2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Finalist

2008 Mark Lynton History Prize Finalist

Ramachandra Guha
for India After Gandhi (HarperCollins Publishers)

Judges' Citation

"In a magisterial account that begins with Nehru's ‘tryst with destiny’ and carries the reader to the present day, Ramachandra Guha crafts a history of India that is at once animated and revelatory.  Capturing the contours of sixty years of change, punctuated with triumph and tragedy alike, Guha reminds us in India After Ghandi that the historical imagination must move beyond the moment of the country's liberation and into the post-independence era.  Indeed, the years since 1948 in India constitute, at their very core, one of the most significant stories of political contestation and survival in the twentieth century, and Guha recounts them with a genius that bespeaks historical narrative at its finest."

Bio

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. Born in Dehradun in 1958, he studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and took his doctorate at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Between 1985 and 1995 he held academic jobs in India, Europe, and North America. Since 1995 he has been a full-time writer. In 1997 and 1998 he was Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He has also been a visiting professor at the universities of Yale, Stanford and Oslo, been a senior associate member of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, a senior fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize Winner

Fred Anderson, professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Caroline Elkins, associate professor of history at Harvard University; and Jane Kramer, European correspondent for The New Yorker.

Back to Winners Page
Read the Enitre Press Release