The World in Our Time: A Memoir By Tapan Raychaudhuri, HarperCollins, Rs 399

I should begin this review with a statement of interest. The author of the book, Tapan Raychaudhuri, supervised my Oxford D.Phil thesis and I am also mentioned in the book, albeit in passing. I am also fortunate to be the recipient of the affection of both Tapan Raychaudhuri and his wife, Hasi. These facts do impede my making an objective assessment of this memoir.

Fortunately, this hurdle isn’t insuperable because of the nature of this book, especially of its first part. In this section, which occupies nearly 200 pages, Raychaudhuri recounts his childhood and his growing up years in Barisal in what was then East Bengal. His family were zamindars born under the shadow of the Permanent Settlement. This shouldn’t give the impression that Raychaudhuri was born in the lap of luxury. Of course, compared to the peasants around his home he was affluent, but his family was certainly not rich enough to indulge in the kind of ostentation and conspicuous consumption that marked the lives of some zamindari families. Moreover, the changing agrarian situation of the 1930s and 1940s and the Partition of 1947 brought about a sharp decline in the family’s standard of living.

Raychaudhuri’s description of this period becomes a significant documentation of the life and condition of a particular class in rural East Bengal — significant because the recounting is done through the eyes of a historian. He writes, “Being zamindar meant being treated as royalty by the poor peasant farmers who were our tenants: the relevant English/Hindi word is ryot, but in Bengali these hapless people were called praja which means subjects. When we encountered the ryots, they did treat us as their lords and masters.’’ Raychaudhuri comments that it was impossible to be impervious to being considered the lord of so many people. Deference was almost taken for granted.

These observations demand comparison with the recollections of another Bengali historian, a few years Raychaudhuri’s senior and his friend, Ranajit Guha. Explaining how he came to write his famous book on the idea of the Permanent Settlement, Guha remembered how, when he was growing up in Barisal in a landlord family, the two common words he heard were, manib (master) and praja. He recalled how, in the process of growing up, he realized that the two words were signs of a relationship of power whose meaning and importance dawned on him as he began to study as a radical young student in Calcutta in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This led him to the Permanent Settlement and the ideas that formed it. Raychaudhuri is too good a historian not to have recognized the true significance of the deference he encountered in the rural world of Barisal. He does not articulate how this informed his historical consciousness.

This brings me to my only grouse against this delightful book. It tells me little or nothing about the author’s intellectual engagements. In the world of Indian history, Raychaudhuri is in some ways a pioneer. His first book, written as early as 1953, was a study of social history of Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir. At that time no one worked on social history: Raychaudhuri opened up the field and in the 1960s enriched the book with a new introduction that drew on social anthropology and the new kind of social history being practised by Asa Briggs and Eric Hobsbawm. Raychaudhuri was also a pioneer in the field of trade history. His second book was based on the archives of the Dutch East India Company. He taught economic history at the Delhi School of Economics and then, while he was at Oxford, he shifted his interests to the history of ideas and perceptions.

Nowhere in the memoirs is the reader given any clue about first, what sustained these interests, and second, how and why the shifts took place. The memoir does not convey the sense of intellectual excitement and quest that must have been integral to Raychaudhuri’s mental world and its development.

Any memoir is constituted by an interaction between the author’s persona and the wider context in which the ego is situated. Raychaudhuri, because he is a historian, writes movingly about the world around him. But he underplays, perhaps deliberately, his own intellectual development, first as an outstanding student and then as a historian who was an inspiration to many of his junior contemporaries and students.

As a memoir, this left me wanting more; but I was charmed by the author’s understated humour, his unerring eye for the telling detail and anecdote and his deep humanity.