09-08-2025
My teacher Rajat Kanta Ray
In 1975, we were third-year students at Presidency College, Calcutta, when a breath of fresh air entered seminar room 17 on the first floor of the old building in the form of Professor Rajat Kanta Ray. A freshly minted PhD from the University of Cambridge, he integrated the most recent, cutting-edge historical research in his lectures to undergraduates. He believed in the inextricable link between scholarship and teaching. The more mischievous among us parodied the extravagant hand gestures that accompanied his erudite lectures, but we loved him because he treated us as equals.
In February 1977, he was the professor-in-charge who took us on a historical excursion to Khajuraho and other sites in Madhya Pradesh. We were mesmerised by his deep knowledge of architectural history. The doors of his home in Jodhpur Park were always open to his students.
Rajat Kanta Ray had done his doctoral research in the environment of the so-called Cambridge school of nationalism, but he expressed his reasoned dissent from some of its supercilious attitudes in a pathbreaking article on 'Political change in British India'. His first work focused on the political history of Bengal during the 50-year timespan from 1875 to 1925. He also wrote authoritatively with Ratnalekha Ray on agrarian history in the colonial period. Having been taught by him to think critically and challenge orthodoxies, I offered an alternative analysis of agrarian social structure in my own doctoral work at Cambridge. I was always struck by his generosity and open-mindedness in accepting criticism from even his most devoted students.
Equally adept at political and economic history, Rajat Ray did path-breaking research on the history of industrialisation and industrial policy. One of his finest long-form articles was on the bazaar and the long-distance flows of credit and finance that connected South Asia to Southeast Asia, West Asia and East Africa across the Indian Ocean. I urged him to write a book on the subject, but he was quite happy to hand over the baton to the next generation of Indian Ocean historians.
Later in his long and distinguished academic career, he turned to exploring cultural and intellectual history. He wrote with grace and imagination about emotional history and what he called 'the felt community'. During a visit to Harvard early in the 21st century, those were the topics he wanted to discuss with me.
In conventional terms, being appointed vice-chancellor of Visva Bharati from 2006 to 2011 was his crowning glory. I was not particularly excited about seeing my revered teacher take on the burdens of administration. On one occasion, he prostrated himself before a statue of Debendranath Tagore to seek the sage's guidance. Yet, his time in Santiniketan rekindled his interest in Rabindranath's concept of jibandebata. He devoted himself in his final years to writing in Bengali on this theme.
There was another context in which I saw Rajat Ray closely. For decades, he was a member of the Council of the Netaji Research Bureau. My late mother Krishna Bose and I sought his advice about international academic conferences at Netaji Bhawan where he was invariably a very lively intellectual presence. He was masterful in chairing history seminars.
The passing of this exemplary scholar-teacher at this critical juncture in our country's history leaves an enormous void. He was bold and forthright in standing up to the assaults on academic freedom and the discipline of history by the forces of Hindu majoritarianism. His answer, however, was not to retreat into narrow provincialism but to uphold the best intellectual traditions of Bengal in their full amplitude. In the enveloping darkness of Bengal's all-round educational and cultural decline, my teacher Rajat Kanta Ray lit a candle whose flame will forever burn bright.
The writer is Gardiner Professor of History at Harvard University
