Noted historian Ramachandra Guha will not teach in the Ahmedabad University. Guha confirmed his decision through twitter .”Due to circumstances beyond my control, I shall not be joining Ahmedabad University. I wish AU well; it has fine faculty and an outstanding Vice-Chancellor. And may the spirit of Gandhi one day come alive once more in his native Gujarat”, Guha tweeted. Later he tweeted that “Or, more precisely, a biographer of Gandhi cannot teach a course on Gandhi in Gandhi’s own city”.
ABVP, the student’s wing of RSS has initiated protest against the decision of University to invite Guha to join the faculty. The ABVP has given a memorandum to Vice- Chancellor to freeze university decision.
ABVP has alleged that Guha’s writings are anti-national and he is an ardent criticizer of Hindu Culture and civilization. People like Guha give applause to extremists in name of freedom and his teachings support factionalism in Indian society. These kinds of liberal intellectuals had hegemony in major universities like JNU and HCU.
Ramachandra 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. In the academic year 2011-2, he served as the Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics.
His most recent book is Gandhi Before India (Knopf, 2014), which was chosen as a notable book of the year by the New York Times. Apart from his books, Guha also writes a syndicated column, that appears in six languages in newspapers with a combined readership of some twenty million. 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 pre-eminent chronicler’.
In 2009, Guha was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian honour. In 2008, and again in 2013, Prospect magazine nominated Guha as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. He was also awarded the Malcolm Adideshiah Award for excellence in social science research, the Ramnath Goenka Prize for excellence in journalism, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the R. K. Narayan Prize.
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