In Praise of a Renaissance Mind

Remembering Tapan Raychaudhuri (1926—2014), historian, storyteller and friend

Tapan Raychaudhuri dozed off during the seminar at St Antony’s College, Oxford, to launch my book, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim. Afterwards, he walked slowly to where my wife was sitting with some copies of the book and insisted on buying one. When she demurred at taking his money, he explained patiently that people didn’t often realise how much hard work went into writing a book. The effort alone deserved some recognition. He then told her she was sitting in the wrong place to attract custom, and had her and her desk, chair and little stock of books shifted to the more public atrium outside.

That was in Michaelmas Term last year, which makes it all the more remarkable, for Raychaudhuri was 87 years old then. I wondered if another Indian historian of equal standing, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, say, or Dr RC Majumdar, would have been similarly solicitous. Would either have taken the trouble at that great age and with an ailing wife at home to attend the event at all? But, then, Hashi, a gastronome like her husband (they jointly wrote ‘Not by Curry Alone’ in an anthology that Alan Davidson edited) but probably more deft in the kitchen and certainly an excellent hostess, had as a young woman known my mother. That was during World War II when we were evacuated to Lucknow. She would have insisted on her husband gracing my launch with his presence.

That could be one reason. Another was that St Antony’s was home to him. He had succeeded the legendary Sir Penderel Moon (whose controversial exit from the ICS prompted The Statesman to write a leader titled ‘Lunar Eclipse’) as Reader in Modern South Asian History at Oxford in 1973. In 1993, the year before retiring, he was given an ad hominem promotion to Professor of Indian History and Civilisation. He was also Fellow of St Antony’s during his full teaching stint and remained an Emeritus Fellow until his death on 26 November.

I like to think he also came because, slight though our connection was, he liked me. It added to my sense of gratification that a man of his age and eminence had taken the trouble to make an arrangement with someone with a car because he no longer took the wheel himself.

He was a child of the Bengal Renaissance, inheritor of the legacy of such nineteenth century pioneers as Ramtanu Lahiri who publicly discarded the sacred thread of his caste, Rasik Krishna Mallick, who refused to swear by the waters of the holy Ganga, and of Radhanath Sikdar, who created a sensation by rejecting an arranged match with a child bride. The Young Bengal movement that Henry Vivian Louis Derozio and others launched has been compared to a mighty storm that tried to sweep away everything before it, lashing society with violence. It caused some good, and, perhaps naturally, also some discomfort and distress.

Chatting with Tapan Babu in the book-lined comfort of his Oxford cottage was a reminder that even if the storm had ceased to blow at gale force, it still inspired constructive thinking among a few stalwarts whose intellectual lineage was rooted in that churning of Indian and European thought. About him and Hashi and their bubbling exuberance clung a whiff of the defiant non-conformism of an era when, so Peari Chand Mitra tells us in his Life of David Hare, when modern youths encountered ‘a snanshuddh Brahmin with the sacerdotal mark on his forehead, they danced round him, bawling in his ears, ‘We eat beef. Listen, we eat beef’.’

A comparison might be sought with another man who also enjoyed my affectionate respect. Nirad C Chaudhuri also emerged from East Bengal, broke journey in Delhi, and ended life in Oxford. Wherever he might now be, Chaudhuri will probably damn me with bell, book and candle for saying Tapan Babu had the edge with his grand zamindari background (his father used a bag of gold guineas for small change) and impeccable formal education. But Nirad Babu could not be matched for his grasp of a vast range of minutiae about English life and letters long before he set foot on English soil.

Attending my seminar at his old college was not Raychaudhuri’s first act of benediction. When Oxford University’s Centre for International Studies invited me to speak on another of my books, Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India, in March 2010, the Raychaudhuris invited my wife and me to stay with them. My son turned up, too, but they weren’t flustered. There was only one guest room, but a sofa in the living room could always be turned into a bed. Formality didn’t restrict their hospitality.

Apart from similar acts of graciousness, I remember him best for the puckish humour that also reflected many of his abiding beliefs. He was a raconteur. Some of it percolated into his writing and enlivened the dry chronology of history. For instance, when he meets a young American whose PhD was in butchering technique, he murmurs, “It is not clear if Bush used his discoveries in Iraq.”

Superficially, that comment might appear to fix Raychaudhuri’s position in the political firmament. But such a superficial judgment could not be more wildly off the mark. For he emphatically asserted he was not anti-American. He wrote admiringly of young Americans who were ‘aware of their role on the world scene as citizens of the world’s most powerful country’. He could say in all honesty, “I admire profoundly the civilisation that is America.” But he could add in the very next sentence and with equal sincerity, “Only, that admiration does not extend to the country’s foreign policy in Asia, Africa and Latin America or to politicians like George Bush and his cohort.” The intellectual in him distinguished between nations and governments, between people and politicians.

