The RG Who Wrote Off Rahul Gandhi

Biographer, chronicler, equal-opportunity critic and sincere friend are but a few of Ram Guha’s avatars.

- David Gilmour

MY first impression of Ram Guha was that he must be an intellectual about sixty or seventy years out of his era. With his rough tweed jacket and baggy trousers, his tousled hair, his round-lensed spectacles and his rather shambling gait, he looked like a figure of the 1930s; underneath his jacket he wore a patterned jersey that might have been knitted for George Orwell. And he talked too, in a way I had been told that bhadralok scholars always used to talk, rapidly and excitedly on a very wide range of subjects.

Yet I soon realised he was not really garrulous—an adjective much used by British rulers to denigrate Bengali intelle­ ctuals—he was simply more interested and better informed than almost anyone else. About twenty years ago we went to Trent Bridge to watch a cricket match, I in my stripey blazer, he in his tweed jacket and Orwell’s jersey. We travelled to the ground with Sunil Khilnani and my son in a motor car, a rather ropey old vehicle that Sunil had recently bought from a friend. It was a day­night match, an ODI between Australia and Pakistan, and as we returned to the car park shortly before midnight, Sunil suggested that, as he had only recently passed his driving test and had never driven in the dark, it might be better if I drove home. Reluctantly I agreed and, while I navigated the outskirts of Nottingham and set offon the long dreary journey down the M1 to London, Ram in the back seat kept up an inquisition that lasted two hours. Had I read the current issue of the New York Review? Did I agree with so and so’s piece in the latest Times Literary Supplement? What did I think of a denunc iatory article in the London Review of Books? He is sometimes a difficult chap to keep up with.