Mahadev Haribhai Desai was an Indian independence activist, scholar and writer best remembered as Mahatma Gandhi's personal secretary. He has variously been described as "Gandhi's Boswell, a Plato to Gandhi's Socrates, as well as an Ānanda to Gandhi's Buddha".
Kota Shivaram Karanth, also abbreviated as K. Shivaram Karanth, was an Indian polymath, who was a novelist in Kannada language, playwright and an ecological conservationist. Ramachandra Guha called him the "Rabindranath Tagore of Modern India, who has been one of the finest novelists-activists since independence". He was the third writer to be decorated with the Jnanpith Award for Kannada, the highest literary honor conferred in India. His son Ullas is an ecological conservationist.
Ramachandra "Ram" Guha is an Indian historian, environmentalist, writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary, environmental and cricket history, and the field of economics. He is an important authority on the history of modern India.
The Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honour in India, which the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the 24 major Indian languages such as Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, English, Bengali, Punjabi and the 22 listed languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution recognised by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.
The Modern Review was a monthly magazine published in Calcutta founded and edited by Ramananda Chatterjee in 1907. The Modern Review emerged as an important forum for the Indian Nationalist intelligentsia. It carried essays on politics, economics, sociology, as well as poems, stories, travelogues, and sketches. Radhakamal Mukerjee published his early, pioneering essays on environmental degradation in India here and Verrier Elwin reports from the Gond country were first published here. Numerous other friends of India including Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland wrote regularly for the magazine. Another indication of the journal's stature was the publication, within its pages, of Jawaharlal Nehru's pseudonymous autocritique Rashtrapati, by ‘Chanakya’ in November 1937. Ramachandra Guha indicates that alone was evidence that it was "leading journal of the progressive Indian intelligentsia."
Biraja Sankar Guha was an Indian physical anthropologist, who classified Indian people into races around the early part of the 20th century and he was also a pioneer to popularize his scientific ideas in the vernacular. He was the first Director of the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) (1945–1954).
Harry Verrier Holman Elwin was a British-born Indian anthropologist, ethnologist and tribal activist, who began his career in India as a Christian missionary. He first abandoned the clergy, to work with Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, then converted to Hinduism in 1935 after staying in a Gandhian ashram, and split with the nationalists over what he felt was an overhasty process of transformation and assimilation for the tribals. Verrier Elwin is best known for his early work with the Baigas and Gonds of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh in central India, and he married a 13 year old member of one of the communities he studied. He later also worked on the tribals of several North East Indian states especially North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and settled in Shillong, the hill capital of Meghalaya.
Sitakant Mahapatra is an Indian poet and literary critic in Odia as well as English. He served in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) from 1961 until he retired in 1995, and has held ex officio posts such as the Chairman of National Book Trust, New Delhi since then.
India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy is a non-fiction book by Indian historian Ramachandra Guha first published by HarperCollins in August 2007.
P. Kunjanandan Nair, better known by his pseudonym, Thikkodiyan, was an Indian playwright, novelist, lyricist and screenwriter of Malayalam. He was known for his contributions to the genre of radio plays and his autobiography, Arangu Kaanatha Nadan, which detailed the socio-cultural development of Malabar in the post-independent period, fetched him a number of awards including the Kendra Sahithya Academy Award, Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Biography and Autobiography, Vayalar Award and the Odakkuzhal Award.
Suresh Hariprasad Joshi was an Indian novelist, short-story writer, literary critic, poet, translator, editor and academic in the Gujarati language. Along with his teaching career, he led the modernist movement in Gujarati literature. He was prolific writer and he transformed the field of literary criticism.
Kudiyirikkal Narayanan Ezhuthachan, commonly known as Dr.K.N.Ezhuthachan was an Indian writer and scholar of Malayalam literature. He was one among the principal followers of the idea of social impact on literature. Ezhuthachan supported Marxist literary criticism and interpreted Indian literary works based on Marxist aesthetics. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his work Keralodayam, a long narrative poem written in Sanskrit. He is the first Malayali to win Sahitya Akademi Award in sanskrit literature. He died on 28 October 1981 while delivering a lecture at Calicut University.
Mamang Dai is an Indian poet, novelist and journalist based in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh. She received Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017 for her novel The Black Hill.
Sunil Janah was an Indian photojournalist and documentary photographer who worked in India in the 1940s. Janah documented India's independence movement, its peasant and labour movements, famines and riots, rural and tribal life, as well as the years of rapid urbanization and industrialization. He was best known for his coverage of the Bengal famine of 1943.
Sitanshu Yashaschandra Mehta, better known as Sitanshu Yashaschandra, is a Gujarati language poet, playwright, translator and academic from India.
Suman Shah is a Gujarati language critic, short story writer, novelist, essayist, editor and translator from Gujarat, India. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2008 for his short story collection Fatfatiyun. He has written both in the modern and in the postmodern eras in Gujarati literature. He has authored more than 74 books, including 2 novels, 6 short story collections, 4 collections of creative essays, 6 translations into Gujarati from English and Hindi, 22 books on literary criticism and around 23 edited works of literary theory and modern Gujarati short stories and poems. He was honorary editor of Shabdasrishti from 1983 to 1986 and an editor of Khevna, a literary journal, from 1987 to 2009.
Janantike is a 1965 collection of personal essays by Indian writer Suresh Joshi. V.Y. Kantak translated it into English with the title Intimate Asides (1995).
Makers of Modern India is a non-fiction book written by Indian historian-scholar Ramachandra Guha and published by Penguin India on 7 November 2012. The book features profiles of selected personalities that laid the foundation of modern India: Ram Mohan Roy, Syed Ahmad Khan, Jotirao Phule, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Tarabai Shinde, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, B. R. Ambedkar, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Periyar, Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, Jawaharlal Nehru, M. S. Golwalkar, Rammanohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, C. Rajagopalachari, Verrier Elwin, and Hamid Dalwai.
