Ramachandra Guha

A first volume of a series detailing the life and work of the influential political advocate draws on private papers and other untapped sources to cover his birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, discussing his London education and decades as a lawyer in South Africa.

Gandhi Before India

The History of the World's Largest Democracy

India After Gandhi

Gandhi lived one of the great 20th-century lives. He inspired and enraged, challenged and delighted many million men and women around the world. He lived almost entirely in the shadow of the British Raj, which for much of his life seemed a permanent fact, but which he did more than anyone else to destroy, using revolutionary and inspirational tactics. In a world defined by violence on a scale never imagined before and by ferocious Fascist and Communist dictatorship, he was armed with nothing more than his arguments and example. This magnificent book tells the story of Gandhi's life, from his departure from South Africa to his assassination in 1948. It is a book with a Tolstoyan sweep, both allowing us to see Gandhi as he was understood by his contemporaries and the vast, unbelievably varied Indian societies and landscapes which he travelled through and changed beyond measure. Drawing on many new sources and animated by its author's wonderful sense of drama and politics, the publication of Gandhi is a major event.

The Years That Changed the World

Gandhi 1915-1948

A major new collection of essays by Ramachandra Guha, Democrats and Dissenters is a work of rigorous scholarship on topics of compelling contemporary interest, written with elegance and wit. The book covers a wide range of themes: from the varying national projects of India's neighbours to political debates within India itself, from the responsibilities of writers to the complex relationship between democracy and violence. It has essays critically assessing the work of Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm, commentaries on the tragic predicament of tribals in India--who are, as Guha demonstrates, far worse off than Dalits or Muslims, yet get a fraction of the attention--and on the peculiar absence of a tradition of conservative intellectuals in India. Each essay takes up an important topic or an influential intellectual, as a window to explore major political and cultural debates in India and the world. Democrats and Dissenters is a book that is widely read, and even more widely discussed.

Democrats and Dissenters

Patriots and Partisans

Includes a short biographical introduction to each person, followed by excerpts from their writings.

Makers of Modern India

The definitive anthology of cricket writing A tribute to the finest writers on the game of cricket and an acknowledgement that the great days of cricket literature are behind us. There was a time when major English writers - P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alec Waugh - took time off to write about cricket, whereas the cricket book market today is dominated by ghosted autobiographies and statistical compendiums. The Picador Book of Cricket celebrates the best writing on the game and includes many pieces that have been out of print, or difficult to get hold of, for years. Including Neville Cardus, C.L.R. James, John Arlott, V.S. Naipaul, C.B. Fry this anthology is a must for any cricket follower or anyone interested in sports writing elevated to high art.

The Picador Book of Cricket

The twenty-first century has been dubbed the Asian Century. Highlighting diverse thinker-politicians rather than billionaire businessmen, Makers of Modern Asia presents eleven leaders who theorized and organized anticolonial movements, strategized and directed military campaigns, and designed and implemented political systems.

Makers of Modern Asia

C. K. Nayudu and Sachin Tendulkar naturally figure in this captivating history of cricket in India, but so too—in arresting and unexpected ways—do Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Indian careers of those great English cricketers Lord Harris and D. R. Jardine provide a window into the operations of Empire, while the extraordinary life of India's first great slow bowler, Palwankar Baloo, introduces the still-unfinished struggle against caste discrimination. Later chapters explore the competition between Hindu and Muslim cricketers in colonial India and the extraordinary passions now provoked when India plays Pakistan. An important, pioneering work, this is also a beautifully-written meditation on the ramifications of sport in society at large, and on how sport can influence both social and political history.

The Indian History of a British Sport

A Corner of a Foreign Field

Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, struggles, humiliations and glories of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. A riveting chronicle of the often brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation, and of the extraordinary individuals and institutions who held it together, it established itself as a classic when it was first published in 2007. In the last decade, India has witnessed, among other things, two general elections; the fall of the Congress and the rise of Narendra Modi; a major anti-corruption movement; more violence against women, Dalits, and religious minorities; a wave of prosperity for some but the persistence of poverty for others; comparative peace in Nagaland but greater discontent in Kashmir than ever before. This tenth anniversary edition, updated and expanded, brings the narrative up to the present. Published to coincide with seventy years of the country’s independence, this definitive history of modern India is the work of one of the world’s finest scholars at the height of his powers.

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

A Global History

Environmentalism

This text provides a cross-cultural and global survey of environmental thinking and the movements it has spawned.

Sunil P Ilayidam

ഹിന്ദുത്വവത്ക്കരിക്കുന്ന ചരിത്രവും ശാസ്ത്രവും വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ നയവും

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Leon Wieseltier

David Thomson

Michael Ignatieff

Joshua Bennett

Mark Lilla

Sean Wilentz

Louise Glück

Adam Zagajewski

David Grossman

Sally Satel

Hannah Sullivan

Laura Kipnis

Helen Vendler

Andrea Marcolongo

James Wolcott

Clara Collier

Celeste Marcus

Eli Lake

Moshe Halbertal

Julius Margolin

Shawn McCreesh

Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics is a quarterly of essays and poetry from some of the world's most celebrated independent thinkers, leading artists, and up-and-coming literary voices.

