Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha in Chennai

Ramachandra Guha (1958 - ) is an Indian social, environmental and cricket historian, academician and biographer. He is also a columnist for the newspapers The Hindu and The Telegraph and the news magazine Outlook.

Life and career

Born in Dehra Dun in 1958, 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, and did his PhD in Sociology at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, with a dissertation on the social history of forestry in Uttaranchal, that focused on the Chipko movement. It was later published as The Unquiet Woods. Between 1985 and 2000, he held various academic positions in India, Europe and North America, including the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, Stanford University and at the Oslo University, and later at the Indian Institute of Science.

Since then, he 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.

Guha is married to the graphic designer Sujata Keshavan and has two children.

He is the author of a historical text of independent India tiled " India After Gandhi" that has been published by Macmillan and HarperCollins in 2007.

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.
• He is also a recipient of the MacArthur Research and Writing Award.

Controversy

Guha created a stir in 2000 when he criticized novelist and activist Arundhati Roy for an emotionally charged article she had written opposing the Narmada Dam. Roy espoused the cause of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a cause Guha supported too. While he characterized her as courageous, he questioned her judgement and intellectual probity. He ended his critique by suggesting she should stick to fiction. Amidst the ensuing uproar, Roy chose to respond in an interview, summing up Guha as an ecological historian who had missed the boat.

Bibliography

• The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (University of California, Berkeley press; Oxford University Press (OUP)) (1989)
• This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (OUP) (with Madhav Gadgil, 1992)
• Wickets in the East (OUP) (1992)
• 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)
• 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)
• Social Ecology
• Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (with David Arnold)

See also

List of Kayasthas

External links

• Ramachandra Guha - History's Footman, a profile by Anita Nair
• India Together: List of Ramachandra Guha's Recent Columns
• Ramachandra Guha's essays for Outlook India (registration required)
• The Arun Shourie of the Left debate on the Guha article criticizing Arundhati Roy
• Big Brother Fascination