Tapan Raychaudhuri (Bengali: তপন রায়চৌধুরী) is an Indian historian specialising in British Indian history, Indian economic history and the History of Bengal.
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He is the second son of Amiya Kumar Raychaudhuri, the Zamindar of Kirtipasha in Barisal, Bengal and a leader of the Congress party there before 1947.[1] His uncle was Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri, Charmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture, University of Calcutta, and a son of the Zamindar of Ponabalia in Bengal. Another uncle of his was the prominent Congress politician, Kiran Shankar Ray, Home Minister of West Bengal from 1947-1948, and the Zamindar of Teota in Bengal.
He studied at Jagabandhu Institution and Ballygunge Government High School, Calcutta and then finally at Barisal Zilla School, Barisal, where he was transferred after his family had to move back to their family seat at Kirtipasha for purposes of rent collection, during a lean period in Bengal's agrarian economy. In the early 1940s he returned to Calcutta to join Scottish Church College for his I.A. and stayed at Duff Hostel, the college's hall of residence. Later he moved to Presidency College to complete his B.A. (Honours) and M.A. in History, with First Class Second in both the examinations. In his B.A. (Hons.) class he was a student of Professor Susobhan Sarkar, who greatly influenced his thought. He completed his first Ph.D. entitled "Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir" at Calcutta University as the last doctoral student of Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the eminent historian of medieval and modern India and himself the son of the Zamindar of Karchamaria in Bengal.
After a few years of teaching at Calcutta University, when he stayed with his uncle, Kiran Shankar Ray's family, at their Calcutta residence on European Asylum Lane, in 1957 he went to Balliol College, Oxford on a Government of West Bengal scholarship to complete his second Ph.D. (D.Phil.) under the supervision of Dr. C.C. Davies entitled "The Dutch in Coromandel, 1605-1690". Davies was then the Reader in Indian History at Oxford University, the post that Raychaudhuri later came to occupy. In the sequel to his Bangalnama he writes that on the first day of his arrival at Balliol, he was befriended by the eminent British Marxist historian, Christopher Hill. Initially, his research did not find favour with his internal evaluators, who stopped him and wanted him to revise the work he had already done on his thesis, in spite of having completed a full doctoral thesis in Calcutta which had already been published as a book, but his own insistence and acceptance of the criticisms eventually helped him complete his thesis.
In his long and illustrious career he has held several important academic posts: he started his career, before leaving for Oxford, as a Lecturer in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, at the University of Calcutta. After his return to India, he was appointed as the Deputy and then Acting-Director of the National Archives of India, New Delhi. Soon after he became Reader and then Professor of History at University of Delhi. Later, he was appointed Professor of Economic History and Director of the Delhi School of Economics under Delhi University, at a time when his colleagues at the Delhi School included Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Sukhomoy Chakravarty, Jagdish Bhagwati and Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri.[2] He was also the Founder-editor of Indian Social and Economic History Review a leading Indian history journal. In 1972 he succeeded Sarvepalli Gopal as the Reader of South Asian History, St. Antony's College, Oxford. In 1991 he was appointed as the Ad Hominem Professor of Indian History and Civilisation, St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is very well known for supervising generations of Indian history students at Oxford. Presently he is Emeritus Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford and was until recently the Editor-in-Chief of Autumn Annual, the scholarly journal published by the Alumni Association of Presidency College, Calcutta.
He has been a Guest Professor at numerous universities: they include the University of California, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Yale University Collegio de Maxico, École pratique des hautes études, University of Sydney and University of Perth and a Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
He has also been a Founding-Member of the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi.
He was active in the national movement in the 1940s. As a college and university student living in Calcutta in that decade, and like other freedom fighters and patriots of his generation, he participated in the Quit India Movement (1942) and was sent to jail for one year along with his father and elder brother. In the initial years of his career he was closely associated with the right wing, given his family background. From the sequel to his Bangalnama it emerges that he was never close to the left-wing history estblishment that had the backing of the Indian National Congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even though he accepted a membership of the ICHR, he soon fell out with the dominant group there and migrated to the United Kingdom where he has remained since. In history he has sought to be identified with the nationalist school, and has supervised generations of Indian scholars working on Indian history of nineteenth and twentieth centuries' India. The political and intellectual orientations of the works completed under his guidance clear demonstrate of the influence of a centre-right historian with clear sympathies for certain segments of the national movement, notably not the Congress. Marginalised political parties opposed to the Congress and led or represented by declining middle class bhadralok interests have mostly been approved off in these works. Since the early 1990s he has, ironically, gravitated towards certain vested interests of the left, especially of the CPI (M) in West Bengal, his home-state. This happened especially after the left made a conscious decision to disassociate itself with communism and adopt a pro-liberalisation policy after 1991. The Padma Bhushan followed in 2007.