Volume I, Issue 1

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence—the little-known story of seven foreigners to India who joined the movement fighting for freedom from British colonial rule. Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule. Of the seven, four were British, two American, and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, the emancipation of women, environmentalism. This book tells their stories, each renegade motivated by idealism and genuine sacrifice; each connected to Gandhi, though some as acolytes where others found endless infuriation in his views; each understanding they would likely face prison sentences for their resistance, and likely live and die in India; each one leaving a profound impact on the region in which they worked, their legacies continuing through the institutions they founded and the generations and individuals they inspired. Through these entwined lives, wonderfully told by one of the world’s finest historians, we reach deep insights into relations between India and the West, and India’s story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.

Western Fighters for India's Freedom

Rebels Against the Raj

This evocative and beautifully written book brings to life one of the most remarkable figures of twentieth-century India. Verrier Elwin (1902–64) was an anthropologist, poet, Gandhian, hedonist, Englishman, and Indian. Savaging the Civilized reveals a many-sided man, a friend of the elite who was at home with the impoverished and the destitute; a charismatic charmer of women who was comfortable with intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler and Jawaharlal Nehru; an anthropologist who lived with and loved the tribes yet who wrote literary essays and monographs for the learned. Savaging the Civilized is both biography and history, an exploration through Elwin’s life of some of the great debates of our times, such as the impact of economic development, and cultural pluralism versus cultural homogeneity. For this new edition, Ramachandra Guha has updated the epilogue to take account of the growing influence of Naxalites in adivasi areas. He has also added a fresh introduction, stressing the relevance of Elwin’s life and work to current debates on Indian democracy and pluralism.

Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India

Savaging the Civilized

Joan Martínez Alier

Until very recently, studies of the environmental movement have been heavily biased towards the North Atlantic worlds. There was a common assumption amongst historians and sociologists that concerns over such issues as conservation or biodiversity were the exclusive preserve of the affluent westerner: the ultimate luxury of the consumer society. Citizens of the world's poorest countries, ran the conventional wisdom, had nothing to gain from environmental concerns; they were 'too poor to be green', and were attending to the more urgent business of survival. Yet strong environmental movements have sprung up over recent decades in some of the poorest countries in Asia and Latin America, albeit with origins and forms of expression quite distinct from their western counterparts. In Varieties of Environmentalism, Guha and Matinez-Alier seek to articulate the values and orientation of the environmentalism of the poor, and to explore the conflicting priorities of South and North that were so dramatically highlighted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Essays on the 'ecology of affluence' are also included, placing ion context such uniquely western phenomena as the 'cult of wilderness' and the environmental justice movement. Using a combination of archival and field data,. The book presents analyses of environmental conflicts and ideologies in four continents: North and South America, Asia and Europe. The authors present the nature and history of environmental movements in quite a new light, one which clarifies the issues and the processes behind them. They also provide reappraisals for three seminal figures, Gandhi, Georgescu-Roegen and Mumford, whose legacy may yet contribute to a greater cross-cultural understanding within the environmental movements.

Essays North and South

Varieties of Environmentalism

Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule. Of the seven, four were British, two American, and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, the emancipation of women, environmentalism. This book tells their stories, each renegade motivated by idealism and genuine sacrifice; each connected to Gandhi, though some as acolytes where others found endless infuriation in his views; each understanding they would likely face prison sentences for their resistance, and likely live and die in India; each one leaving a profound impact on the region in which they worked, their legacies continuing through the institutions they founded and the generations and individuals they inspired. Through these entwined lives, wonderfully told by one of the world's finest historians, we reach deep insights into relations between India and the West, and India's story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.

Western Fighters for India’s Freedom

Rebels against the Raj

When Ramachandra Guha began following the game in the early 1960s, India was utterly marginal to the world of cricket: the country still hadn't won a Test match overseas; by the time he joined the Board of Control for Cricket in India, fifty years later, India had become world cricket's sole superpower. The Commonwealth of Cricket is a first-person account of this astonishing transformation. The book traces the entire arc of cricket in India, across all levels at which the game is played: school, college, club, state, country. It presents vivid portraits of local heroes, provincial icons, and international stars. Cast as a work of literature, The Commonwealth of Cricket is keenly informed by the author's scholarly training, the stories and sketches narrated against a wider canvas of social and historical change. The book blends memoir, anecdote, reportage and political critique, providing a rich, insightful and rivetingly readable account of this greatest of games as played in the country that has most energetically made this sport its own.

The Commonwealth Of Cricket: A Lifelong Love Affair With The Most Subtle and Sophisticated Game Known To Humankind

From one of India’s finest writers, thinkers and commentators, a memoir of a love affair with cricket.

Ramachandra Guha

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