Ramachandra Guha's Blog

In about a week’s time we shall mark the sixtieth anniversary of the death of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This column focuses on one key aspect of Nehru’s political career, his collaboration with Vallabhbhai Patel. These two men worked shoulder-to-shoulder during the freedom struggle and in the early years of Independence. They had their disagreements, as any two individuals working together would, whether as fellow members of a cricket team, or spouses in a marriage, or dire...

Last month I spent several stimulating days in Mizoram. I had some knowledge of the state’s political history, met numerous Mizos in the course of my life, but never visited the state before.

I flew first to Guwahati, where I caught up with some old friends, gloried in my sightings of the Brahmaputra, and spoke on Gandhi to the teachers and students of the University. On the flight to Aizawl I had naturally opted for a window seat. I watched with a growing sense of anticipation as the plane bre...

An Indian I greatly admire is the social worker and pioneer of the Chipko movement, Chandi Prasad Bhatt. My first meeting with him, when I was in my early twenties, had an transformative impact on my life. I have met him many times since; each encounter providing fresh insights into the moral, political and environmental challenges that confront India and the world, and what might be done to contain them.

Some years ago, Chandi Prasad Bhatt published his autobiography in Hindi. This has now been...

The Indian socialist tradition is now moribund, but there was a time when it had a profound and mostly salutary influence on politics and society. Yet few people now know of its past vigour and dynamism. The Congress, the Communists, the regional parties, the Ambedkarites, and (especially in recent years) the Jana Sangh and the BJP—all have had their chroniclers and cheerleaders, who have traced their respective ideological lineages and written biographies, and sometimes hagiographies, of their ...

In recent years, a stream of books and articles have appeared seeking to analyse the theory and practice of Hindutva. They have sought to alternatively explain, critique, or justify the rising influence of the BJP and the RSS. Some have focused on organizational questions, on the building of social networks on the ground and how they help garner votes for the party. Others have explored the role of ideology, the articulation of a belief system founded on Hindu pride and the demonization of minor...

The climate crisis has brought human ill-treatment of nature forcibly to our attention, though of course India’s environmental problems are by no means the product of global warming alone. The staggeringly high rates of air pollution in the cities of Northern India, the ongoing devastation of the Himalaya by carelessly planned roads and dams, the depletion of groundwater aquifers, the chemical contamination of the soil, the loss of biodiversity, are all occurring independent of climate change. T...

My first editor, Rukun Advani, once described himself as ‘a composite hybrid of the Indian and the Anglo-European’, who sought to reconcile ‘within himself those varying cultural influences which chauvinistic nationalists could only see as contradictions.’ This self-characterization I might avow as my own. One mark of the Anglo-European in me is that, unlike members of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, I had not just uncles and aunts, parents and grandparents, but also a godfather. It is t...

I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer earlier this week. The main character in the film, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a physicist whose family was Jewish, and who worked for many years at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. In these respects he was akin to Albert Einstein, who makes several appearances in the movie itself.

Although they had some intellectual disagreements, Oppenheimer nonetheless greatly admired Einstein. Speaking at UNESCO House in Paris in December 1965,...

In one of the first books I read, the writer had posed the question: ‘Who was the greatest all-rounder in the history of cricket?’, before providing this answer: ‘He was a left-arm bowler and a right-hand batsman, who was born in the village of Kirkheaton’.

I now forget the title of the book, but remember the author. He was A. A. Thomson, a notorious partisan of Yorkshire cricketers. He had grown up idolizing Wilfred Rhodes and George Hirst, who both played for that county, who wer...

I have had a long-standing interest in South Africa, and in 1995 briefly contemplated moving there to work. The country had just had its first multi-racial election, and the great Nelson Mandela had been elected President. I was deeply curious to see, at first-hand, what the land and its people would make of their hard won freedom. In the event the job I was interested in did not come through. Nonetheless, I continued to closely follow developments in the country, and made five trips there, part...