Tapan Raychauduri
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Historian & raconteur Raychauduri dies in UK Shahid Amin The Times of India Nov 28 2014
Born into a landed family in present-day Bangladesh, Tapan Raychauduri, one of the top historians of modern South Asia, died of a cerebral stroke on Wednesday in Oxford, the English university town where he was a professor of Indian history and civilization and Emeritus Fellow, St.Antony's College. Trained under Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the founder of modern historiography in India, Raychaudhuri earned his laurels early. At 25, he had already pocketed a D.Phil degree from Calcutta University and also published Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir (1953) -a pioneering social history of Bengali society and culture.
From 1953-1957 he worked on a second D.Phil at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the archives of the Dutch East India Company at the Hague, published subsequently as Jan Company in Coromondel, 1605-1690. A pioneering attempt at studying the interrelations between early modern Europen commerce and local politics and regional coastal economies of pre-colonial India, Jan Company firmly established him as a leading economic historian of the sub-continent.
He was at the Delhi School of Economics from 1959 to 1970, the golden years of the institution which boasted of economists Amartya Sen, K N Raj, Sukhomoy Chakravarty and M N Srinivas, the father figure of sociology , on its faculty. It was from D School that he launched single handedly the journal Indian Economic and Social History Review in 1962, the leading international journal in this field till the present.
In 1970-71, Tapanda, as he was known to his students, became the head of DU's history department. In that one year he fathered a most ambitious programme of interdepartmental, interdisciplinary studies, much talked about these days, when he devised and taught a set of courses enabling graduate students of both history and economics departments of the University to earn a specialized degree in Economic History .
Early 1973 saw Raychaudhuri move to the University of Oxford, where he presided over the teaching and research of South Asian Hisory for the next 22 years. Back at his alma mater, Tapanda really came into his own. He overhauled the antiquated courses on Indian history (there was a special paper till then just on the impeachment of Governor-General Warren Hastings at that ancient seat of learning!).
He now began publishing on a wide range of themes -the history of interactions between European and Indian sensibilities, cultural history of colonial Bengal, including an engaging essay on Bengali cookbooks. It was from Oxford that he presided over and jointly edited with the famous Aligarh-based medievalist, Prof. Irfan Habib, the authoritative Cambridge Economic History of [pre colonial] India.
A master raconteur, and a stylist of limpid Bengali prose, Raychaudhuri produced his ultimate social history in the shape of serialized articles in the Bengali magazine Desh, (2007) which inverting the opprobrium attached to people from erstwhile East Bengal, he called Bangaalnama, translated beautiful by him as The World in Our Times (2012)
