'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.

Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, struggles, humiliations and glories of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. A riveting chronicle of the often brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation, and of the extraordinary individuals and institutions who held it together, it established itself as a classic when it was first published in 2007. In the last decade, India has witnessed, among other things, two general elections; the fall of the Congress and the rise of Narendra Modi; a major anti-corruption movement; more violence against women, Dalits, and religious minorities; a wave of prosperity for some but the persistence of poverty for others; comparative peace in Nagaland but greater discontent in Kashmir than ever before. This tenth anniversary edition, updated and expanded, brings the narrative up to the present. Published to coincide with seventy years of the country’s independence, this definitive history of modern India is the work of one of the world’s finest scholars at the height of his powers.

Includes section "Book reviews and notes."

This book highlights, for the first time in South Asian historiography, the physical conditions and geological events that created this subcontinent 50 million years ago. Those events led to the emergence of one of the first human civilizations in the Indus valley. It also explains why, for five thousend years, the South Asians did not invade other lands but were constantly invaded themselves. All of them settled down and made the subcontinent their home except Britain and its merchants who came by sea, remained off shore, siphoned its wealth, and left it in tatters when they departed. The impact of the rise of European sea power on the subcontinent has been highlighted, and, for the first time, it has been strategically explained why the sea-faring colonial powers wanted to establish strong forts on the Afro-Asian coasts and how great empires of India and China remained unable to dismantle those forts that eventually led to the crumbling of those empires. This book reflects two different historical narratives - Hindu and Muslim - and offers a balanced and objective view of one of the longest uninterrupted histories of the world by carefully considering the historical circumstances that created not only differences but also similarities in the experiences of the people of South Asia. Drawing on new evidence and research, it provides a fresh perspective on the politics of historical narrative.

Includes book reviews and bibliographies.