Life and Career of Dr. Biswamoy Pati, 1956-2017

H-Asia Life and Career of Dr. Biswamoy Pati, 1956-2017

Discussion published by Sumit Guha on Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Ravindran Gopinath, Professor in the Department of History, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi has kindly permitted me to share this memorial of the life and work of the Indian historian, Dr. Biswamoy Pati.

Sumit Guha

University of Texas-Austin

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Dr Biswamoy Pati (1956-2017)

Biswamoy Pati passed away on 24 June 2017 at a hospital near Delhi after undergoing a routine surgical investigation. His most untimely death has come as a great shock to his friends, colleagues, students and the community of historians both in India and elsewhere.

Biswamoy Pati grew up in Cuttack in the state of Odisha and came to Delhi in 1973, enrolling for a History degree in Ramjas College. Since then Pati was associated with the Delhi university as a student, researcher and teacher. Pati’s M.Phil. and Ph.D. research on peasants, tribals and the national movement in Orissa was supervised by Prof. Sumit Sarkar.

In 1982, he joined Sri Venkateswara College as a Lecturer. After teaching in Venkateswara College for twenty-seven years, in 2009 he moved to the History Department of the University of Delhi. Biswamoy married his colleague, Indrani Sen, a teacher of English literature in the early eighties.

Pati’s entire adult life centred around teaching, research, publishing and most importantly mentoring students, researchers and young faculty. Biswamoy Pati who used to describe himself as a social historian was a prolific writer. He wrote on a wide range of themes and topics which included social histories of Orissa, health and medicine, biographies, princely states, environment and journalistic commentaries on contemporary developments and book reviews. Given the very wide range of his very many published pieces, this short notice will not be able to comment on his many individual contributions.

Pati’s initial research on the social history of the national movement in Orissa should be located in the sharply divided and contested terrain of modern Indian history writing of the 1980s. The simple Cambridge model for interpreting Indian nationalism did not find many takers in the country and the leading Indian historians of that time were all inspired (to varying extents) by Marxist politics and Marxist conceptions of historical development. However, that did not prevent sharp disagreements. In modern Indian political history at that time, there was Bipan Chandra arguing a nationalist interpretation of India’s freedom struggle, that was largely appreciative and uncritical of the Congress while Sumit Sarkar on the other hand, emphasized the internal contradictions and the

Most radical young historians in Delhi at that time, Pati included, tended to agree more with Sarkar’s position. It is in such an intellectual context that Pati decided to research the social history of the participation of peasants and tribals in the national movement in colonial Orissa with Sarkar as his research guide. With time, he widened his range of research interests beyond the participation of different marginalized social groups in the national struggle, but these new themes were always related to the history and politics of Orissa. In 1999 Pati along with Sahu and Nanda collaborated with Herman Kulke in the second phase of the prestigious Orissa Research Project. Pati’s enduring research interest in Orissa is evidenced by around 18 scholarly articles, commentaries and two monographs.

Pati was an enthusiastic editor of volumes with a gift for bringing together contributors from across the country and the world. In his many edited volumes Pati’s own contributions always dealt with Orissa.

Beginning with an edited volume on India between 1940 and 1944 in 1998 he brought together festschriften for Sumit Sarkar (Issues in Modern Indian History: For Sumit Sarkar) and Parthasarathi Gupta (Negotiating India’s Past: Essays in Memory of Professor Partha Sarathy Gupta). In 2007 Pati with Waltraud Ernst published a collection of essays entitled, India's Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism. He then went on to edit with Mark Harrison a pioneering volume of essays on the history of health and medicine (The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India). Two important collections of articles to mark the 150th anniversary of the Revolt of 1857 were edited by Pati. It may be noted that he also forayed into historical biographies with articles on Aruna Asaf Ali and an edited volume on Tilak.

