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Born against a background of privation and civil war and divided along lines of caste, language, and religion, the nation of India still became a united and democratic country. The story of India before and after independence is a riveting one, and India after Gandhi explores the protests and conflicts that helped shape the nation politically, socially, and economically.
The complete story of its creation and its modern history has never been told before, and never as clearly, or as engagingly, as in Ramachandra Guha’s remarkable India after Gandhi. Moving between history and biography, Guha writes of the factors that have kept the country together, and provides fresh insights into the lives of legendary Prime Ministers and leaders, as well as lesser known Indians-peasants, women, workers, and Untouchables. 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. Guha’s books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. The prizes they have won include the U. K. Cricket Society’s Literary Award and the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History. “Guha has produced a superb, gloriously detailed book that is essential reading for anybody with a serious interest in modern India.” — The IndependentFrom one of the subcontinent’s most important and controversial writers comes this definitive history of post-Partition India, published on the 60th anniversary of Independence
Told in lucid and beautiful prose, the story of India’s wild ride toward and since Independence is a riveting one. Taking full advantage of the dramatic details of the protests and conflicts that helped shape the nation, politically, socially, and economically, Guha writes of the factors and processes that have kept the country together, and kept it democratic, defying the numerous prophets of doom.
Moving between history and biography, this story provides fresh insights into the lives and public careers of those legendary and long-serving Prime Ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Guha includes vivid sketches of the major “provincial” leaders, but also writes with feeling and sensitivity about lesser-known Indians—peasants, tribals, women, workers, and Untouchables.
Massively researched and elegantly written, this is the work of a major scholar at the height of his powers, a brilliant and definitive history of what is possibly the most important, occasionally the most exasperating, and certainly the most interesting country in the world.
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