The news broke on Wednesday afternoon, Hiroshima Day, and was relayed across the world in minutes by former students and colleagues: Professor Rajat Ray had passed away in his sleep at about four in the afternoon in his Jodhpur Park home. His death called up memories for all of us who exchanged messages in the hours that followed, and it seemed that there were so many unfinished conversations we had to have with him.
There are bare facts that bear retelling after the death of a public figure, and they are these: Rajat Kanta Ray was the son of a senior civil servant who had been West Bengal’s Home Secretary.
After finishing school at Ballygunge Government High School, he obtained a BA in history from Presidency College, and a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge. He returned to Calcutta, taught for a while at the Indian Institute of Management, before returning to teach at Presidency, where he remained from 1975 to 2006. From 2006 to 2011, the end of his period of formal employment, he was vice-chancellor of Visva Bharati. He wrote several books, the most internationally successful of which, paradoxically for a man not prone to showing his feelings much, was Exploring Emotional History: Gender, Mentality, and Literature in the Indian Awakening (2001), a book that got caught in one of historiography’s periodic ‘turns’ as the discipline was being encouraged to embrace ‘affect’.
It was almost certainly not his best book: he wrote several, the first three being in the then-prevalent studies-in-Indian-nationalism mode: Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939 (1979); Industrialisation in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector, 1914-47 (1979); and Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875-1927 (1985). Among his later works were a Bengali monograph on the causes and meanings of the 1757 Battle of Plassey (1994), which raised passions in the corridors of Calcutta University among colleagues now long-deceased; and an account of pre-national feelings that existed before, but fed into, Indian nationalism (again) in The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality Before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (2007), which by the standards to which he held his students he must have regarded as somewhat methodologically unsound, but which was further on up the road from Exploring Emotional History.
Some of his shorter writing was more influential; for instance, his early work with Ratnalekha Ray on the agrarian economy in Bengal, expressed in two joint articles in 1973 and 1975, and continued in her monograph, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society 1760-1850 (1980), which made her the senior partner in their collaboration, was a major contribution to the debates on the eighteenth century transition to a colonial economy. The work that went into this intervention probably immunised Professor Ray against some of the more facile and polemical claims made about ‘peasants’ by the Subaltern Studies group from the early 1980s, which were in any case emanating from an opposed ideological tendency.
Substantial though his research output was, he will probably be remembered more for his teaching than his research; and it is in this capacity that I first encountered him as an undergraduate at Presidency College in the early 1990s. The first encounter was not with the man in person, but with a very ingeniously devised admissions test, in which we had to imagine a dialogue between Voltaire and Rousseau, put ourselves in the position of Napoleon confronting ‘generals January and February’ in Russia, and reconstruct the setting of a historical novel we’d read. Professor Ray had by then already taught many cohorts of students, and would go on to teach a few generations more. He was renowned for making small details tell larger stories. His style was evocative and expressive, even if rendered in a quiet and dispassionate voice which he lost sometimes, his periods of laryngitis tided over by his handing a few teaching notes to a student who was to read them to the class in his presence, leading to a few moments of embarrassed mirth when a student read a first-person singular pronoun and had to stop to clarify ‘not I, Rajatbabu’. He was not too fussed with being up-to-date in his teaching: he could still bring himself, in 1990, to comment acidly on the historic tragedy that had placed Albert Soboul, ‘a card-carrying Communist’, in the Chair for the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne in the 1960s. Recent historiography had to be left to other people to teach; his job was to bring the narrative to life.
Rajat babu believed firmly that the importance of a secular education was what bound him, a lifelong anti-communist, to his communist or socialist colleagues and students, and in the last analysis to a world-view that was conductive to a good national politics. This grounding principle aided him in resisting the cultural relativism and epistemological uncertainties being peddled by post-colonialists in their early and middle years: he said that this was, in the face of the rise of Hindutva and anti-rational forms of thinking, ‘scoring same-side goals’. Perhaps in the same spirit, he was suspicious of oral history as arbitrary and untestable against most other source-corpuses, privileging the unreliability of memory and emotion. This injunction to avoid the unverifiable informed a piece of my early research that was eventually published as part of a history of Hindu College and Presidency College, co-authored with Rajat Ray and with Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty; but Rajatbabu’s part in it did not entirely follow his own advice.
Contrary to his self-fashioning as a detached man of letters, Professor Ray was a person of emotion, and of emotional commitment. He claimed not to remember the names of his students; but he cared enough to advise them on how to write examination papers if he was afraid they wouldn’t do well enough, which he couldn’t possibly have done if he hadn’t known who he was talking to. In my own case, I remember a conversation with him about my propensity to write short, cryptic pieces as exam answers: I told him I was unlikely to be able to write more or better under examination conditions. ‘In that case’, he said, ‘write larger’; I followed this piece of wisdom faithfully in all examinations I wrote after that. I was also the beneficiary of his advice on my biography of Nehru (2004), which he read with a And far beyond the call of duty; he saved me from one or two embarrassing errors. Politically, we were seldom on the same page except in moments of what we might want to call a coalitional conjuncture, where we saw a common cause against a greater threat. Our differences did not, for the most part, impede communication, with one or two exceptions. And there are still unfinished conversations between us, which we shall not have the opportunity to finish, or to keep unfinished; I shall miss him.
Professor Rajat Ray’s post-career cameo as administrator and institution-builder saw him a little out of joint with his times and with himself. With his integrity under scrutiny as Upacharya of Visva Bharati, he once communed, in his own account, with the spirit of Rabindranath, meditating outdoors in Bolpur, to examine his own conscience. However peculiar this may have seemed to a sceptical public, those who knew him would have known that this was unlikely to have been entirely cynical or performative. His undefined role in the attempted conversion of his beloved Presidency College into a university ended slightly ignominiously. His former students, at least one of whom, now at his other university, had much reason to believe that his career was deliberately impeded by his old teacher, has nonetheless praised him very generously in public; and many of us would rather forgive Professor Ray his misjudgements than bear him any ill will. The machinations of state-level politics and back-room deals never did suit his temperament.
He is survived by his two daughters, Sucharita and Indira, and his third wife Nupur Chaudhuri. His first wife, the agrarian historian Ratnalekha Ray, died in 1987. His second marriage was to the historian of the Indian Ocean, Lakshmi Subramanian, from whom he was divorced.
(Benjamin Zachariah read history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a senior research fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.)