India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
Daily Telegraph
‘Insightful, spirited and elegantly crafted’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Superb, gloriously detailed . . . a brilliant and beautifully balanced book. It is impeccably researched and documented, but Guha is no dry-as-dust academic historian. He presents his facts objectively but never hides his patriotism or cosmopolitan, Nehruvian ethos. He avoids self congratulation and celebrates the survival of democratic India without overlooking the nation’s countless failings and shortcomings’
Independent
‘A riveting narrative . . . India After Gandhi is a balanced and unfailingly insightful work’
Sunday Times
‘No brief review could convey the astonishing range of this remarkable and capacious book . . . Guha marshals his facts and figures brilliantly . . . There will undoubtedly be other books covering the extraordinary and exhilarating story of post-independence India, but it is hard to imagine there will be a better one’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Combining academic rigour with the readability of a thriller, India After Gandhi is a breathtaking survey’
Time Out Mumbai
‘Magnificently told . . . A riveting story with unforgettable characters and towering challenges, immense greatness and extraordinary venality, soaring hopes and profound disappointment’
India Today
‘It’s not often that you want a 771 page book to be longer. But as you race – yes, race – through India After Gandhi . . . you keep feeling that way. Guha writes lucidly,with unobtrusively readable prose, covers most bases, paints characters in with apposite quote or wry comment, points to broad themes, but also picks fascinating small details and in general keeps things going at an excellent pace’
The Economic Times
Chosen as a Book of the Year by the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, San Franciso Chronicle, Time Out and Outlook
India After Gandhi
RAMACHANDRA GUHA was born in Dehradun in 1958, and educated in Delhi and Calcutta. He has taught at the universities of Oslo, Stanford and Yale, and at the Indian Institute of Science. He has been a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and also served as the Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
After a peripatetic academic career, with five jobs in ten years in three continents, Guha settled down to become a full-time writer, based in Bangalore. His books cover a wide range of themes: they include a global history of environmentalism, a biography of an anthropologist-activist, a social history of Indian cricket, and a social history of Himalayan peasants. His entire career, he says, seems in retrospect to have been an extended (and painful) preparation for the writing of India After Gandhi.
Guha’s books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. The prizes they have won include the UK Cricket Society’s Literary Award and the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History.
ALSO BY RAMACHANDRA GUHA
The Unquiet Woods:
Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya
Savaging the Civilized:
Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India
Environmentalism:
A Global History
The Use and Abuse of Nature
(with Madhav Gadgil)
An Anthropologist among the Marxists and Other Essays
The Picador Book of Cricket
(editor)
A Corner of a Foreign Field:
The Indian History of a British Sport
First published 2007 by Macmillan
First published in paperback 2008 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-330-54022-3 PDF
ISBN 978-0-330-54020-9 EPUB
Copyright © Ramachandra Guha 2007
The right of Ramachandra Guha to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Picture Acknowledgements
The Hindu – 1, 4, 8, 9, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47.
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library – 2, 3, 12, 17, 19, 20, 21.
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos – 5.
Press Information Bureau – 6, 13, 14, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 37.
Ananda Bazaar Patrika – 7, 11, 24, 25, 34, 44.
R. K. Laxman – 10. Author's collection – 15, 16, 18, 49.
Prashant Panjiar/Outlook – 40. Nasreen Munni Kabir – 48. AFP – 46.
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Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy