http://saurav-basu.sulekha.com/blog/post/2008/07/india-after-gandhi-by-ramachandra-guha-a-review-cum.htm

you miss the point. guha is an employee of ramachandra mission. he is trying to distribute airtime to different parts of our country in reasonable measure, so as to draw admirers from all corners. but his politics is showing. here are my thoughts on guha’s politics, after reading (not yet finished) his magnum opus – india after gandhi:

1. Doon school traiing early in his life has made him not “one of us”, but an “eavesdropper”. i guess his beef with Kali worship stems from that — as doon-schoolers-and-their-aspiring-parents-would-like-to-believe — inconceivable elitism. i am sure guha has never heard of the beautiful lyrics of shyamasangeet, sung by the redoubtable pannalal bhattacharya.

2. in fact, guha’s typical crooked cosmopolitanism makes him schmooze those who think, eat, write, shit, speak, bark in english. the real stalwarts of our country were deeply rooted in the local — gandhi’s experiments in truth was in gujarati, tagore’s songs are in bengali (i read somewhere guha doesn’t like songs). indeed, that’s a completely different kind of cosmopolitianism. it is like singing bharat in local languages, but singing about bharat.

3. guha’s space is carved between serious academic journals (e.g., Indian Economic & Social History Review) and our hard working journalists (e.g., Hindu, The Statesman). that’s his niche. from that vantage point he criticizes those who are in the US and those who are not his variety of crooked cosmopolitan.

4. his skills are in the construction of sentences (comma, fullstop, segues) in english. good writer.

http://azygos.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/07/southy-sunburns.htm

I agree with other commentatators that Guha is an over-rated, media-made historian who made clever moves in establishing himself as a brand. The sweeping statement is the chief weapon in his armour, and dissing well-known people is how he seeks prominence for himself. Recall that he came into limelight chiefly when he clashed with another pompous windbag, Arundhati Roy.

Ramachandra Guha obtained his PhD in Sociology from IIM, Calcutta. His dissertation focused on forestry conservation. IIM Calcutta is not a reputed place to obtain a PhD in Sociology! He later taught as an Adjunct Professor (i.e. non-tenured visitint staff) in several universities in the United States. All in all, his academic credentials are mediocre despute the extraordinary sponsorship he seems to be having from unknown sources.

The Indian media for one has provided him extensive space quite disproportionate to his intellectual antecedents. One may disagree with the Communist school of Indian history i.e. Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, K.N. Panikkar, Sarvapali Gopal, D.D. Kosambi etc but one can not dispute that they have solid academic credentials. Others may disagree with center-right intellectuals such as Arun Shourie, Swapan Das Gupta and Sita Ram Goel but no one can dispute the rigor in which they treat their material either.

Guha is neither – i.e. an academic of exceptional international reknown nor one of particular intellectual rigor. He is probably sponsored by the United States (hence the space provided by pro-American media outfits like the Indian Express, Outlook, CNN-IBN, Harper-Collins etc). I tend to see him as the Bollywood of contemporary Indian intelligentsia – i.e. all show but little real substance. He could well be the American response to the Marxist hold on the Indian intellectual scene – hardly better than what it seeks to replace!

One father created a bully, the other father created a sissy.