The story after Tees January

History has been written uptill Gandhi, and history is still Gandhi. There have been many books about Gandhi in the past few months. Tushar Gandhi feels it is coincidental with writers and deliberate with publishers post-Munnabhai. Ramachandra Guha won’t be happy with this introduction, for he insists that his new book India After Gandhi is not about Gandhi. “The keyword is ‘after’ and not ‘Gandhi’,” he says, “no one has taken post-independence history seriously. Historians are obsessed with Gandhi. History ends at January 30, 1948.I have spent years researching and thinking.”

Guha is precise in saying this, for the book is humungous, and deliberates upon issues and events at great length. Guha says he has a deep and abiding interest in Gandi, but the time after him has been ‘not studied and misunderstood.” There has been criticism, particularly by Amit Chaudhuri, that Guha hasn’t said much about cultural forms. “This is Bengali criticism,” Guha retorts, “No work of history is ever complete. Whatever you write, there’ll be such criticism. I took eight years to write these 800 pages.”

Guha has been a voracious writer of non-fiction, but to the question of venturing into fiction, he says, “it is beyond my competence. There is no dearth of historical books to write. It is very fortunate for a historian to be born in India.”

Does Guha, an alumnus of St. Stephen’s, believe in something called the Stephanian school of writing? “ In that college I learnt nothing about scholarship,” he chuckles, “it’s my years in Calcutta, Uttaranchal and Bangalore that have shaped me as a writer.” In college he was “a second class economics student and a second class cricketer,” and was therefore just “happy”. After the happy holidays, he ventured into serious scholarship that’s produced books on ecology, cricket, a biography of a missionary who settled in India, and more.

Every Indian is a scholar on Indian politics, and therefore this book is not to be missed to add to your scholarship.