Rajat Kanta Ray taught history not for applause, but to cultivate independence of mind

Indian Express

5 days ago

Written by Anandaroop Sen
Rajat Kanta Ray was my teacher at Presidency College (2003-2006), the generosity of whose spirit, the relentlessness of erudition, the disarming charm, and the unflappable poise, we were privileged to experience. I write 'we' because it is difficult for me to talk about Rajat babu without a sense of collective, imagined, or otherwise. A collective forged in the history department in particular and at Presidency College at large. He, as the individual par excellence, crafted this collective through decades of his work at Presidency College. This was the key paradox (for many of us) of Rajat Kanta Ray, the accomplished, widely respected historian of South Asia, shaping and inhabiting the world of South Asian (and beyond) historiography, an almost incorporeal entity and our undergraduate professor, organising the everyday, very much a corporeal figure, with his slow delivery, soft voice filling up the classroom as we huddled closer to catch his words.
He gave us the keys to historical imagination. Fiercely independent as a thinker, he never reached out to be a popular teacher. Yet, he held us captivated with his histories of 1857 and Gandhi. He nurtured scores of historians of South Asia across ideological and political positions, giving them the ammunition to argue against him, while lightly wearing his generosity. Rajat Kanta Ray was an individual, not the individual of capitalism as a vessel of consumption, but an individual with the courage to stand against the pressure and tides of consensus. Yet, it was this very individualism of courage that built the collective I imagine being part of. He taught us the rigours of historical work but insisted on the act of imagination required to organise the labour.
As a professional historian, the sheer range of his work is a testament to his curiosity and erudition. His monograph, Industrialisation in India: Growth and Conflict in the Corporate Sector, first published in 1979, remains a classic. Later in his life, he moved to histories of emotions and intimacies. This welding of the economies of capital and desire is perhaps typical of an effort to reach out for a profundity of the human condition through the minutiae of archival labour. This is for me the legacy of Rajat babu's work. Others, better minds will comment on the complexities of his work and I will not detain the reader with that but I do remember the moment I finished reading his long essay on Indian Ocean trade titled 'Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar 1800-1914' (published in Modern Asian Studies in 1995) at Jawaharlal Nehru University; I marvelled at the expertise, the ambition and the breadth. But most of all, I was drawn in by its sensuousness. It was as if parts of the Indian Ocean had washed into my tiny Sutlej hostel room.
Rajat babu was a guardian of a disappearing world. A world where there was value in sharing knowledge without an agenda of self-enrichment, a world where custodianship is not gatekeeping but a measure of care; his care for his craft, pedagogy and students were a single thread running across what we knew of him as a person. A guardian and a custodian who generated excellence in and around him, not through the bark of orders and aggression, but with calmness laced with a sense of humour that sparkled and made light of the enormous intellectual labour.
And there was a basic weirdness to him as a person that I found delightful. Everybody appreciated the wisdom, but the element of strangeness was wonderful. I remember we were at a book launch at Oxford Bookshop in Kolkata's Park Street. Drinks were served after the launch. One of the organisers came to him and asked Rajat babu, 'Sir, can I get you anything to drink?' He took a moment and then asked, 'Do you have sherry?' Now, who would have a steady supply of sherry on an autumn evening in Calcutta, or, for that matter, who drank sherry outside the chambers of late Victorian England was beyond us. The organiser certainly did not have an answer and left mumbling his apologies. Rajat babu smiled and said it was all right.
In the 'Asian Capital' article, Rajat babu wrote extensively about the Arab dhow, boats with their triangular sails, traversing the surface of the Indian Ocean; how these were still the lifeblood of Indian Ocean trade in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not engulfed by European capitalism. As he drifts closer to our memories while sailing away from our world, I hope Rajat babu has now found his dhow.
The writer is senior lecturer, Historical Studies, University of Cape Town