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The Challenges of Contemporary History: Questions from India

Dr. Ramachandra Guha
Visiting Professor, Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Friday, October 6, 2006 - 12:00
Center for the Advanced Study of India 3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor) University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore, who is currently a visiting professor at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Guha's first book was The Unquiet Woods, jointly published by Oxford University Press an the University of California Press in 1989. This is a social history of the Himalayan forests, from the nineteenth century down to the celebrated Chipko movement. In 1999 the OUP and the University of Chicago Press published Guha's Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India. Among Ramachandra Guha's other books are Environmentalism: A Global History (Addison Wesley Longman, 2000), and two books on Indian ecological conflicts co-authored with Madhav Gadgil: This Fissured Land (1992) and Ecology and Equity (1995), these now issued in a joint omnibus edition by the OUP. His collection of environmental essays, How Much Should a Person Consume? will be published in fall 2006 by the University of California Press.

Guha has published scholarly essays in Past and Present, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Development and Change, and Economic and Political Weekly. His essay 'Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation' (first published in Environmental Ethics in 1989) has been reprinted in more than a dozen anthologies. Aside from his scholarly work, Guha writes regularly on social and political issues for the general public. He has a fortnightly column in The Hindu, one of India's most respected and influential newspapers. Guha is also known for his writings on India's favourite sport, cricket. He is the author of two cricket books and the editor of a third. In 2002, Picador published Ramachandra Guha's social history of Indian cricket, entitled A Corner of a Foreign Field.

Guha is now completing a major history of independent India. This book will be all-India in scope and cover culture and the arts as well as economics and politics. To be published by Macmillan in the U. K., by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in the U. S. A., and by Picador in India, the book will appear in the summer of 2007.