OBITUARY : Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri

It was just after I had passed my M.A. examination from Aligarh in 1953, that I read Tapan Raychaudhuri’s book that had just been published, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir (Calcutta, 1953). It set for me a model of how a region’s history for a relating short period could be intensively studied. Two years later I was greatly excited when, arriving at Oxford, under a Government of India scholarship, I discovered that the author of that book was at Oxford and had moreover the same supervisor as mine, the kindly and genial Dr C.C. Davies. My friend Barun De introduced me to Tapan Saheb as I henceforth called him; and, as behoved a senior colleague, he took me under his wings. In his autobiography he has very kind words for me, but he does not characteristically mention his own acts of generosity, including the lending of his thesis ‘The Dutch in Coromandel in the Seventeenth Century’, which contained much information on famines and trade in agricultural produce that I was seeking for my own thesis. Just as he had broken new ground in regional history with his first book, he now similarly pioneered the study of Dutch trade with India, on which till then not much work had been done though the Dutch trade at that time dwarfed that of the English East India Company.