Ramachandra Guha has been an astute and lucid guide to Indian history, with an ability to paint both the broad canvas as well fill in the minute details. Most people know him as a columnist – sometimes controversial, but always insightful and engaging. But there is another side to him, that of the scrupulous historian and scholarly path breaker – in the field of environmental history, the social history of Indian cricket, the history of the Indian republic, and in biographies of lesser-known figures like Verrier Elwin and very public figures like Gandhi.

This episode of BIC Talks is a series of extracts from a Festschrift in honour of Ramachandra Guha, originally presented as a BIC Streams session based on A Functioning Anarchy, a collection of essays by historians, social scientists, ecologists and journalists- edited by Nandini Sundar and Srinath Raghavan- in appreciation of the scholar in Guha.