Historian and raconteur Raychauduri dies in UK

Born into a landed family in present-day Bangladesh, Tapan Raychauduri, one of top historians of modern South Asia, succumbed to a second cerebral stroke in Oxford, the English university town where he was a professor of Indian history and civilization and Emeritus Fellow, St. Antony's College.

Trained under Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the founder of modern historiography in India, Raychaudhuri earned his laurels early. At 25 he had already pocketed a D.Phil degree from Calcutta University and also published Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir (1953) - a pioneering social history of Bengali society and culture, based on both Persian and Bengali materials.

From 1953 -1957 Raychaudhuri worked on a second D.Phil at Balliol College, Oxford and at the archives of the Dutch East India Company at the Hague, published subsequently as Jan Company in Coromondel, 1605-1690. A pioneering attempt at studying the interrelations between early modern Europen commerce and local politics and regional coastal economies of pre-colonial India, Jan Company firmly established Raychaudhuri as a leading economic historian of the sub-continent.

He was at the Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University from 1959 to 1970, the golden years of that institution which boasted of economists Amartya Sen, K.N. Raj, Sukhomoy Chakravarty and M.N. Srinivas, the father figure of sociology on its faculty. It was from D School that Raychudhuri launched single handedly the quarterly journal Indian Economic and Social History Review in 1962, the leading international journal in this field till the present...