Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
" "Most Indians – and, following Attenborough's film, many non-Indians too – are moderately well acquainted with the colleagues and critics of the mature Gandhi. Yet they know very little about those who worked with him in South Africa. Here, his closest friends outside his family were two Hindus (a doctor turned jeweller and a liberal politician respectively); two Jews (one a journalist from England, the other an architect originally from Eastern Europe); and two Christian clergymen (one a Baptist, the other an Anglican). These six men were, so to speak, the South African analogues of Gandhi's famous colleagues in the Indian freedom struggle – Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), C. Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad, et al. They are much less recognized (in some cases, unrecognized), although their impact on Gandhi's character and conduct may have been even more decisive, for they came into his life when he was not yet a great public figure or 'Mahatma' – as he was in India – but a struggling, searching activist.
Ramachandra Guha (born 29 April 1958) is an Indian historian and writer whose research interests include environmental, social, political and cricket history.
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
I was a student at the Delhi School at the very end of its Golden Age. The departments of economics and sociology were still world-class. Amartya Sen had left for England and M. N. Srinivas had retired to Bangalore; but Sukhamoy Chakravarty and André Béteille remained. There were also other brilliant scholars on the faculty—such as A. L. Nagar and Kaushik Basu in economics, and Veena Das and J. P. S. Uberoi in sociology. Both departments had active research programmes.
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the press, there are many fine historians in India. From my own generation of scholars, I can strongly recommend — to student and lay reader alike — the work of Upinder Singh on ancient India, of Nayanjot Lahiri on the history of archaeology, of Vijaya Ramaswamy on the bhakti movement, of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the early history of European expansion, of Chetan Singh on the decline of the Mughal State, of Sumit Guha on the social history of Western India, of Seema Alavi on the social history of medicine, of Niraja Gopal Jayal on the history of citizenship, of Tirthankar Roy on the economic consequences of colonialism, of Mahesh Rangarajan on the history of forests and wildlife, and of A. R. Venkatachalapathy on South Indian cultural history.
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Where do Goldman and Eaton and Trautmann and Zelliot and Gold figure in the canon of South Asian Studies? Judging from the country where they work in, the United States of America, not very high. Were they to enter a seminar room at the Association of Asian Studies meetings there would not be the buzz that would certainly accompany the entrance of diasporic scholars ten times as glamorous but not half as accomplished.