The History department of Presidency College had a tradition of having at least one truly outstanding scholar-teacher train another. The tradition began with Kuruvilla Zachariah who joined the college around 1917 after receiving a congratulatory first in History in his BA from Merton College, Oxford. He was followed by Sushobhan Sarkar who passed on the baton to Amales Tripathi who was followed by Ashin Das Gupta. The last in this lineage was Rajat Kanta Ray who died on August 6.

Zachariah taught Sarkar who taught Das Gupta who in turn taught Ray. Ray had the good fortune of also being taught by Tripathi who was not a student of Sushobhan Sarkar.

Ray was a student of Presidency College in the early and mid 1960s. He came from Ballygunge Government High School where he had been an extraordinarily good student. He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge from where he took a PhD in History. The study of Indian nationalism which Ray focused on was in Cambridge dominated then by two individuals – Jack Gallagher and Anil Seal. The gospel according to Gallagher and Seal was that nationalism in India was devoid of any ideology. Sections of self-interested elites divided into factions along caste lines took to opposing the Raj when the latter failed or refused to feed their ambitions. Yesterday’s collaborators became tomorrow’s nationalists who were also once non-cooperative and twice shy.

Ray was influenced by the ideas of Gallagher and Seal but refused to accept them in their entirety. He accepted the existence of caste-driven factions but he could not accept Indian nationalism as being mindless. He explored the complex intertwining of these two apparently contradictory trajectories in his book Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875-1927 (1985). He had analysed similar themes in an earlier book Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939 (1979).

Ray’s intellectual interests were not confined only to Indian nationalism. In collaboration with his first wife, Ratnalekha Ray, he wrote on agrarian relations in Bengal in the 19th century. He delved into the complicated functioning of the bazaar in the interstices of the colonial economy and how the Indian mercantile community operated within it. He wrote a monograph on the process of industrialisation in India. Ray was also one of the earliest to write about the history of emotions in Bengal. He coined the term “The Felt Community” to delineate the nature of anti-British protests before the coming of nationalism.

Ray was a bilingual intellectual. He wrote in Bengali and his Bengali book on the conspiracy behind the battle of Palashi (often written as Plassey) was a major, if somewhat neglected, contribution.

Apart from his scholarship, Ray was a fine teacher who had an impact on generations of students. On his return from Cambridge, he taught briefly at IIM, Calcutta. Then he moved to Presidency College where he remained in spite of going through many tribulations. He was a pillar of the College and he taught his students to love the study of history. He introduced his students to new historiographical approaches and sometimes took them well beyond the prescribed syllabus. My wife, Dayita, was Ray’s first tutorial student at Presidency and she still recalls how Ray made her read B. H. Slicher Van Bath on the agrarian history of the Middle Ages and insisted that she read the plays of Sophocles while reading the history of Greece during the Peloponnesian War.

I first met Ray when I joined the History department in Calcutta University. The first meetings were not exactly smooth as Ray saw me as being too influenced by Marxist historiography and I saw him as being too close to Seal and Gallagher. He had the graciousness to erase these first impressions and invited me to be a honorary guest lecturer at Presidency. We continued to disagree and argue especially on Subaltern Studies, the works of Ranajit Guha and on Geoffrey Elton’s analysis of Tudor politics. Ray knew how to differ without acrimony. It was an unacknowledged gift he gave me.

Ray lived and taught by his own beliefs and was never flustered by the ripples of posterity. He inherited an ancestry of teaching and scholarship at Presidency. He carried it forward to leave behind an imperishable legacy. Of how many individuals can this be said?

Rudrangshu Mukherjee is Chancellor and Professor of History at Ashoka University. Views expressed are personal.

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