India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha

India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha

From 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.

Ramachandra Guha has taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, as well as the University of Oslo, the Indian Institute of Science, and the London School of Economics. A pioneering environmental history, an award-winning social history of cricket, and the award-winning India After Gandhi are among his works. He contributes to the British and Indian press on social and political topics, with articles in The Telegraph and the Hindustan Times, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Times. He currently resides in Bangalore.