India After Gandhi: A History

(Paperback, 3rd edition)

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'Magisterial' - The Financial Times An updated edition of Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi with new material that explains the major events, policy shifts and controversies of the past decade, placing them in their proper sociological and historical context and setting out the author's justifiable concerns for the decline of democracy in India. 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 into the lives and public careers of those long-serving 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. This third edition brings the story fully up to date.

Reviews

Finally, here is a history of democratic India that is every bit as sweeping as the country itself. A magisterial work * Financial Times *
Guha has given democratic India the rich, well-paced history it deserves * Washington Post *
An insightful, spirited and elegantly crafted account of India since 1947. * Times Literary Supplement *
India after Gandhi is a magnificently told history of the world's largest democracy. It is a riveting story with unforgettable characters and towering challenges, immense greatness and extraordinary venality, soaring hopes and profound disappointment. * India Today *
It is a formidable undertaking to write in a single volume a history of this vast country ... Keeping in proportion the separate elements of so huge and sprawling a history calls for the finest judgement .... Guha rises noble to the challenges: his history is as comprehensive, balanced and elegantly crafted as any reasonable reader could expect. * Spectator *

Author Bio

Ramachandra Guha has taught at Yale, Stanford, Oslo and the Indian Institute of Science. His other books include A Corner of a Foreign Field and Environmentalism: A Global History. His awards include the UK Cricket Society's Literary Award and the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History. In May 2008, Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines nominated Guha as one of the world's one hundred most influential intellectuals. In 2009, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan for services to literature and education.