In the essay one can be personal without being casual. This is a genre that has a special character and a distinctive appeal. 

'I suspect most readers will know Shashi Tharoor’s public profile. To show how Rukun Advani is, as it were, his absolute Other...'

Enuga Reddy saw Gandhi not as his private property but as belonging to the world and to the ages. Whatever he had, he shared and passed on.

In an essay for the new book 'The Fourth Lion: Essays for Gopalkrishna Gandhi', historian Ramachandra Guha goes down memory lane.

Neeladri Bhattacharya’s 'The Great Agrarian Conquest', which deals with the undivided Punjab from 1840s-1940s, successfully brings together agrarian and environmental history, two sub-disciplines that have tended to work in isolation from one another.

By focusing so relentlessly on parties and elections, Yogendra Yadav’s new book 'Making Sense of Indian Democracy' seriously underplays the role that ideology and organisation play in the making (and unmaking) of Indian democracy.

If the forces of authoritarianism and bigotry continue to gather momentum, and the court does little or nothing to check them, the court of today may be viewed by future generations not merely as an executive court, but as a collaborationist one.

Narendra Modi's project for the Central Vista was always controversial. It is now absolutely untenable.

The struggle for inter-faith harmony remains vital and urgent. To overcome the malign forces of Hindutva, we need Ambedkar and Gandhi on the same side.

In this excerpt from his recent biography of Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha documents the intense and at times venomous hatred that the RSS and its long-serving sarsanghchalak, M. S. Golwalkar, had for the Mahatma.

In his own understated way the playwright remained admirably devoted to his hometown and his home state, while never losing sight of his country or the world.

Since May 2014, the Modi government has waged an almost continuous war against the intellect by wilfully undermining our best universities and research institutes.

The Modi government has done little to stem disaffection in the Valley, but a fair amount to intensify it.

Cynics thought it was the love of power that kept Fernandes in the National Democratic Alliance; yet his undying hostility to the Congress of Indira Gandhi may have been as important.

By the time he was in his mid 30s, Gandhi no longer spoke of Africans as inferior to Indians.

The BJP-led Central government slyly seeks to promote Hindi at the expense of other Indian languages.

Most politicians use hope or fear consistently through the course of their career. Narendra Modi is an exception; he has alternated between these two modes of campaigning.

The rise and consolidation of British global hegemony in the 19th century, and of American global hegemony in the 20th century, were made (slightly) more palatable by the culture of the superpower, by the literature, art, music, film and sport brought by it.

Having once achieved fame, wealth, or both, Indian actors, businessmen and sportsmen are unwilling to risk losing it by speaking out against social injustice or the crimes of the state.

The conduct of the Sameeksha Trust demonstrates that one does not have to be a Congress chamcha or CPI(M) apparatchik or Sanghi ideologue to undermine and devalue the integrity of a great scholarly institution.