In Makers of Modern India, the historian Ramachandra Guha presents excerpts from the speeches and writings of 19 men and women  beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy whose ideas influenced the formation of the Indian republic. Sharing space with iconic figures like Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar are lesser-known thinkers such as the 19th century feminist Tarabai Shinde, the author of a powerful tract comparing the situations of men and women, and the liberal Muslim writer Hamid Dalwai, who encouraged social reform and modernism within his community.

About the Author 

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and columnist based in Bangalore. He has taught at the universities of Yale, Stanford, and Oslo, and at the Indian Institute of Science. His books include The Unquiet Woods, A Corner of a Foreign Field. India After Gandhi was chosen as a book of the year by many publications and as a book of the decade in the Times of India and the Hindustan Times.He is the recipient of many awards including the Padma Bhushan.in 2008 prospect and   Foreign Policy magazines nominated Guha as one of the world’s hundred most influential intellectuals.

Book Plot 

Ramachandra Guha, author of the internationally acclaimed India After Gandhi, profiles nineteen Indians whose ideas had a defining impact on the formation and evolution of our republic and presents rare and compelling excerpts from their writings and speeches.These men and women were not only influential political activists they also wrote with eloquence, authority and deliberation as they reflected on what Guha describes in his illuminating prologue as ‘the most contentious times in the most interesting country in the world’. Their writings take us from the subcontinent’s first engagement with modernity in the nineteenth century, through the successive phases of the freedom movement, on through the decades after Independence. This book highlights little-known aspects of major figures in Indian history like Tagore and Nehru; it also rehabilitates thinkers who have been unjustly forgotten, such as Tarabai Shinde and Hamid Dalwai. These makers of modern India did not speak in one voice: their perspectives are sometimes complementary, at other times contradictory. The topics they explore and analyse include religion, caste, gender, language, nationalism, colonialism, democracy, secularism and the economy that is to say, all that is significant in the human condition. These issues have a resonance in our own times, not just in India but everywhere in the world as well.