Ram Guha Keynote at BSSH Conference '22 - The Accidental Sports Historian

Sport in History

The Accidental Sports HistorianRamachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. For many years, Ramachandra Guha wrote 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 serendipitousdiscovery 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 discusses the methodological lessons he learnt while researching the book, and also speaks about the future prospects for sports history. 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, 2013, and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 2018, both published by Knopf), and of a memoir of his life as a cricket fan, The Commonwealth of Cricket (William Collins, 2020).

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