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The historyteller

Tapanda provides an insider view of the lives, thoughts and contradictions of this doomed social group of Hindu landlords of East Bengal, whose fortunes suddenly collapsed as they left for India at the time of Partition, to avoid being in East Pakistan. (Source: The Hindu photo)

Written by Amartya Sen | Posted: November 29, 2014 1

Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri — Tapanda to many of us — who died in Oxford on November 26, was not only a leading historian, but a person of many different talents. He was an outstanding teacher, whose pedagogy extended far beyond those who were formally his students at Oxford or Delhi or Calcutta. I was never his student, and yet, thanks to our friendship over 62 years, I learned a huge amount from him on a large variety of subjects, including a great many things about history. Being of lazy disposition, I relished the fact that often enough, the most effortless — and quickest — way of learning something about the past was to ask Tapanda a question about it. He was an extraordinary believer in enlightenment and enjoyed learning about things that he did not know, but seemed to enjoy almost as much as sharing his knowledge with others.

Tapanda’s gifts as a conversationalist were exceptional. He liked being amused, and enjoyed amusing others. Some of the funniest stories I have heard in my life have come from Tapanda. However, he was never a believer in humour for its own sake — never a maker of stand-alone jokes. His stories and recollections informed us even as we were vastly entertained. He also had a deep sense of equity and justice. One of the many consequences of that general, though very implicit, commitment was that his humour was never at the expense of anyone in a tough position. His most amusing stories could, however, be devastatingly funny about the high and mighty. Tapanda’s humanity and sympathy were as striking as his magical ability to entertain and engage his friends.

Tapanda’s sense of justice found expression in his account of history, and even in his memoirs. His family belonged to the class of Hindu landlords in Muslim-majority East Bengal — what is now Bangladesh. He describes in his memoir, The World in Our Time, how outrageously the poor peasants and other rural workmen were treated by the land-owning potentates. His anger at the system within which he was growing up is as clearly articulated as his perceptive discussion of how this privileged class became increasingly trapped in self-doubt and bewilderment as political values changed in the course of the fight for Indian independence. As it happens, many young men and women who came from that exploitative background went on to become radical — sometimes revolutionary — leaders of the politics of emancipation.

Tapanda provides an insider view of the lives, thoughts and contradictions of this doomed social group of Hindu landlords of East Bengal, whose fortunes suddenly collapsed as they left for India at the time of Partition, continued…

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