COMMENTARY

Barun De: Situating an Eminent Historian Historically

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

Barun De was a ne historian who retained a regard for evidence and a nely balanced empirical approach to research. He was also a diligent institution-builder who marshalled a number of institutions with distinction.

arun De, historian of early modern India, passed away in Kolkata on 16 July 2013 after a brief illness. He was 80 years old. The age of 80 might have been considered very old in the year of his birth, 1932, when average life expectancy was 32 years in India; today life expectancy is 65 years one of the many indices of the historic changes he saw in his lifetime. He was quite active intellectually till the end, except for the last two months when cancer affected his brains. An obituary in the Economic & Political Weekly, which carried some of his writings over three decades, will be eminently appropriate. Such an obituary, unlike those published recently in the newspapers, might attempt to look at his life and work in the light of the history of his own times. Barun Des lineage included a long line of civil servants. In the online world there is a sort of obituary that emphasises this aspect, but his claim to recognition does not rest on his genealogy. At the same time, that background does matter if one looks at his social location in the Indian middle class of the metropolitan cities. The Kayastha tradition of serving the state and their entrenched position among the elite of the capital city Calcutta are relevant. So is the fact that Barun Des grandfather was one of the early Indian entrants into the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in Bengal. The point, however, is that Barun De chose a career path different from what one might have expected, given his social background. He made a bold choice in opting for an academic career. Bold Choice It was a bold decision because the profession he chose was materially unrewarding. As Tapan Raychaudhuri has recounted recently in his memoirs, in the 1950s academic jobs were located in the lower range of choices open to the
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Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (bhattacharya. sabyasachi@gmail.com) is an eminent historian of modern India and was formerly chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research.

