Thuppahi's Blog

Dipesh Chakrabarty,* courtesy of South Asian History and Culture, vol.  7, no. 1, Jan. 2016

Everything seemed normal about the weekend of April 18-19, 2015 in Chicago until it ended with a very cruel blow to many around the world. Without any warning or early signs that could have prepared anybody for what was to come, it took Chris Bayly – Professor Sir Christopher Alan Bayly (1945-2015) – who was then visiting us at the University of Chicago, away. This tribute is in part a statement of my admiration for Bayly’s evolving academic personality; it is also an attempt to understand the shifting terrains of academic historiography that brought us together. Beginning from very different academic and social positions, following pathways that intersected as often as they diverged, we had come to a point, late in our careers, where I felt privileged enough to think of Bayly, an infinitely more accomplished person than I, as a “friend.” Not a close friend by any means, but we bore each other much good will and warm feelings of friendship. I had a role to play in Bayly becoming a visitor to the University of Chicago. Age-wise, Bayly was my senior by only a few years, but the gap between our careers was substantial. He was already a published scholar when I had just begun to dabble in historical research in Calcutta in the early 1970s. Bayly finished his Oxford DPhil in 1970. I finished my ANU Ph.D in 1983. His academic life spanned some forty-five years. From his first book, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), to the book he was working on till that fateful weekend last April, a history of the world in the twentieth century, it was a long and rich journey that included some significant, and sometimes collaborative, forays into South East Asian and other histories as well. Moved along by the sheer force of his erudition and research, and that of his intelligence that could connect events across very large gaps of geography, I also, like many others in my position, learned to evolve as a reader of Bayly. Continue reading →