OBITUARY : Bipan Chandra (1928–2014)

Professor Bipan Chandra, Emeritus Professor of the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who passed away on 30 August, was an outstanding historian, a major figure in the country’s intellectual life, and an indomitable fighter in the cause of secular anti-imperialism.

Born in Kangra in pre-independence Punjab (now in HimachaPradesh), he had his education in Forman Christian College, Lahore, and later at Stanford University, California. Forced to leave Lahore during the Partition, he was, like many sensitive intellectuals of his generation, drawn to Marxism, which made him give up his pursuit of an Engineering degree, in favour of a study of Economics and History. While at Stanford, he attended the lectures of Paul Baran, the renowned Marxist economist and author of The Political Economy of Growth – a pioneering Marxist analysis of the genesis of ‘underdevelopment’. He also came into contact there with Communist activists. Because of his Communist associations he was forced to leave the United States, which was then gripped by the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch-hunt.