to write a major, two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi. This work will be based on materials he has collected in more than fifty archival collections in four continents, many of which have never been consulted before. The book will be published by Doubleday in the U. S, and by Penguin Press in the U. K..
Aside from his scholarly work, Guha writes regularly on social and political issues concerning the citizenry. He writes a fortnightly column in The Telegraph and a monthly column in the Hindustan Times. Internationally, he has published essays and commentaries in the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Prospect, London Magazine, The Times, The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Ecologist. Dr Guha has been interviewed on historical and political themes by BBC, NBC, and ABC, and by The New York Times, The Observer, The Financial Times, and other international newspapers.
The New York Times has referred to Guha as ‘perhaps the best among India’s non-fiction writers’. Time Magazine has called him ‘Indian democracy’s pre-eminent chronicler’.
Guha’s books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Awards:
- Guha’s essay ‘Prehistory of Community Forestry in India’ was awarded the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society for Environmental History for 2001.
- A Corner of a Foreign Field was awarded the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society prize in 2003.
- India after Gandhi was a finalist for the Mark Lytton History Prize and the Kiriyama Prize. It won the Ramnath Goenka Award for the best work of non-fiction in India in 2007-8.
- In April 2008, Ramachandra Guha chosen as one of the hundred most influential public intellectuals in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. In the subsequent readers’ poll he was ranked 44th.