SASC Colloquia Panel: Scholars in the Public Square

Panel Discussion with Rohit De and Ram Guha.
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.
Rohit De is a lawyer and historian of modern South Asia and focuses on the legal history of the Indian subcontinent and the common law world. As a legal historian he moves beyond asking what the law was; to what actors thought it was and how this knowledge shaped their quotidian tactics, thoughts and actions. In recent years, this has enabled his research to move beyond the political borders to South Asia to uncover transnational legal geographies of commerce, migration, and rights across East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.