Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. Born in Dehradun in 1958, he studied at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and took his doctorate at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Between 1985 and 1995 he held academic jobs in India, Europe, and North America. Since 1995 he has been a full-time writer. In 1997 and 1998 he was Indo-American Community Chair Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He has also taught at the universities of Yale, Stanford and Oslo, been a Senior Associate Member of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

His first book The Unquiet Woods was published in 1989 followed by Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India (1999). His other books include Environmentalism: A Global History (2000), and two books on Indian ecological conflicts co-authored with Madhav Gadgil: This Fissured Land (1992) and Ecology and Equity (1995), and a collection of environmental essays, How Much Should a Person Consume? (2006).

He also writes regularly on social and political issues in a fortnightly column in The Hindu, one of India's most respected and influential newspapers. Outside of India, Guha has published essays in the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Prospect, London Magazine, The Times, The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Ecologist.

Guha is also known for his writings on India's favourite sport, cricket. He is the author of two cricket books Wickets in the East (1992) and Spin and Other Turns (1994), and the editor of a third The Picador Book of Cricket, (2001).

In 2002, his social history of Indian cricket, entitled A Corner of a Foreign Field was awarded the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society Book of the Year prize for 2002. He is now completing a major history of independent India. This book will be all-India in scope and cover culture and the arts as well as economics and politics; it is to be published in 2007.