middle class aspirant for a job somewhere between the Indian Administrative Service and clerical positions. Judging by whatever little we know of the poorly-researched history of that period, the economic situation was grim for the middle class professionals. For them the 1940s and 1950s were hard times. The second world war had brought in its wake massive price ination. That reduced the real income of the xed income earners, i e, the salaried middle class as well as those in that class who depended on earnings from savings and rental incomes. The war economy was good for the contractors who dealt with staple food items, cloth, kerosene and military supplies of various kinds. A new word black market was added to the Bengali lexicon in those times. Thus a reshufing of the elite took place, a nouveau riche class came up to challenge the old professional middle class and old property owners. Given that context, in historical hindsight the decision of Barun De to seek an academic position looks like an unusually bold decision. Among his classmates in Presidency College, Calcutta, several others, who were roughly from a similar social background, took the same decision: Amartya Sen, Sukhomay Chakravarti, Partha Sarathi Gupta. All of them found their way to Europe to study economics or history. Young Barun went to St Catherines College, then known as St Catherines Society, in Oxford to get another BA degree, a very wise choice, and his MA in History (1958). Young Barun pursued his resolve. Contrary to the family tradition he looked for a teaching position. Upon returning to Calcutta all he could get was a temporary part-time lectureship at Calcutta University. He decided to return to Oxford to earn his doctoral degree. Oxford University had been endowed by a benefactor, a professorship (in my times in Oxford, John Gallagher held the Beit professorship) as well as a Beit senior fellowship. Barun De was awarded this fellowship to enable him to complete, at Nufeld College, his doctoral thesis on Henry Dundas and the policies and constitutional ideas at work in the East India Company in the last three decades of the 18th century.
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Upon completing that dissertation Barun De returned to Calcutta, again looking for an academic position. Academic positions were difcult to come by in those days. At that time in the University of Calcutta there was only one professorship in each department and in some departments there was none. Lower positions in the department were also difcult to create and, one presumes, factionalism was at work in the matter of appointment. While waiting and waiting for placement in one of the metropolitan universities, Barun De was offered a position in a new provincial university at Burdwan. Institution-builder In the meanwhile outside of the university system new and sometimes superior research and educational institutions were being created, the rst lot being the Indian Institute of Technology, a part of the Nehruvian vision of technological advancement and industrialisation. Next, in the 1960s, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) came into existence. The rst IIM was the one founded by the Government of India in Calcutta with a very unusual man at the helm, K T Chandy. A retired senior executive of the Hindustan Lever house and a close friend of V K Krishna Menon from their London days, Chandy was entrusted by the government to train Indian aspirants for entry into the ranks of the executives who began to take over from British ofcers in British business corporations as well as the new public sector units which were coming into existence in the Nehruvian economic regime. It was commonly believed at that time that the highest authority in the land had given the IIM an agenda of lling up such positions in the public sector units. In fact in the rst generation of IIM Calcutta (IIMC) graduates many opted for positions in the public sector. The Faculty nursed a notion that a sort of national mission was on the IIMC agenda. (In course of time this objective was lost sight of and IIMC, like IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) and other ones, began to serve primarily, almost exclusively, the private sector). When the IIMC offered him a professorship in 1965 it was a turning point in Barun Des life. He served as the rst
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Indian programme director and he was also one of the earliest to teach in the management school courses on entrepreneurial history. Similar programmes and courses began to be offered in other institutes of management who recruited their leading faculty members from the faculty of the IIMC in the early days. Ravi Mathai and Ishwar Dayal left IIMC to join the IIM Allahabad. They were both founder directors of new institutes of management. Barun De stayed on in IIMC, as professor of social and economic history, from 1965 to 1973 (he was away for two years in between at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla) and a good deal of his early research in India came as a spate in this period. It is probable that Barun De was not quite satised with the prospect of teaching history at a management school for the rest of his life. Therefore in 1973 when he was offered the director position in the newly-founded Centre for Studies in Social Sciences he accepted the challenge of building a new institution. In the 1970s, the academic scene began to change in India. The foundation of the Indian Council of Social Science Research in 1969 and the Indian Council of Historical Research in 1972 opened up new possibilities of funding research and employment outside the university system. That reduced the power of the university establishment and their power-brokers to keep out persons like Barun De. Secondly, the minister of education from 1973 to 1977, Saiyid Nurul Hasan, pushed for expansion of academic positions and revision of salary structure. That made a difference. He also promoted the foundation of over 20 social science research institutes. Barun Des Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) was one of them. He piloted the institution through the rst decade and gathered around him a faculty that set new intellectual standards in that part of the country. The CSSSC became the Eastern Regional Centre of the ICSSR. As an institution builder Barun De distinguished himself once again, after retirement from the CSSSC in 1993, as the founder director of the Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies from 1993 to 1997. Almost single-handed,
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with no help other than support of the then Governor of West Bengal, Nurul Hasan, he gathered resources for an autonomous centre for research with a great potential. For Barun De personally this experience might have been useful in the years he spent soon after in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1998-2001. In the last decade of his life be served as chairman of the West Bengal Heritage Commission and as the Tagore National Fellow of the Ministry of Culture. Historian and Academic We may now turn to the question, what were Barun Des achievements as a historian? What were the themes on his agenda as a historian? Three major areas of interest engaged his mind in the decades from the 1960s to 2013. First, his early work was on policies of the East India Company in the 18th century and more generally the reconstruction of the postMughal polity in that century. Second, the regional history of Bengal in the late

Survey
September 8, 2012

Revisiting Communalism and Fundamentalism in India

by

Surya Prakash Upadhyay, Rowena Robinson This comprehensive review of the literature on communalism and its virulent offshoot, fundamentalism in India considers the various perspectives from which the issue has sought to be understood, from precolonial and colonial times to the post-Independence period. The writings indicate that communalism is an outcome of the competitive aspirations of domination and counter-domination that began in colonial times. Cynical distortions of the democratic process and the politicisation of religion in the early decades of Independence intensified it. In recent years, economic liberalisation, the growth of opportunities and a multiplying middle class have further aggravated it. More alarmingly, since the 1980s, Hindu communalism has morphed into fundamentalism, with the Sangh parivar and its cultural politics of Hindutva playing ominous roles. For copies write to: Circulation Manager, Economic and Political Weekly, 320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013. email: circulation@epw.in 23

