Wednesday
18
November 2026
5:00 PM IST
Location
Room 019, GICT Building
Central Campus
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The Craft of History and the Art of Biography
The Nalanda
Ramachandra Guha
Historian and Biographer
Speaker
Aparajith Ramnath
Associate Professor
School of Arts and Sciences
Moderator
Speaker
Ramachandra 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 Arguments with Gandhi (Fourth Estate and W. W, Norton, 2026). His books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. Professor 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 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, 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.
Moderator
Aparajith Ramnath
Aparajith Ramnath is an award-winning historian of science, technology, and business. He is the author of two books: Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (1861–1962) (Penguin/Viking, 2024), a biographical study of an iconic engineer and public intellectual who played a key role in modern Indian history; and The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900–47 (Oxford University Press, 2017), a pioneering history of engineers in late-colonial India. He has also produced several research papers and book chapters, and written for Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu, and FiftyTwo.in. Professor Ramnath was initially trained as an electrical engineer at BITS Pilani, and later as a historian of science and technology at Oxford University and Imperial College London. He has been an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology, a Charles Wallace India Trust grant awardee, a Sangam House writing fellow, and a recipient of the Young Historian of Science Award (2018) from the Indian National Science Academy.