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‘Rebels Against the Raj’ by Ramachandra Guha

Seven renegades who fought for India’s freedom

Everyone loves a rebel story. And in the 75th year of Indian Independence, we definitely love a story of those who rebelled against British rule.

Historian-writer Ramachandra Guha’s latest book, Rebels Against the Raj, shines the spotlight on a special kind of rebel — westerners who joined the Indian cause. While towering leaders like Annie Besant are well-known from history books and popular memory, names like B.G. Horniman or Madeleine Slade might be new for many readers. 

There are seven renegades featured in this book. But don’t expect seven chapters detailing the lives of these extraordinarily brave men and women. They lived and worked in India during some of the tumultuous periods of our Freedom Movement, and Guha expertly places their story in a continuous and overlapping timeline and context that helps the reader understand the history much better.  

Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Random House, Rebels Against the Raj is also relevant to our times, when ideas of national identity seem to be undergoing a churn, where it is deemed that those from outside our borders cannot possibly teach us anything about our country. As Guha writes in his Prologue, “ This book tells us that they can.”