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19th and early 20th centuries was a subject he returned to over and again. Third, he also explored the wider range of issues at the interface between nationalism and colonialism in India and elsewhere in Asia. It was in the rst of these areas where his scholarly contribution was most signicant. In the 1950s Lewis Namiers innovation in the methodology of historical studies had an impact and this inuenced studies in the English East India Company, most notably in the works of Dame Lucy Sutherland. Colin Davis had also worked on those lines and Barun Des choice of his eld of research at Nufeld College was an important initiative to extend our knowledge of the inner working of the East India Company, the role of Henry Dundas and others as interest groups and policymakers. Dundas (1742-1811), the rst Viscount Melville, is known in British history as the righthand man of William Pitt, the Younger. In imperial history Dundas is memorable for having secured British hold over Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, and for his policymaking role as the man who controlled the Board of Control of the East India Company. Des doctoral thesis was never published. But he drew upon his vast knowledge of the structure and discourse of 18th century politics in many of his writings, dispersed in journals and collections and research papers. The important publications among them are Barun Des Presidential Address on 18th century India at the Indian History Congress in 1988, his paper is a collection of essays on Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan in a volume (ed, Irfan Habib, 1999) and a pioneering article (in a volume edited by O P Bhatnagar, 1964) on the disintegration of the Mughal political system. Des interest in 18th century India was shared by Nurul Hasan, one of his mentors, and his friend from Oxford days, Irfan Habib, and later other entrants in the eld like Frank Perlin, Andre Wink, Muzaffar Alam, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, etc. Barun De returned to 18th century studies in his last and unnished project as the Tagore National Fellow at the Victoria Memorial Hall. This was a project to explore British India through the medium of British artists paintings and sketches.
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Barun Des location in Calcutta and access to sources on colonial Bengal naturally led to the development of his interest in that area of study. Some of his early publications were on 19th century Bengal: in 1975 a re-evaluation of the role of Raja Ram Mohan Roy (in a collection edited by V C Joshi), in 1976 another on that theme (in essays edited by C H Philips and M Wianuright), a critical overview of the Bengal Renaissance and its analogues in 1979 (Centre for Social Studies Monograph Series), and some essays on his grandfather Brojendranath De, one of the early ICS administrators in Bengal and a notable Persian scholar (Bengal: Past and Present, 1969), and his teacher Susobhan Sarkar for whom he put together a memorial volume of essays (1976). As the editor (honorary) of the West Bengal District Gazetteers in 1979-83, he produced two volumes and later he wrote some reective essays on the regional history of Bengal (e g, Convocation Address at the Vidyasagar University, 1995). However, these cannot to be placed in the same class as his earlier research work. Colonialism and Nationalism The third area of research for Barun De was the encounter between colonialism and nationalism in late 19th and 20th century India and in Asia as a whole. He was commissioned to co-author with Bipan Chandra and Amales Tripathi a survey of the Freedom Struggle (1972) which enjoyed popular attention and acclaim. His interest was not so much in the chronicle of nationalist polities but nationalist ideology and he wrote on that theme in a collection of essays he edited (Centre for Social Science Studies, Calcutta, 1977), and the Indian Historical Review (ICHR, 1979). In the 1990s many essays were written by him on different aspects of nationalism and imperialism: ethnic revivalism (in a volume edited by the Director of Anthropological Survey, K S Singh, 1992), imperialism as a global phenomenon (in a volume edited from Berlin by J Heidrich 1993), secularism and nation-building (Dhaka University, 1974), Indian and Iranian historical experience (volume edited by M H Ansari, 2005), Asian perspective on
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national liberation (Abul K alam Azad Institute of Asia Studies, 1995), and a comparative study of developments in India and Bangladesh (in a volume he co-edited with Ranabir Samaddar, published in 1997). This spate of research was preceded by some historical surveys he produced for the UN University in Tokyo, which were in the nature of texts of lectures. Perhaps the last work in the series on nationalism in Asia was: Secularism at Bay: Uzbekistan at the Turn of the Century (New Delhi, 2006). Public Intellectual It is evident that Barun De was generous to a fault in giving away to acquaintances bits and pieces of his writings for collections they published, and he was equally generous with his time in talking to his students. At one time India had a tradition of oral transmission of knowledge and he might have been one of the last practitioners of that art. As a result he did not publish as much as he might have. But in Indian culture there is a space for such personalities and his contribution has not gone unrecognised. We have considered him here as a public intellectual and tried to situate him in the context of developments which shaped the professional life of intellectuals like him in India in the last ve decades. One debatable issue remains to be addressed. A large number of people who read what he wrote in the book Freedom Struggle with Bipan Chandra and Amales Tripathi as co-authors, look upon him as a staunch nationalist historian. On the other hand, Marxism also claims him, chiey because he was perceived as the head and front of a research centre he founded, which had a more than average share of intellectuals of that school. But it is perhaps unjust to judge him in this manner by the company he kept. Perhaps in opting for the life he led there was a commitment which you might call national in spirit, perhaps in the words and notions he used there was a touch of Marxian vocabulary and yet as a historian he retained a regard for evidence, a nely balanced empirical approach to research which cannot be categorised in simple binaries. That is what historical scholarship is about.
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