Historian Ramachandra Guha has been appointed distinguished professor at Krea University, a liberal arts and sciences private university in Andhra Pradesh.

The appointment will be active from August 1, the college said in an email to its academic council members. “Dr Guha will teach classes, interact with students, work with colleagues on curricular development, and help build the vision of Krea,” the institution said.

Guha, who is the author of books such as India After Gandhi, A Corner of a Foreign Field, which is an award-winning social history of cricket, and The Unquiet Woods, an environmental history. In 2018, he published Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948.

Guha had in October 2018 announced that he was no longer taking up a post at Ahmedabad University, “due to circumstances beyond [his] control”. On October 16 that year, the university had announced Guha’s appointment as the Shrenik Lalbhai Chair Professor of Humanities and director of the Gandhi Winter School at the university’s School of Arts and Sciences.

People familiar with the situation said that high-level political pressure had been brought to bear on the institution’s board members about Guha’s appointment. However, Ahmedabad University officials declined to comment on this.