Pati’s core area of research was the social history of Orissa. Locating himself firmly between conventional political history and an autonomous subaltern, Pati’s study of Orissa’s peasant revolts, Indian princes, small pox, tribal communities and religious conversions were informed by structures of imperial exploitation mediated by local and regional “feudal” collaborators. These detailed studies of colonial Orissa, for me, constitute Biswamoy Pati’s crucial contribution to the corpus of scholarship on modern Indian history. One work that encapsulates Pati’s research on Orissa is his bookSouth Asia from the margins: Echoes of Orissa, 1800-2000 (Manchester University, Press, 2012).

With the pressure to publish, mounting administrative duties and routine assessment, academics today find themselves hard pressed for time. Despite this, Pati was very generous with his time in mentoring students and young researchers and constantly prodded his friends to publish. His interaction with students was not limited to academics. A quintessential teacher, throughout his career, Pati took his class room teaching and students very seriously. He was always available to sympathetically listen to problems of students and friends. Though not very comfortable with Hindi, he was very popular with his non-English speaking students, always available to help them with their problems- both academic and personal.

Biswamoy published most of what he had written or presented at conferences and seminars (a select

Citation: Sumit Guha. Life and Career of Dr. Biswamoy Pati, 1956-2017. H-Asia. 07-06-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/discussions/185791/life-and-career-dr-biswamoy-pati-1956-2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Asia list is given below). Perhaps it was this passion for publishing that explains his longstanding association with the publishing world- he was the Book Review Editor ofSocial Scientist for more than two decades and the series editor for two important publishing houses in India.

To conclude, Pati was not an academic who only researched and published. As a teacher in Delhi University he was an active supporter of Left teacher politics and a member of the Communist Party. Politics for him, as he used to tell his friends, had to extend beyond party politics. Pati’s choice of historical subjects, his position in the debates on Indian historiography and most importantly the way he related to the people around him were informed by his emancipatory politics.

I have been informed that a memorial meeting will be held at the Department of History, University of Delhi on 21 July 2017 at 11:00 a.m.

A Select Bibliography of Biswamoy Pati’s Writings

Monographs

Biswamoy Pati, Resisting Domination: Peasants, Tribals and the National Movement in Orissa, 1920 1950, Manohar, New Delhi, 1993*

Biswamoy Pati, Identity, Hegemony, Resistance: Towards a Social History of Conversions in Orissa, 1800-2000 (Three Essays Collective, New Delhi, 2003), German Reprint, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbucken, 2011.*

Biswamoy Pati, South Asia from the margins: Echoes of Orissa, 1800-2000, Manchester University, Press, 2012.

Edited Volumes

Biswamoy Pati, Ed. Turbulent Times: India, 1940 – 44, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1998.

Biswamoy Pati, Ed. Issues in Modern Indian History: For Sumit Sarkar, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 2000.

Biswamoy Pati, Situating Social History: Orissa,1800 –1997, Orient Longman, New Delhi. 2001

Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison, Eds. Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India, Orient Longman, New Delhi (HB 2001; reprinted – PB, in 2006).

Biswamoy Pati, Bhairabi Sahu and T.K.Venkatasubramanian Eds. Negotiating India’s Past: Essays in Memory of Professor Partha Sarathi Gupta, Tulika, New Delhi, 2003

Shakti Kak and Biswamoy Pati Eds. Exploring Gender Equations: Colonial and Post-Colonial India, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi, 2005

Biswamoy Pati Ed. The 1857 Rebellion: Debates in Indian History and Society, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007

Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, Eds.India's Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism (Routledge, U.K. 2007), Indian Reprint, Primus Books, 2010.

Biswamoy Pati Ed. The Great Rebellion of 1857: Transgressions, Contests and Diversities, Routledge U.K. 2010.

Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison Ed. The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India, (Routledge, U.K. 2009), Indian Reprint, Primus Books, New Delhi, 2011.

Biswamoy Pati, Ed. Balgangadhar Tilak: Popular Readings, (Primus Books, Delhi, 2011).

Biswamoy Pati Ed. Adivasis in Colonial India: Survival, Resistance and Negotiation (Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi, 2011)