SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Why South Asians Don't Write Good Biographies, and Why They Should

Abstract

Biography lies at the intersection of literature and history. South Asia is home to very many  literary traditions, long-standing and still robust. South Asian historians have made their mark on global scholarship. Yet, the art and craft of biography is poorly developed in the region. The number of well-researched, well-written biographies of and by South Asians can be counted on the fingers of one hand, or at best two. This lecture attributes this lack to the influence of the region’s dominant religion, Hinduism; to its dominant historiographical tradition, Marxism; and to a more general disregard for the preservation of papers and documents. It then suggests how these deficencies may be overcome, so that scholars and writers at last begin to do some justice to the remarkable range of influential individuals produced by and in South Asia.

Biography

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. He has taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He is currenty Phillipe Roman Professor of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics.

Guha’s books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002). India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out, and Outlook, and as a book of the decade in the Times of India, the Times of London, and The Hindu. Guha’s books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. The New York Times has referred to him as ‘perhaps the best among India’s non fiction writers’; Time Magazine has called him ‘Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler’.

Ramachandra Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society prize, the Malcolm Adideshiah Award for excellence in social science research, the Ramnath Goenka Prize for excellence in journalism, and the R. K. Narayan Prize. In 2008, Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines nominated Guha as one of the world’s one hundred most influential intellectuals. In 2009, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the Republic of India’s third highest civilian honour.