The Journey of an Accidental Sports Historian, Ramachandra Guha

The South Asian Studies Council proudly presents
Ramachandra Guha
The Journey of an Accidental Sports Historian
12:00 pm Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Henry R. Luce Hall, Rm 203, 34 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT
For many years, Ramachandra Guha published scholarly, heavily footnoted, academic books and papers which dealt with subjects other than sport, while moonlighting during the weekends as a writer of popular, anecdotal, articles on Indian cricket and cricketers. The serendipitous discovery that India’s first great slow bowler, Palwankar Baloo, played a modest role in a political controversy that took place long after he retired from the game, encouraged Guha to bring his profession and passion together. The outcome was his book A Corner of a Foreign Field, a social history of cricket in India. Guha will discuss the methodological lessons he learned while researching the book, and also speak of the future prospects for sports history in South Asia.
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer who is currently Distinguished University Professor at Krea University. He has previously taught at Stanford University, the Indian Institute of Science, and the London School of Economics. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002), and a widely acclaimed history of his country, India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) He is also the author of a two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi Before India, 2014, and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 2018, both published by Knopf), each of which was chosen as a book of the year by the New York Times. His most recent book is Rebels against the Raj (Knopf, 2022). His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Howard Milton Prize of the British Society for Sports History, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Yale University.