Bøker av Ramachandra Guha

From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world

Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of caste, class, language and religion, independent India emerged, somehow, as a united and democratic country. Ramachandra Guha's hugely acclaimed book tells the full story - the pain and the struggle, the humiliations and the glories - of the world's largest and least likely democracy.While India is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world, it is also the most interesting. Ramachandra Guha writes compellingly of the myriad protests and conflicts that have peppered the history of free India. Moving between history and biography, the story of modern India is peopled with extraordinary characters. Guha gives fresh insights into the lives and public careers of those long-serving Prime Ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. But the book also writes with feeling and sensitivity about lesser-known (though not necessarily less important) Indians - peasants, tribals, women, workers and musicians.Massively researched and elegantly written, India After Gandhi is a remarkable account of India's rebirth, and a work already hailed as a masterpiece of single volume history. This tenth anniversary edition, published to coincide with seventy years of India's independence, is revised and expanded to bring the narrative up to the present.

From one of India's finest writers, thinkers and commentators, a memoir of a love affair with cricket.

'A vivid, absorbing read' Sunday Times'Magisterial' Literary ReviewThe magnificent new biography of Gandhi by India's leading historianA New York Times Notable Book of 2018Gandhi lived one of the great 20th-century lives. He inspired and enraged, challenged and galvanized many millions of men and women around the world. He lived almost entirely in the shadow of the British Raj, which for much of his life seemed a permanent fact, but which he did more than anyone else to destroy, using revolutionary tactics. In a world defined by violence on a scale never imagined before and by ferocious Fascist and Communist dictatorship, he was armed with nothing more than his arguments and example.This magnificent book tells the story of Gandhi's life, from his departure from South Africa to his assassination in 1948. It is a book with a Tolstoyan sweep, both allowing us to see Gandhi as he was understood by his contemporaries and the vast, varied Indian societies and landscapes which he travelled through and changed beyond measure. Drawing on many new sources and animated by its author's wonderful sense of drama and politics, Gandhi is a major reappraisal of the crucial years in this titanic figure's story.

The twenty-first century has been dubbed the Asian Century. Highlighting diverse thinker-politicians rather than billionaire businessmen, Makers of Modern Asia> presents eleven leaders who theorized and organized anticolonial movements, strategized and directed military campaigns, and designed and implemented political systems.

Provides a comparative history of environmentalism in two large ecologically and culturally diverse democracies - India and the United States. Proposing an inclusive "social ecology" framework, this work arrives at an understanding of controversies over large dams, state forests, wildlife reserves, and more.

This study of peasant movements against commercial forestry, includes an epilogue which brings the story of Himalayan social protest up-to-date in 2000. The bibliography and index have been revised and expanded for this edition.

Modern India is the world's largest democracy, a sprawling, polyglot nation containing one-sixth of all humankind. Makers of Modern India collects for the first time the writings of nineteen of India's foremost thinker-activists, ranging from legends like Gandhi and Nehru to pioneering subaltern and feminist thinkers.

The first volume of the definitive biography of Gandhi, one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century, from the great historian Ramachandra GuhaThe life of Mohandas Gandhi is one of the most remarkable and potent in the modern era. In this fascinating new biography Ramachandra Guha allows us to understand the personality and politics of Mohandas Gandhi as never before. Showing that Gandhi's ideas were fundamentally shaped before his return to India in 1915, Gandhi Before India is the extraordinarily vivid portrait of the formative years he spent in England and South Africa, where he developed the techniques that would undermine and ultimately destroy the British Empire.Ramachandra Guha depicts a world of sharp contrasts between the coastal culture of Gujarat, High Victorian London and colonial South Africa, where settlers from India, Britain and elsewhere battled for their share of this rich and newly despoiled land. Drawing on many new sources located in archives across four continents, Guha sensitively explores the many facets of Gandhi's life and struggles. This is the biography of the year.Reviews:'Excellent and exhaustive ... Guha has done heroic work in reconstructing this period of Gandhi's life ... Gandhi emerges here as a fascinatingly complicated and contradictory figure ... if the sequel proves as rich and absorbing as this first book, it will doubtless serve as the fundamental portrait of Gandhi for many years to come' Sunday Business Post'What can a new biographer add? Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha, India's leading historian, offers plenty ... Rather than lingering on Gandhi's own well-studied words, Mr Guha has unearthed a wealth of previously overlooked school reports, diaries, letters and articles by collaborators and opponents of Gandhi. The result is a striking depiction of his transformation into mid-adulthood ... As Mr Guha ably shows, for all that Gandhi influenced events in South Africa, it was he who experienced the greater change' Economist'One of the surprises in Gandhi Before India is just how much fresh material it contains. Guha has a gift for tracking down obscure letters and newspaper reports and patching them together to make history come alive ... The book turns up some gems ... Gandhi Before India demonstrates how complicated cross-cultural relations were in the long 19th century ... it is a work of vivid social history as well as biography' Patrick French, Guardian'Guha is India's best-known historian, who marshals his wide scholarship in contemporary and modern history with a raconteur's lucid felicity' DNA Mumbai'A spirited case for Gandhi's continued relevance, for the challenges his ideas still present to us' Tehelka, New Delhi'Guha is one of India's most intelligent and readable historians; and in addition to his considerable talents, he has had the good fortune to discover a treasure trove of Gandhi's own voluminous press cuttings and also many shelf-loads of letters to him from friends and colleagues' StandpointAbout the author:Ramachandra Guha is one of India's most influential historians and public intellectuals. His books include A Corner of a Foreign Field and India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. The Independent has called him 'one of the world's great minds'; Time has said he is 'Indian democracy's pre-eminent chronicler'. He has held visiting professorships at Stanford, Yale, and the London School of Economics. He lives in Bangalore.

Articulates the values and orientation of the environmentalism of the poor, and explores the conflicting priorities of South and North that were so dramatically highlighted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. This book presents analyses of environmental conflicts and ideologies in four continents: North and South America, Asia and Europe.