Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1953–2006)

The death of Raj Chandavarkar at a preposterously early age robs social history of one of its most distinctive, and enigmatic, voices. During his all-too-brief career, Raj's writings made a major impact on how the history of his native India should be understood, drawing attention to previously-neglected areas of experience among industrial workers, urban dwellers, 'criminal' classes, the sick and the poor. But his work transcended its immediate context to raise profound questions about the nature of supposedly-universal processes of capitalism, industrialization and modern state formation whenever they were shifted out of their originary European locations. His range was enormous and his intervention in multiple debates invariably incisive.

Yet how he ever came to spend most of his life researching and teaching at Cambridge University was always a source of mystery to him. Plucked by dint of a scholarship out of a warm and vibrant neighbourhood in Mumbai and translated to the cold austerity of an English public school, he learned early to question his relationship with authority and his surroundings. The questioning continued throughout his career and he was never the stereotypical 'Cambridge don' (if such exists) nor the most conventional of colleagues. But the awards and accolades continued to flow: a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, a starred First in Tripos, a Research and then a Teaching Fellowship at Trinity College. However, it was entirely in keeping with Raj's querulous persona that the University post which he held for so long should formally have been in the History of Islam – one of the few subjects connected to South Asia about which he freely conceded he knew next-to-nothing. It was also in keeping that he should have regarded the trappings of his outstanding academic career as mere baubles. For him, the greatest experience of his life was his marriage to his fellow social historian, Jennifer Davis, whom he sadly leaves behind. And the greatest moment of his career came when he was offered a trial for Middlesex. Cricket was his passion, which he played until the day that the finger of fate was raised against him. Inside, he liked to harbour the idea that he was not really a leading academic at one of the world's most prestigious universities, but rather the finest cricketer that India never had.

However, instead, the history of India gained one of its most original talents. When he began research in the late 1970s it was inevitable that he should be drawn not only back towards Mumbai, but also towards areas of the subject which previously had been neglected. For the first generation after Independence, India's history remained dominated by the struggle between imperialism and nationalism, which had so recently reached its conclusion. But this tended to keep it focused on the elite levels of politics, on leaders and statesmen, at the expense of wider human experiences and deeper social processes. Also, many of the heroic promises on which the Indian nation had come to 'freedom' appeared to have been broken or never to have been meaningful in the first place. Raj was part of that second generation of historians of post-colonial India who revolted against its received historiography and sought new approaches to understanding its experience of modernity; a generation which also included the Subaltern Studies collective.

Raj was never very sympathetic to the Subaltern Studies enterprise, which he saw largely as transferring the heroism of 'the freedom struggle' from the elite to the people without sufficiently questioning the category of 'freedom' itself. Rather, he was attracted to the 'new' social history then developing around figures such as E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones, which offered both to broaden the definition of what was meant by politics and to resituate 'the lower orders' of society in a deeper understanding of their various contexts – cultural, economic, institutional. Thus began his central interest in the Mumbai industrial 'working class', which continued in one way or another throughout his career and to which he kept returning after various sojourns studying other issues and themes. He gave his...