Ramachandra Guha's many books include a pioneering work of environmental history (The Unquiet Woods, 1989), an award-winning social history of sport (A Corner of a Foreign Field, 2002), and a widely acclaimed and bestselling work of contemporary history (India after Gandhi, 2007). The first volume of his landmark biography of Gandhi, Gandhi before India, was published in 2013; the second and concluding volume will be published in early 2018.
Guha's awards include the R.K. Narayan Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Ramnath Goenka Award and the Padma Bhushan. In 2014, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in the humanities by Yale University, and in 2015, he won the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian culture and scholarship.
This evocative and beautifully written book brings to life one of the most remarkable figures of twentieth-century India. Verrier Elwin (1902-64) was an anthropologist, poet, Gandhian, hedonist, Englishman, and Indian. Savaging the Civilized reveals a many-sided man, a friend of the elite who was at home with the impoverished and the destitute; a charismatic charmer of women who was comfortable with intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler and Jawaharlal Nehru; an anthropologist who lived with and loved the tribes yet who wrote literary essays and monographs for the learned.
Savaging the Civilized is both biography and history, an exploration through Elwin's life of some of the great debates of our times, such as the impact of economic development, and cultural pluralism versus cultural homogeneity. For this new edition, Ramachandra Guha has updated the epilogue to take account of the growing influence of Naxalites in Adivasi areas. He has also added a fresh introduction, stressing the relevance of Elwin's life and work to current debates on Indian democracy and pluralism.
