India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

By Ramachandra Guha

From one of the subcontinent’s most important and controversial writers comes this definitive history of post-Partition India, now revised and updated with extensive new material

Told in lucid and beautiful prose, the story of India’s wild ride toward and since Independence is a riveting one. Taking full advantage of the dramatic details of the protests and conflicts that helped shape the nation, politically, socially, and economically, Ramachandra Guha writes of the factors and processes that have kept the country together, and kept it democratic, defying the numerous prophets of doom.

Moving between history and biography, this story provides fresh insights into the lives and public careers of those legendary and long-serving Prime Ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Guha includes vivid sketches of the major “provincial” leaders, but also writes with feeling and sensitivity about lesser-known Indians—peasants, tribals, women, workers, and Untouchables.

Massively researched and elegantly written, this is the work of a major scholar at the height of his powers, a brilliant and definitive history of what is possibly the most important, occasionally the most exasperating, and certainly the most interesting country in the world. This tenth anniversary edition, published to coincide with seventy years of India’s independence, is revised and expanded to bring the narrative up to the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062973856

Ramachandra Guha

Born in Dehradun in 1958, and educated in Delhi and Calcutta, Ramachandra Guha pursued an academic career for ten years before becoming a full-time writer and regular on the global lecture circuit. He is also an internationally-renowned cricket journalist, editor of The Picador Book of Cricket and author of the prize-winning A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport. He lives in Bangalore.

Reviews for India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a massive work, covering the immensity of India between 1947 and 2015 or 16. When I realized how much territory Dr. Guha had to cover, I was dubious, but this history of India since just before independence manages to elucidate i broad strokes what happened, how it happened and sometimes, why it happened. For example, I understand much better than before the evolution of the impasse over Kashmir, the reasons for India's turn from essentially a centrally planned economy to a more mainstream capitalist one, and how and why Congress lost its hold on power and the BJP came to succeed Congress. Guha carefully explains how the situation of the Congress in 1950, say, differs from that of the BJP in 2015 and indeed, today in the wake of its most recent electoral victory. I have visited India several times and am fascinated by its diversity and history but my understanding of the country has been improved by reading this history.

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a wide ranging history of post-Independence India, even at 900 pages Guha can't do full justice to the scope. However, he does as much as could possibly do in covering the scope, and it's well written and absorbing.

[dilip1kumar-572329 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A massive work, well deserving of the "magisterial" tag given by the Financial Times review. The great blessing is that it doesn't try to be cryptic, doesn't use over-long sentences with multiple negatives, and deals with each incident or milestone in a few, elegantly phrased, paragraphs. Thus, you never lose hope that you will be able to read through to the end, as you are guided by a series of easy stages. A bonus is the penultimate chapter on the arts and sports. The treatment is even-handed and objective throughout, and you have the assurance that all the evidence has been weighed and a sober overall assessment made. Best of all, the author ends on an optimistic note, which sounds all the more reassuring because of the wide range and depth of the information accessed.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My own view – speaking as a historian rather than citizen – is that as long as Pakistan exists there will be Hindu fundamentalists in India. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.

This sweeping history was a revelation. I feel as if I was simultaneously dazzled and lost. My chief response was a desire to read more both by Nehru as well as about him. I pondered concepts like communalism all week and made comparisons with other places, other history. Nehru apparently once confessed to Andre Malraux that his greatest challenge was creating and maintaining a secular state in a religious country. It was interesting how in the Nixon biography I recently read much was made about how Nixon felt Nehru and Indira Gandhi looked down upon him, a grocer's son. Little of that surfaced here--which is appropriate when considering the grand grievances of Nixon.

People have been predicating the doom of India since its Independence, some are now predicating that half of the nation is becoming California, the other half Chad. The resilient Indian embrace of democracy is the most encouraging, especially as across the world the institution appears to be falling from fashion.

