Ramachandra Guha


Ramachandra Guha is an Indian writer whose research interests include environmental, social, economics, political, contemporary and cricket history. He is also a columnist for The Telegraph, Hindustan Times and Hindi Daily Newspaper Amar Ujala.
A regular contributor to various academic journals, Guha has also written for The Caravan and Outlook magazines. For the year 2011–12, he held a visiting position at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs. His latest book is Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, the second part of his two-volume biography of M. K. Gandhi. It is a follow-up to the acclaimed Gandhi Before India. His large body of work, covering a wide range of fields and yielding a number of rational insights, has made him a significant figure in Indian historical studies, and Guha is valued as one of the major historians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.The American Historical Association has conferred its Honorary Foreign Member prize for the year 2019 on Ramchandra Guha. He is the third Indian historian to be recognised by the association, joining the ranks of Romila Thapar and Jadunath Sarkar, who received the honour in 2009 and 1952 respectively.
He was appointed to BCCI's panel of administrators by the Supreme Court of India on 30 January 2017, only to resign in July of the same year.

Early life and education

Guha was born on 29 April 1958 at Dehradun, Uttar Pradesh in a Tamil family. He was brought up in Dehradun, where his father Subramaniam Ramdas Guha worked at the Forest Research Institute, and his mother was a high-school teacher. While he should have been named Subramaniam Ramachandra in keeping with Tamil name-keeping norms, his teachers at school, presumably while registering his name during admission, were not familiar with these and he came to be called Ramachandra Guha. He grew up in Dehradun, on the Forest Research Institute campus.
Guha studied at Cambrian Hall and The Doon School. At Doon, he was a contributor to the school newspaper The Doon School Weekly, and edited a publication called History Times along with Amitav Ghosh, later to become a noted writer. He graduated from St. Stephen's College, Delhi with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1977, and completed his master's in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. He then enrolled at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where he did a PhD on the social history of forestry in Uttarakhand, focusing on the Chipko movement. It was later published as The Unquiet Woods.

Books

Guha has authored the chapter The VHP Needs To Hear The Condemnation Of The Hindu Middle Ground in the book Gujarat: The making of a tragedy, which was edited by Siddharth Varadarajan and published by Penguin. The book is about the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Guha is the author of India after Gandhi, published by Macmillan and Ecco in 2007. This book has been translated into Hindi in two volumes as Bharat: Gandhi Ke Baad and Bharat: Nehru Ke Baad and published by Penguin. The Tamil version of the book is published in the name "இந்திய வரலாறு காந்திக்குப் பிறகு " by Kizhakku and translated by R. P. Sarathy. The Bengali version of the book is published in the name "গাঁধী-উত্তর ভারতবর্ষ" by Ananda Publishers Private Limited and translated by Ashish Lahiri.
Guha also published a collection of essays titled Patriots and Partisans in November 2012.
In October 2013, he published Gandhi Before India, the first part of a planned two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi which describes life from his childhood to the two decades in South Africa. Another collection of essays under the title Democrats and Dissenters was released in September 2016. Guha has authored books on a diverse range of subjects including Cricket, Environment, Politics, History, etc.
In 2018, Guha published Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948, a sequel to his 2013 book, which deals with events from Gandhi coming back to India to his death. It also has an epilogue that discusses the role of Gandhi in contemporary world politics.

Cricket

Guha has written extensively on cricket in both his capacity as a journalist and historian. His research into the social history of Indian cricket culminated in his work A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian history of a British Sport in 2002. The work charts the development of cricket in India from its inception during the British Raj to its position in contemporary India as the nations favourite pastime.
In July 2017 Guha stepped down from his position as a BCCI administrator, citing personal reasons.

Personal life

Guha is married to the graphic designer Sujata Keshavan, and they have two children. Son Keshava Guha become a fiction author with the release of Accidental Magic at the 2019 Bangalore Literature Festival.

Awards and recognition