Thursday, April 27, 2006
Dr Rajnarayan S Chandavarkar
From the Trinity College Magazine:
23rd April 2006: It is with great sadness that the College reports the sudden and unexpected death today of Dr Raj Chandavarkar, Reader in the History and Politics of South Asia and Fellow of Trinity (1979-1983, 1988-2006).
From the Mumbai Mirror:
The scholar was well known for spending a lot of time understanding the hardships and learning the culture of the people whose lives he deconstructed. “While most scholars would have been happy to source their information from the archives, Raj was interested in cultural forms and the locality.
“He was keen on human interaction -— to know how tamashas evolved. He wanted information on Marathi shairs and poets,” said Neera Adarkar, co-author of One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices.
In the book, Adarkar, along with journalist and activist Meena Menon, documents the lives of mill workers at Girangaon, weaving together oral history and the seldom-documented realm of personal memory.
“The history of Girangaon can, in a sense, be called a history of modern India,” he writes in the preface to One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices.
Both writers recall him as a humble man, seldom willing to stand on a pedestal and indulge in unnecessary sermonising. Author of The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India and Imperial Power and Popular Politics, Chandavarkar is survived by his wife, Jennifer, who is also a scholar.
On a personal note:
It is difficult to put into words how much inspiration I drew from Dr Chandavarkar. Sitting in the idyllic surroundings of the seminar room overlooking the Cam, at the Centre of South Asian Studies, each class of his that I attended made my mind race and I felt a surge of excitement about re-discovering the Sociology and Politics of South Asia as if for the first time.
He was one of those rare teachers who had the ability to convey the larger picture of the most complex reality merely by demonstrating the first principles of it. Everything else followed, 'a harmony of mathematical precision'.
And of course his brilliantly understated but astonishingly clever sense of humour would lighten the load whenever the class became a bit intense.
I have felt and always will feel privileged that he took an immense interest in my work, and helped me see the power of political economy analysis. All that went before pales compared to what followed.
Sir, you will be missed. And remembered with gratitude for raising the pitch of an intellectual journey.
23rd April 2006: It is with great sadness that the College reports the sudden and unexpected death today of Dr Raj Chandavarkar, Reader in the History and Politics of South Asia and Fellow of Trinity (1979-1983, 1988-2006).
From the Mumbai Mirror:
Even as Mumbai ponders the future of mill lands and debates the treatment meted out to mill workers, the city’s foremost authority on the subject, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, died of a heart attack in the United States.
Chandavarkar, a noted sociologist and Cambridge scholar, contributed immensely to the survey of issues in Indian labour history and put into perspective the peculiarities of the Indian working class.
The scholar was well known for spending a lot of time understanding the hardships and learning the culture of the people whose lives he deconstructed. “While most scholars would have been happy to source their information from the archives, Raj was interested in cultural forms and the locality.
“He was keen on human interaction -— to know how tamashas evolved. He wanted information on Marathi shairs and poets,” said Neera Adarkar, co-author of One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices.
In the book, Adarkar, along with journalist and activist Meena Menon, documents the lives of mill workers at Girangaon, weaving together oral history and the seldom-documented realm of personal memory.
“The history of Girangaon can, in a sense, be called a history of modern India,” he writes in the preface to One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices.
Both writers recall him as a humble man, seldom willing to stand on a pedestal and indulge in unnecessary sermonising. Author of The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India and Imperial Power and Popular Politics, Chandavarkar is survived by his wife, Jennifer, who is also a scholar.
On a personal note:
It is difficult to put into words how much inspiration I drew from Dr Chandavarkar. Sitting in the idyllic surroundings of the seminar room overlooking the Cam, at the Centre of South Asian Studies, each class of his that I attended made my mind race and I felt a surge of excitement about re-discovering the Sociology and Politics of South Asia as if for the first time.
He was one of those rare teachers who had the ability to convey the larger picture of the most complex reality merely by demonstrating the first principles of it. Everything else followed, 'a harmony of mathematical precision'.
And of course his brilliantly understated but astonishingly clever sense of humour would lighten the load whenever the class became a bit intense.
I have felt and always will feel privileged that he took an immense interest in my work, and helped me see the power of political economy analysis. All that went before pales compared to what followed.
Sir, you will be missed. And remembered with gratitude for raising the pitch of an intellectual journey.
# posted by Narayan Lakshman @ 11:24 AM 
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