[kgodey_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’ve been wanting to learn more about history for a long time now, and I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and start reading more history books. I started off with a book I’ve owned for about eight years now, but never got around to reading. I think I’ve been avoiding non-fiction because it takes me much longer to read and comprehend it, but I guess I should stop judging my reading by total number of books read.India After Gandhi is a post-independence history of India; a subject I didn’t know a lot about, despite spending the first seventeen years of my life there. In school, our history books pretty much stopped at independence. It starts off with the Partition and the formation of the Indian government, and goes until 2007 (when the book was written), although the final two decades are not covered with the same level of historical detail (due to the events being too contemporary.)The book is extremely comprehensive, Guha clearly did a lot of research – the bibliography is humongous. It covered the process of transitioning from British rule (highlighting administrative problems like integrating over 550 kingdoms into India, setting up free and fair elections for a largely illiterate electorate, and settling millions of refugees from Partition), subsequent politics, economic policy, social movements, and there’s even a chapter on popular entertainments. I learned a lot, I’m certainly a long way away from knowing all that I want to know about Indian history, but I feel like I have a solid foundation on which to build on, and I wouldn’t have thought one book would have been able to do that. It also gave me the historical context to understand several things I’d been confused about when I lived in India (like the history of the political parties and how they came to have the positions they did, and how the Indian states came to be organized in their current configuration.)Guha does an admirable job of approaching things from a historian’s point of view, you can see that he has his own opinions as an Indian citizen, but he makes it pretty obvious that they are his own opinions when they crop up. I’m sure there are biases in what he chose to talk about and how he presented it, but those are unavoidable. My only complaint on that front was that Guha chooses to emphasize India’s successes, but doesn’t spend as much time talking about India’s failures. It’s not like he doesn’t acknowledge them, but because he doesn’t give them as much detail, they come across as relatively unimportant. For example, at one point he mentions that an election would be the first “free and fair” election in Kashmir, but all the talk of previous elections in the book so far had been about the heroic efforts of India’s Election Commission to set up elections that actually worked, so how did the Kashmir elections end up unfair?Overall, I thought that this was a great book, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about India. It did make me very sad, though – seeing India start out with such well-intentioned and smart leaders and devolve into the mess that it is now.

[rajivc_18 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The history of India has been confusing, and he does a marvellous job of covering the events during the tumultuous years since we became an independent country.The tragedy of having the Nehru-Gandhi at the helm comes through clearly, even though he does not castigate them.I would love to see an updated edition

[bookish85 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

truly this is a magisterial work . guha starts with partition, a scar which will ever remain in the face of this nation to the integration of princely states , the great stewardship of leaders like nehru , patel , ambedkar , emergence of dynasty and caste politics,mandal and masjid politics ,strengthening of fundamentalists(both Hindu and Muslim) and the recent positioning of India as a growing economic and multi ethnic democracy in the world . development of science and technology,state of health and education , judicial activism, environmentalism deserves separate chapters devoted to them. for those people who think that history of India means Indus valley civilization, kings and their eccentricities and its fight against colonialism this book is a must read.

[trotsky731 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extremely informative

[cwhouston_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I learned a lot about the recent history of this intriguing country from this book. Much of the coverage is devoted to political history and many of the other topics that are discussed, e.g. wars with Pakistan and China, communal violence, economic development, secessionist movements etc are also framed in a political context. Content that I particularly enjoyed reading about included: the development of the constitution, establishment of the federal structure, the relationship between free India and the Princely States, caste and adivasi conflict, and the response to the refugee crisis arising from partition.`India after Gandhi' is well written, entertaining and packed full of references. In some places the author does appear to adopt a rather partisan position with respect to relations with Pakistan. However, he also very forcefully portrays the challenges faced by the Muslim minority in the country, whom it may be suggested have been the principal victims of the half century of Indo-Pak tension.I have also read John Keay's `India: A History' and feel that `India After Gandhi' is a far better choice for those seeking an understanding of the country and it's people.

[rrhowell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not everyone can write history that is also excellent reading. This is a well written book that helps you to understand the basics of modern Indian history. There also are not a lot of other books around that can help with this.

