Book description
Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along
lines of caste, class, language and religion, independent India emerged,
somehow, as a united and democratic country. Ramachandra Guha’s hugely
acclaimed book tells the full story - the pain and the struggle, the
humiliations and the glories - of the world’s largest and least likely
democracy.
While India is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world, it
is also the most interesting. Ramachandra Guha writes compellingly of
the myriad protests and conflicts that have peppered the history of free
India. Moving between history and biography, the story of modern India
is peopled with extraordinary characters. Guha gives fresh insights on
the lives and public careers of those longserving Prime Ministers,
Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. But the book also writes with
feeling and sensitivity about lesser known (though not necessarily less
important) Indians - peasants, tribals, women, workers and musicians.
Massively researched and elegantly written, India After Gandhi
is a remarkable account of India’s rebirth, and a work already hailed
as a masterpiece of single volume history. Ramachandra Guha's books
cover a wide range of themes: they include a global history of
environmentalism, a biography of an anthropologist-activist, a social
history of Indian cricket, and a social history of Himalayan peasants.
His entire career, he says, seems in retrospect to have been an extended
(and painful) preparation for the writing of India After Gandhi
.
