OBITUARY

Christopher Bayly 
(1945-2015)

The death of Sir Christopher Alan Bayly - Chris to all those of us who knew him - is difficult to accept. He was a month short of his 70th birthday when he died suddenly in Chicago on April 19. He was in Delhi in March to speak about Nehru and his biographer, Sarvepalli Gopal. He seemed then to be in fine form and full of intellectual energy. Who knew then that death would swoop in on him without warning?

Bayly came to study the history of India through various intellectual influences. He was brought up, as he was to later write, "in the twee and conservative Tunbridge Wells of the 1950s and 1960s", and came to Balliol College in Oxford from a grammar school on a scholarship in the early 1960s. In Balliol, an important intellectual figure was Christopher Hill, and some of his students - Keith Thomas being the most notable - were moving to write a more anthropologically informed social history. Bayly's first interest was in Soviet Russia, and he began to learn Russian. A trip to India and the influence of Jack Gallagher changed all this. Gallagher was then the Beit Professor of Commonwealth and Imperial History in Oxford (he called it his "Siberian exile", for him any place away from Trinity Cambridge was exile) and he prevailed upon Bayly to study the special subject on Warren Hastings and Bengal then being taught by Lucy Sutherland and Ashin Das Gupta. While Sutherland's emphasis à la Lewis Namier on factionalism in British parliament did not interest Bayly, Das Gupta's and Gallagher's work held out the hope that Indian history had other, more attractive fields of study. He was also drawn at this stage by the insights of Richard Cobb into late 18th century French history. Bayly's research interests shifted to India. It is worth recording that Gallagher was very fond of saying that Bayly was the best student he ever had in Oxford and in Cambridge.

Bayly began his research in St Antony's College with Sarvepalli Gopal, who guided him to do a local study of the background to Indian nationalism in the city of Allahabad. A revised version of this Oxford DPhil thesis became Bayly's first book, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920, that Oxford published in 1975. In the historiographical context of the 1970s, this was an important book. Bayly moved away from the study of caste-based factions that some of Gallagher's disciples had chosen to explore and looked instead at the "politics of the notables" in Allahabad, the Congress-leaning publicists in the town. Bayly also refused to be lured by the idea that Indian nationalism was one unified movement that lumped one and all in its flood tide. He analysed a more layered phenomenon that could include, in Allahabad, a Hindu conservative like Madan Mohan Malaviya, a westernized modern individual like Jawaharlal Nehru and many other minor figures with different ideological orientations.

The study of Allahabad in the late 19th century opened up for Bayly the subject matter of what became his most influential book, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. In this book, Bayly analysed in great detail how existing pre-British networks of towns, rural markets, mercantile communities moulded the nature of British commercial penetration and political expansion. Colonialism, Bayly seemed to suggest, seeped in and adapted, rather than rupturing. Colonialism established in his analysis what Tapan Raychaudhuri was to call "distorted continuities".

Such views did not go unchallenged, but Bayly's approach also seemed persuasive to many younger scholars. One important feature that emerged from Bayly's subsequent work - and many important books were to follow - was his capacity to read and appreciate the work of historians who differed with his views and perspective. He had the rare gift of engaging with difference and of recognizing the merit and value of the work of other historians. I say this from personal experience, because I don't think he quite agreed with my analysis of the revolt of 1857 in Awadh, but he was deeply appreciative of the work, never dismissive. It was thus always a pleasure to discuss one's work and ideas with him. He was in some ways a historian's historian: he learnt from the work of other historians, and the latter learnt even more from him and his work. He thus made himself something of an institution in modern Indian historiography.

Bayly's later work moved into south east Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War and to the story of Britain's fashioning of the world. If in his early work Bayly had delved deep, in his later work he acquired breadth. By doing this, Bayly was perhaps honouring the remit of the chair he came to hold in Cambridge - the Vere Harmsworth Professorship of Imperial and Naval History.

It is impossible to pigeonhole Bayly and his work. He loved to explore the tensions within Indian society, and in his own intellectual quest he epitomized certain irreconcilable tensions that began with the fact that he was a British historian working on India. He was an old-fashioned liberal who recognized, albeit reluctantly, the value of Marxism in understanding historical change. His work was anchored in facts, but he believed that historical reality is constructed and that debates are critical to the writing of history.

In his quiet and undemonstrative way, Chris Bayly loved to walk on the frontiers of history writing, frontiers that he extended and even opened up.