Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra Guha in Chennai.
Born	29 April 1958 Dehra Dun, Uttarakhand
Nationality	Indian
Alma mater	The Doon School St. Stephen's College Delhi School of Economics (M.A.) Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (Ph.D.)
Occupation	environmental, social, political and cricket history
Religion	Hinduism

Ramachandra Guha (Tamil: ராமசந்திர குஹா); (born 29 April 1958, Dehra Dun) is an Indian writer whose research interests have included environmental, social, political and cricket history. He is also a columnist for the newspapers The Telegraph (syndicated in several Indian languages), and The Hindustan Times.

Early life and education

Guha was born on 29 April 1958 at Dehra Dun, Uttarakhand where his father Ram Das Guha worked at the Forest Research Institute. His mother tongue is Tamil. Ramachandra Guha studied at The Doon School and St. Stephen's College, Delhi. He graduated in Economics with a BA in 1977 and then an MA from the Delhi School of Economics (University of Delhi). He then went to Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where he did a Fellowship (equivalent to a Ph.D) on the social history of forestry in Uttaranchal, that focused on the Chipko movement. It was later published as The Unquiet Woods .

Career

Between 1985 and 2000, he taught at various universities in India, Europe and North America, including the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Stanford University and at Oslo University (Arne Naess chair, 2008), and later at the Indian Institute of Science. During this period, he was also a fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in Germany (1994–95).

Guha then moved to Bangalore, and began writing full time. He served as Sundaraja Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 2003. He is managing trustee of the New India Foundation, a nonprofit body that funds research on modern Indian history. Guha is married to the graphic designer Sujata Keshavan and has two children, Keshava and Iravati.

He is the author of India after Gandhi, published by Macmillan and Ecco in 2007.

In 2000, Guha penned an essay critiquing an article written by writer and activist Arundhati Roy opposing the Narmada Dam. Roy espoused the cause of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a cause Guha is also a supporter of. However, he questioned her expertise in the relevant field and argued that her activities and writings undermined rather than helped the cause. Roy responded in an interview, saying that Guha was a cricket historian who had missed the boat.

In 2009, Guha joined several other well-known historians in signing a petition that criticized the functioning of the prestigious Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in Delhi. The petition, also signed by such well-known academics as Sumit Sarkar, Nivedita Menon, Nayanjot Lahiri, Mushirul Hasan, Mukul Kesavan, Mahesh Rangarajan and Krishna Kumar, alleged that the institution was being run in an inefficient and corrupt fashion. They point out that NMML has discontinued its publication programme, and that the acquisition of manuscripts and oral histories have all but come to a halt.[1]. In turn, writer and activist Madhu Kishwar, environmentalist Pradeep Kishen and historians Irfan Habib and D.N. Jha have come out in support of NMML and it's director Mridula Mukherjee.[2] Subsequently, the government found that the transfer of funds was done "with the approval of the competent authority." Mridula Mukherjee and the NMML was given a clean chit by the Ministry of Culture, repudiating Guha's allegations. [3]

Guha was appointed the Philippe Roman Chair of International Affairs and History at the London School of Economics for 2011-12, succeeding Niall Ferguson.

Awards and recognition

• His 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 Book of the Year prize for 2002.
• He won the R. K. Narayan Prize at the Chennai Book Fair in 2003.
• The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008. In the poll that followed, Guha was placed 44th.
• Padma Bhushan for 2009, India's third highest civilian award.
• 2011 Sahitya Akademi Award for India after Gandhi.

Bibliography

• The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (University of California Press, Berkley; Oxford University Press (OUP)) (1989)
• This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (OUP) (with Madhav Gadgil, 1992)
• Wickets in the East (OUP) (1992)
• Social Ecology (OUP) (Editor, with T.N. Madan, 1994)
• Spin and Other Turns (Penguin) (1994)
• An Indian Cricket Omnibus (OUP) (Editor, with T.G. Vaidyanathan, 1994)
• Ecology and Equity (with Madhav Gadgil, 1995) (Penguin)
• Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (with Joan Martinez-Alier, 1997)
• Savaging the Civilized — Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India (University of Chicago Press; OUP) (1999)
• An Anthropologist Among the Marxists, and other essays (Permanent Black) (2000)
• Environmentalism: A global history (OUP) (2000)
• The Picador Book of Cricket (Picador) (Editor, 2001)
• A Corner of a Foreign Field - An Indian history of a British sport (Picador) (2001)
• An Indian cricket century (Editor, works of Sujit Mukherjee, 2002)
• The Last Liberal and Other Essays (Permanent Black, 2004)
• The States of Indian Cricket (Permanent Black) (2005)
• How Much Should a Person Consume?: Thinking Through the Environment (University of California, Berkeley Press; Permanent Black) (2006)
• India after Gandhi: The history of the world's largest democracy (Ecco) (2007)
• Makers of Modern India (Viking/Penguin) (Editor, 2010)
• Institutions and Inequalities: Essays in Honour of Andre Beteille (with Jonathan P. Parry)
• Nature's Spokesman: M. Krishnan and Indian Wildlife (editor, works of M. Krishnan)
• Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (with David Arnold)

External links

• Ramachandra Guha's essays for Outlook India (registration required)