Ramachandra Guha

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Ramachandra Guha (1958 - ) is a leading Indian social, environmental and Cricket historian, academician and biographer. He also writes columns for The Hindu, The Telegraph and Outlook newspapers and magazine.

1 Life and career
2 Controversy
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Life and career

Born in Dehra Dun in 1958, Guha studied at The Doon School and St. Stephen's College, Delhi. He graduated in Economics with a BA in 1977 and then an MA from the Delhi School of Economics, and did his doctorate studies in Sociology at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, with a dissertation on the social history of forestry in Uttaranchal, focusing on the Chipko movement (later published as The Unquiet Woods). He held various academic positions in India, Europe and North America, between 1985 and 2000, including at the Universities of Yale, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford and Oslo, as well as at the Indian Institute of Science. Since then, he moved to Bangalore, and began writing full time.

His essay, "Prehistory of Community Forestry in India", was awarded the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society for Environmental History for 2001. "A Corner of a Foreign Field" was awarded the Daily Telegraph Cricket Society Book of the Year prize for 2002. He won the R. K. Narayan Prize at the Chennai Book Fair in 2003. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur Research and Writing Award. He served as Sundaraja Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 2003.

Guha is married to the graphic designer Sujata Keshavan and has two children. He is the author of a history of independent India that will be published by Macmillan and HarperCollins in 2007.

[edit] Controversy

Guha created a stir in 2000 when he criticized novelist and activist Arundhati Roy for an emotionally charged article^[1] she had written opposing the Narmada Dam. Roy espoused the cause of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a cause Guha supported too. While he characterized her as courageous, he questioned her judgement and intellectual probity. He ended his critique by suggesting she should stick to fiction.^[2] Amidst the ensuing uproar, Roy chose to respond in an interview, summing up Guha as an ecological historian who had missed the boat. He is also known for his Anti Rashtria Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS) views. [The Guru of Hate http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/11/26/stories/2006112600100300.htm ]

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[edit] Bibliography

The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (University of California, Berkeley press; Oxford University Press (OUP)) (1989)
This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (OUP) (with Madhav Gadgil, 1992)
Wickets in the East (OUP) (1992)
Spin and Other Turns (Penguin) (1994)
Ecology and Equity (with Madhav Gadgil, 1995) (Penguin)
Savaging the Civilized - Verrier Elwin, his tribals and India(University of Chicago Press; OUP)(1999)
An Anthropologist Among the Marxists, and other essays (Permanent Black) (2000)
Environmentalism: A global history (OUP) (2000)
The Picador Book of Cricket (Picador) (Editor, 2001)
A Corner of a Foreign Field - An Indian history of a British sport (Picador) (2001)
The States of Indian Cricket (Permanent Black) (2005)
How Much Should a Person Consume?: Thinking Through the Environment(University of California, Berkeley Press; Permanent Black) (2006)
An Indian Cricket Omnibus (OUP) (Editor, with T.G. Vaidyanathan, 1994)
The Last Liberal and Other Essays (Permanent Black, 2004)
Institutions and Inequalities: Essays in Honour of Andre Beteille (with Jonathan P. Parry)
Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (with Joan Martinez-Alier, 1997)
Nature's Spokesman: M. Krishnan and Indian Wildlife (editor, works of M. Krishnan)
Social Ecology
Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (with David Arnold)
An Indian cricket century (Editor, works of Sujit Mukherjee, 2002)