Rajmohan Gandhi

Rajmohan Gandhi was born in New Delhi on 7 August 1935, the son of Devdas Gandhi and Lakshmi Gandhi, and the grandson of M.K. Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari (Wikipedia). He edited the Indian Express in Madras from 1985 to 1987, led the Indian delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva in 1990, sat in the Rajya Sabha from 1990 to 1992, and taught history and politics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign almost continuously from 1997 to 2022. He was president of Initiatives of Change International in 2009 and 2010 and won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002 for Rajaji: A Life (his own website).

He has written more than fifteen books, among them Patel: A Life (1990), Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire (2008) and India After 1947 (2022).

His book on Punjab, Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten (Aleph, 2013), covers the 240 years from the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 to the division of Punjab in 1947. It follows the instability after 1707, the invasions of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali, the clashes between Afghans and Sikhs, half a century of Sikh rule, a century of British rule, and the carnage of 1947 and the humanity that opposed it. It was researched in India, in Pakistan and at Illinois, and was launched in Chandigarh on 18 September 2013 with the Punjab Governor, Shivraj Patil, as chief guest (his own website). The Caravan's listing says it also draws on figures such as Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Iqbal, Amrita Pritam and Manto, and on the teachings of the Sikh Gurus and Sufi saints.

One passage has been disputed. Gandhi writes that Latif's History of the Panjab (1889) reports Bahadur Shah giving Guru Gobind Singh "tents, elephants and horses" and a commander's rank of 5,000. By his own account he only cites Latif and does not claim the Guru accepted the rank, and he disputes the historian Irfan Habib's review, which called the claim unsupported (his own website).

He is remembered in this record as the author of a single-volume narrative of undivided Punjab that covers the Gurus, the Sikh kingdom and the Sufi tradition in one book (The Caravan).