Ramachandra Guha Quotes

Ramachandra Guha is an Indian historian and writer whose research interests include environmental, social, political and cricket history. He is also a columnist for The Telegraph and Hindustan Times. A regular contributor to various academic journals, Guha has also written for The Caravan and Outlook magazines. For the year 2011–2012, he held a visiting position at the London School of Economics and Political Science , the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs. His newest book is Gandhi Before India , the first part of a planned two-volume biography of M. K. Gandhi. His large body of work, covering a wide range of fields and yielding a number of rational insights has made him a significant figure in Indian historical studies, and Guha is valued as one of the major historians of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

He was appointed to BCCI's panel of administrators by the Supreme Court of India on 30 January 2017.

✵ 29. April 1958
Ramachandra Guha photo
Ramachandra Guha: 6   quotes 0   likes

Famous Ramachandra Guha Quotes

“What is now in the past was once in the future”

Source: India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“In the generation (or two generations) before mine, the leading Indian historians (judged in terms of scholarly books and papers written and read) included Irfan Habib, R. S. Sharma, Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Amalendu Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, all of whom were influenced to a lesser or greater degree by Marxism; and Ashin Dasgupta, Dharma Kumar, Parthasarathy Gupta, Amales Tripathi, Rajat Kanta Rai, Mushirul Hasan, and Tapan Roychowdhury, all of whom were liberals. The leading political scientists included the liberals Rajni Kothari, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Ramashray Ray; the Marxists Javed Alam and Partha Chatterjee; and Ashis Nandy, an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi who like them stoutly resists being classified in conventional terms. The pre-eminent sociologists of that generation were M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille, both of whom would own the label ‘liberal’; and T. N. Madan, who while working on classically conservative themes such as family, kinship and religion would most likely see himself as a liberal too. Even the best-known or most influential economists of the 1960s and 1970 tended to be on the left of the spectrum, as the names of K. N. Raj, Amartya Sen, V. M. Dandekar, Amit Bhaduri, Krishna Bharadwaj, Pranab Bardhan, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra (among others) signify.”

[Guha, Ramachandra, Where Are The Conservative Intellectuals in India?, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/where-are-the-conservative-intellectuals-in-india-caravan.html, Caravan, March 2015]

“Three men did most to make Hinduism a modern faith. Of these the first was not recognized as a Hindu by the Shankaracharyas; the second was not recognized as a Hindu by himself; the third was born a Hindu but made certain he would not die as one. These three great reformers were Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar. Gandhi and Nehru, working together, helped Hindus make their peace with modern ideas of democracy and secularism. Gandhi and Ambedkar, working by contrasting methods and in opposition to one another, made Hindus recognize the evils and horrors of the system of Untouchability. Nehru and Ambedkar, working sometimes together, sometimes separately, forced Hindus to grant, in law if not always in practice, equal rights to their women. The Gandhi-Nehru relationship has been the subject of countless books down the years. Books on the Congress, which document how these two made the party the principal vehicle of Indian nationalism; books on Gandhi, which have to deal necessarily with the man he chose to succeed him; books on Nehru, which pay proper respect to the man who influenced him more than anyone else. Books too numerous to mention, among which I might be allowed to single out, as being worthy of special mention, Sarvepalli Gopal’s Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Nanda’s Mahatma Gandhi, and Rajmohan Gandhi’s The Good Boatman. In recent years, the Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship has also attracted a fair share of attention. Some of this has been polemical and even petty; as in Arun Shourie’s Worshipping False Gods (which is deeply unfair to Ambedkar), and Jabbar Patel’s film Ambedkar (which is inexplicably hostile to Gandhi). But there have also been some sensitive studies of the troubled relationship between the upper caste Hindu who abhorred Untouchability and the greatest of Dalit reformers. These include, on the political side, the essays of Eleanor Zelliott and Denis Dalton; and on the moral and psychological side, D. R. Nagaraj’s brilliant little book The Flaming Feet. By contrast, the Nehru-Ambedkar relationship has been consigned to obscurity. There is no book about it, nor, to my knowledge, even a decent scholarly article. That is a pity, because for several crucial years they worked together in the Government of India, as Prime Minister and Law Minister respectively.”

[Guha, Ramachandra, REFORMING THE HINDUS, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/reforming-the-hindus.html, The Hindu, July 18th, 2004]
Articles

Similar authors

Jawaharlal Nehru photo
Jawaharlal Nehru 110
Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister …
Mahatma Gandhi photo
Mahatma Gandhi 238
pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-rul…
Svetlana Alexievich photo
Svetlana Alexievich 8
Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose w…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 120
Russian writer
W. Somerset Maugham photo
W. Somerset Maugham 158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer
C. V. Raman photo
C. V. Raman 20
Indian physicist
Ilya Ehrenburg photo
Ilya Ehrenburg 1
Russian-Soviet writer and poet
Robert Baden-Powell photo
Robert Baden-Powell 23
lieutenant-general in the British Army, writer, founder and…
Harold Pinter photo
Harold Pinter 25
playwright from England
Matka Tereza photo
Matka Tereza 52
Roman Catholic saint of Albanian origin