He would certainly deplore what Eric Hobsbawm called the impressive return from Mauretania to India of politics formulated in terms of religion; indeed, beliefs apart, he had personal reason to do so. He believed that his directorship of the Delhi School of Economics was truncated because the Jana Sangh, which had captured the Delhi municipality, was “not happy to see a person with radical sympathies” at the helm and pressured the vice-chancellor, Dr BN Ganguli. Delhi’s loss was Oxford’s gain.

Although his Oxford DPhil was on the Dutch East India Company’s trading activities (the resultant book was titled Jan Company in Coromandel) and he edited (with Irfan Habib) the first volume of the Cambridge Economic History of India, his forte was social history. It allowed a mingling of academic rigour with a lively personal interest in the surrounding humanity that produced some scurrilous stories about people of consequence in private conversation but serious analyses in public discourse. As a result, his recent works—the anthology called Bangalnama, his autobiography in Bengali, and two non- specialist works in English, The World in Our Time: A Memoir and Europe reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal—probably best give the flavour of the man’s wit, erudition and incisive insight.

Books provided the common plank for our meetings. Not just my books or his but when a friend in Kolkata, Jolly Mohan Kaul, once a luminary of the undivided Communist Party of India, wrote his memoirs, In Search of a Better World, he asked Tapan Raychaudhuri to release it and me to preside over the ceremony. The Kashmiri Jolly and his deceased Bengali wife, Manikuntala Sen, a former West Bengal legislator, believed in Communism but no longer in Communists.

Raychaudhuri says he and another Oxford graduate who, sadly, squandered his talents dropped in at my parental home in 1960 or thereabouts. I have no recollection of that visit. Our first meeting so far as I am aware was more than 40 years later when in a fit of liberalism influenced by its president, Sir Keith Thomas, author of the magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, Corpus Christi College elected me its first as I call it Blue-collar Fellow. Since the experiment was not repeated, I can only suppose Corpus Christi repented of its brief encounter with the non-academic world. But even if Tapan Babu and I got to know each other so late in the day, there were around us some friendly and familiar, if slightly risqué, ghosts of the past.

His youngest brother Apu had been my colleague on The Statesman and married, divorced and remarried a daughter of Samar Sen whom some considered the finest Bengali poet since Rabindranath Tagore. Hashi’s beautiful sister Sonali became a cause célèbre when she left her filmmaker husband Harisadan Dasgupta to elope with Roberto Rosselini who was then married to Ingrid Bergman. Rossellini was 52 to Sonali’s 27. Her mother pleaded with Jawaharlal Nehru to impound Sonali’s passport but in vain. Nehru had himself invited Rosselini to India.

Hari was a gifted man who had studied filmmaking in America. His sensitive last feature film titled Eki Angey Eto Roop was screened at the Edinburgh Festival under the title, if I am not mistaken, So Many Faces of Eve. He wanted me to write the English sub-titles but other factors intervened. He accused Satyajit Ray of delaying the film’s release through his hold on the stars. My last conversation with Hari was when he hobbled into my office one day leaning heavily on a stick. Ingrid Bergman, whom he had known well, had just died and he wanted to write a tribute. Alas, the few lines he produced were gibberish. I was living in Singapore when he died. He had probably never recovered from Sonali’s defection.

When she died earlier this year, AM—one suspects the initials make a pretence of masking the identity of West Bengal’s former Marxist finance minister—wrote in The Telegraph, ‘A similar furore was sought to be raised by a section of self-appointed social nitpickers when, a few years later, Sonali’s elder sister, Hashi, who had lost her husband a few months previously, decided to re-marry; her choice fell on Tapan Raychaudhuri, the historian. She left her father-in-law’s house to join Tapan. The scandal-mongers could not directly object to her re-marriage; thanks to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s efforts, it was legally sanctified almost a century ago. Their grouse was based on two hypotheses: (a) she should have waited a while; it was unseemly for a woman to re-marry so soon after the husband’s death; and (b) even though the husband was dead, the father-in-law—the venerable lawyer—was still living, her decision must have shocked and pained him.’

Hashi may feel all alone now. But she isn’t really. She has the garden she tended so lovingly, growing exotic Indian vegetables in unkind English conditions. Many of the Oxford dons who gave Tapan Raychaudhuri a grand dinner on his eightieth birthday are also still there, though not Richard Symonds, a wise and witty Quaker who had been with Gandhi in India and who organised the event. Richard’s wife sent me the obituary Tapan Babu penned a few years ago. But there are others who appreciated the Raychaudhuris not only for their scholarship but because they were such good company. They are there for Hashi at the end of a telephone line. She has never been shy of using the instrument even across continents. I can still hear her thin voice quavering through the ether.

About The Author

Sunanda K Datta-Ray

Sunanda K Datta-Ray is a journalist and author of several books. He is an Open contributor