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.

Advertisement

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’.

Advertisement

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 Statesman