This is Democracy – Episode 35: Democracy in India

Jeremi sits down with Professor Sumit Guha of University of Texas at Austin to discuss the upcoming democratic elections in India, and the culture of the world's largest democracy. Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "Indian Soul." From 1996 to 1999 Sumit Guha was Professor in the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and moved to the USA in 2000 as S.P. Das Distinguished Professor at Brown University. In 2004 he joined the Department of History in Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and came thence to the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. He began his research as an economic historian with interests in demography and agriculture. These widened into the study of environmental and ethnic histories. My first book was The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan 1818-1941(1985) followed by Environment and Ethnicity in India, c. 1200-1991 (1999) and Health and Population in South Asia from earliest times to the present(2001). His most recent book is Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present.  His next book The Social Frame of Historical Memory: South Asian Practices in Global Context, c.1200-2000 will be published by the University of Washington Press this year.