India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

A definitive history of post-Partition India, now revised and updated with extensive new material.

Guha has given India the rich, well-paced history it deserves. — Washington Post Book World

Told in lucid and beautiful prose, the story of India's wild ride toward and since Independence is a riveting one. Taking full advantage of the dramatic details of the protests and conflicts that helped shape the nation, politically, socially, and economically, Ramachandra Guha writes of the factors and processes that have kept the country together, and kept it democratic, defying the numerous prophets of doom.

Moving between history and biography, this story provides fresh insights into the lives and public careers of those legendary and long-serving Prime Ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Guha includes vivid sketches of the major provincial leaders, but also writes with feeling and sensitivity about lesser-known Indians—peasants, tribals, women, workers, and Untouchables.

Massively researched and elegantly written, this is the work of a major scholar at the height of his powers, a brilliant and definitive history of what is possibly the most important, occasionally the most exasperating, and certainly the most interesting country in the world. This tenth anniversary edition, published to coincide with seventy years of India's independence, is revised and expanded to bring the narrative up to the present.

Guha is a scholar of astounding energy and ingenuity. . . . He seems to have visited every archive from Alabama to Allahabad, Calcutta to California, delving into a sea of private correspondence, news reports, pamphlet ephemera, as well as state papers. The result is a fascinating, kaleidoscopic narrative. — Daily Telegraph (UK)