MUMBAI
Ramchandra Guha’s magnum opus on the history of contemporary India, India after Gandhi, was released by publisher Picador India at the British Council Library on Friday.
The books tells the stunning story how India proved the world wrong
Ramchandra Guha’s magnum opus on the history of contemporary India, India after Gandhi, was released by publisher Picador India at the British Council Library on Friday.
The reception of this 900-page book in London, where it was released some days back, was rousing. In a time of increasing interest in India’s economic rise, Ramachandra Guha lays out the most important story about the country. The story is the forging of a united and democratic nation despite many disparate and disputed parts. That India has survived for so long as a democracy is the true Indian miracle, and is told in depth, for the first time.
“I was commissioned nine years ago for this book. India is an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy. It was challenging to write this book. And have proved in this book that most western writers & western prophecies about India are wrong. The first general elections were touted by western writers as a gamble, but we survived.”
“We have had many a successful general elections and Mayawati is being elected the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh,” says Guha.
The work of a scholar, who has taught at Yale and Stanford, among other universities, this book draws upon more than fifty manuscript collections, housed in archives in three countries. India’s best-known historian, and according to the New York Times, ‘perhaps the best of India’s non-fiction writers’, Guha discussed the themes of the book that goes back to the last 60 years.
“My entire career, seems in retrospect to have an extended (and painful) preparation for the writing of India After Gandhi,” he says.
Answering the question raised in the book on why the somewhat democracy like India works he says, “Game of cricket, Hindi films, territorial boundedness and Integration of India given by our constitution, are some the reasons that make this democracy successful”.
Guha said, “No new nation was born under more hostile conditions. Nehru and Patel, whose viewpoints did not match should be seen as co-workers and collaborators. So should be Jaiprakash Narayan and Anmbedkar. All of them strived for one common cause--democracy”
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