Christopher Alan Bayly: Tribute to a teacher

It was on a cold, windy November morning that I had walked over to St Catharine’s College in Cambridge for the first time: To inform my PhD supervisor that I had arrived from India and to request a meeting with him. “Can I leave this note for Dr Christopher Bayly, please,” I had asked a portly gentleman at the Porters’ Lodge. I recall receiving a severe stare: "There’s no one called ‘Dr Bayly’ here. There’s a ‘Professor Bayly,’ though."

That was my first lesson in Cambridge: Never call a "professor" a "Dr". A professor is a scholar while a "Dr" a junior academic. But within weeks, came the surprise second lesson: "Professor Bayly" refused to be called a "professor". “You must call me Chris,” he insisted, upturning centuries of academic snobbery with an easy smile.

Professor Sir Christopher Alan Bayly, who died aged 70 on April 19, was not only the best-known historian of the British empire, he was also one of the greatest historians of India. And with his death Cambridge University has lost a landmark: A first-floor room with a raft of Tudor windows set against the red brick walls of St Catharine’s College. No touristy landmark this: Not a place where, say, Newton first calculated the speed of sound, Byron stayed with his pet bear or Virginia Woolf swam naked in moonlight. But for the 815-year-old university that measures its age in terms of genius, originality and influence, this was where generations of students, teachers and scholars of history came to learn, unlearn and relearn from a historian with matchless ability to look into the past.

From his window in "Catz" (as he always referred to St Catharine’s), he had a Don’s eye-view of the streaming humanity from across the world that eddied around the college — from river Cam to Trumpington Street — like an endless flood: students, fellows, teachers, visiting scholars, camera-toting tourists and anyone with any business in Cambridge. Inside his spacious chamber, it was all about India: East India Company paintings and landscapes, Mughal miniatures and prints, antique swords and carpets — handpicked during his numerous field trips to India since the 1960s — amidst a sea of notes, books, journals and old newspapers. Here he held his long one-on-one tutorials, teaching his students the art and craft of studying the past to understand the present and anticipate the future.

For Indian students of modern history, no master’s course was complete without Bayly’s books. We were precariously caught between the old-world colonial scholars who looked at Indian society as "irrational" and nationalist historians who found the “golden era of the Hindu civilisation” to be the key to our history. There was, of course, the boredom of straightjacketed Marxist "mode of production". The new subaltern historiography was thrilling: But why did it read history only in moments of conflict? Weren’t moments of peace in everyday life worthy of history, we wondered.

In contrast, Bayly’s books, with their statistically-robust, empirical take on Indian history, came as a breath of fresh air. Instead of viceroys, kings or peasants, they focused on hectic networks of communication, aspirations, negotiations and politics across towns, bazaars and merchant communities. And they used varied historical tools: from archives to newspapers, pothis of Varanasi pundits to hundi receipts of business families. It was history that was exciting, surprising and such a pleasure to read. Even the staunchest Left wing professor at Jadavpur University, Sipra Sarkar, would grudgingly tell us: “You may not agree with him but you can never ignore such robust history”.

As a teacher, he was gentle, ever-polite, yet extraordinarily exacting and demanding. In my first week, I remember, he had asked me to read up 25 books and meet him to discuss those within a week. I could manage just seven. “The first thing you have to pick up is how to read fast, as fast as you can,” he had said. “That’s a technique undergraduate students learn here.” That relentless rigour manifested not just during weekly tutorials but every day, as he would pop up suddenly — at the University Library or at India Office Library in London — always interested, always encouraging, always ready to answer any question you may have. For all his effort, he had built up the formidable reputation of having no student of his ever failing a PhD.

“Who do you write for?” I had asked him once. “Most of the time I feel as if I am orating into a void,” he had said with typical self-deprecating humour. And, then, after a long pause: “I suppose, I write for other historians”. His absence will certainly be felt by his peer group. But he will be remembered most by those whose lives he had touched and shaped in countless ways as a teacher.