[solla_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was particularly good reading it so soon after reading A Suitable Boy, a novel set in India shortly after independence, so in the time period at the beginning of the [India after Gandhi]. I was also glad to have had the background provided by [India, a History], although I definitely only remembered the broad strokes from that work, it did mean that I better understood such issues as how the Princely states would be integrated into India. The book ran 750 pages, but was lively reading. I had no idea what a multi-ethnic place India is. Of course, I knew about Muslims and Hindus and the conflict over Kashmir. I had heard about Indira Gandhi being assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, and the killing of Sikhs that happened afterward in response. But I hadn't known how many different linguistic communities there were, or how much of an issue it was to them to maintain their different languages rather than accept Hindu as a national language. I didn't know there were tribal peoples - groups considered to have been original before the migrations of Dravidian (possibly from Iran) and Indo-Aryans, possibly from the Central Asian Steppes that happened around 1700 BC and later. Nor did I have any idea of the multiple other conflicts that India has faced from Independence from the British up to the present. The book was very good at presenting a much more complete picture of issues that I'd only known a little of from the outside, such as Indira Gandhi declaring a state of emergency which lasted for a couple of years. The overall theme is how India persevered as a democracy - though an imperfect one - despite all the odds against it, including poverty, the many cultures and religions, the lack of a long democratic tradition. A big part of this might be the remarkable leaders that India had just after partition, such as Nehru who was committed to the protection of minorities and political rights for oppressed groups such as the untouchables and women.I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about one of the world's largest nations, and one of the most diverse.

[timjones_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a superb book. In clear, measured prose, Indian polymath Ramachandra Guha (author of other excellent books on topics as diverse as cricket and environmentalism) outlines and explains the complicated political, economic, diplomatic, environmental, military and cultural factors which have transformed the India of 1947, newly independent and riven by Partition, into the India of today. The book is particularly strong on the ways in which democracy has taken root in India. It's long - my edition ran to 771 pages, plus copious notes - but so clearly written that it is not a chore to read. If you are at all interested in India, or in modern history, I highly recommend this book.

[mostlyharmless_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An Indian historian, from what I could understand, submitted theses on esoteric topics,worked in the backwaters of a humanities department , and took time off in the evenings for the real job; currying favor with whatever political outfit (s)he had decided to make the backbone of a professional existence.Thought processes that suggested diversion from these agendas were unaffordable luxuries. History was part of the spoils of repeating political battles; it was to be laid claim upon, even created, but never discovered.By those standards, Ramachandra Guha is hardly a historian, let alone an eminent one. This book is engaging, provocative, and even affectionate in its pursuit of its subject. So much so that it seems like the crystallization of years of accumulated academic curiosity, the author getting up one morning and discovering that a book could actually be compiled out of all the meandering coffee breaks he sneaked out of a demanding day-job.

[raffertys-99932 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ramachandra has crafted a wonderful book on the recent history of India. The book begins with the transfer of power from the British rule to the Republic of India, and then follows India's growth from a birth of a nation to the current economic boom and India's emergence as a world power. The history of India is complex, and to jump into it is a bit daunting, as most of us have very little knowledge of the history preceding independence. However, the author does not only explain the many unique aspects of Indian culture, he also brings it together in a very clear, interesting and exciting narrative. Beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, the author writes of the difficult challenges India faced in becoming a nation and of trying to live up to the ideals which lead to independence. From choosing the national language, integrating the lands of stately princes, and creating a nation that served all its people no matter their caste, religion or sex, Nehru and others in the Congress (like Vallabhbhai Patel and B. R. Ambedkar) had a huge task on their hands. They laid down a strong democratic foundation for India, one that would be tested after Nehru's death. Unfortunately, those who lead after Nehru and his cabinet were less concerned with building a nation and more in helping themselves. Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, became prime minister and split the congress, taking India in a direction quite different from her father's. Indira, when facing impeachment, enforced emergency rule, where she practically ruled as a dictator for almost 2 years. Fortunately, democracy was soon restored by Indira herself calling for fresh elections, but afterwords self-interest became the staple of Indian government which it still struggles with to this day. The author also touches on many other aspects of this developing nation. He writes about the constant struggle with Pakistan over Kashmir, the border disputes between China and India, the growing religious tensions between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority and between different castes (often exploited for political gain), and much more. There is a lot to cover in this short period of history, but Ramachandra does an excellent job of pulling it all together and still making it enjoyable for the reader.Ramachandra has written a fine history. It's easy to read, and even though the length may be daunting to some (over 900 pages!) its just such a fascinating story that its hard to put down. Highly recommended.