To the extent that an academic field such as history can still claim to be a community of scholars, it is held together by persons such as Professor Hari Sankar Vasudevan, known as ‘Hari’ or ‘HSV’ to colleagues and students, who died early Sunday aged 68 from complications related to the Covid-19 virus.
The details of a rich and varied career are in the public domain: a career spent at Calcutta University from 1978 with a professorship from 1999; secondments to other universities such as Jamia Milia University in Delhi, directorships of institutions such as the Maulana Azad Institute for Asian Studies, or the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata; visiting fellowships; important roles in drafting textbooks for national curricula, and a membership, prior to the saffron takeover, of the Indian Council for Historical Research. These details can be read elsewhere, and they do him less than justice.
Hari Vasudevan was a European intellectual out of place, in the best sense of that assessment – something that put him out of joint with the postcolonial sensibilities of our own times. His academic training was in Cambridge, where he spent the years from his BA to his PhD, completed (in 1977, on Russian provincial politics in Tver from 1897 to 1900) under Norman Stone, apologist for the Turkish state on the Armenian genocide, and also sometime history teacher to a Hungarian called Victor Orbàn, and for whom Hari himself wrote an obituary not too long ago. Hari’s obituary of Stone reflected on posthumous reputations, and particularly on posthumous character assassinations: Professor Richard Evans’ on Stone himself, and Stone on EH Carr many years before.
Hari was too kind a man to take sides on this, even as not doing so made him look perilously close to another unpleasant Cambridge character, Orlando Figes, fellow Stone supervisee (though a proper character assassination of Figes might well have to wait till his death). Hari ironically commented that Stone “had forced his adversaries to resort to his own instruments. They had used an obituary for behaviour for which they had indicted him.” It is tempting to imagine Hari reflecting on the construction of his own posthumous reputation, making an editorial interjection to plead for more nuance, less polemics, and an attention to detail.
Hari Vasudevan was a brilliant communicator and an inspiring teacher. I was among his students when we read Russian history together around the time of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the demise of the Soviet Union. As a non-communist who was never an anti-communist, his was a voice that was trusted by many of us: resolutely non-polemical, dry, and measured, Hari made sense of history and of contemporary events with ease; his Russian was fluent, and over the years he had acquired a more than adequate knowledge of French and German. Those of us who had the good fortune to be present to listen to him make sense of the failed coup that brought Boris Yeltsin to power in 1992 (I still have a recording of that lecture on two old cassette tapes) will not forget the clarity and humour with which he analysed the situation.
It was always to be regretted that there were not more publications that flowed from his pen. Hari Vasudevan did not publish his PhD. His articles are typically exercises in careful synthesis, such as his review article on late imperial Russian land tenure from 1988 – a reasonably dry subject that he was able to bring to life when he taught us, even persuading me to write a long article on the decline of the aristocracy (or not) in Britain, Germany and Russia – or his more recent overview article on the origins and development of the communist movement in India in the Cambridge History of Communism. His books were published late in his career, on subjects less than central to his major intellectual concerns. It was not then, nor is it now, easy to have a research career in India if one worked on things ‘foreign’; and Professor Vasudevan’s linguistic abilities started to turn him, somewhat inadvertently, into an expert on foreign relations, Indo-Russian trade, and diplomatic exchange.
For all the books he did not write, though, he probably inspired a few dozen that others wrote. One of his friends, a South Asianist, was widely reputed to have hugely benefitted from Hari’s reworking of his own PhD; when asked about this, Hari would reply, ‘I never wrote any of it’ with an ever-so-slight emphasis on the ‘wrote’. More legitimately, he was, for those who were his students or colleagues, a great co-thinker and a reader of the utmost intellectual generosity; not a few of his passing remarks became sound historical monographs. It was his insistence on building a career for me that led me to his old university, Cambridge; his was also the advice that was in my ears as I left: “you can probably stay in Cambridge all your life if you want to, but just don’t.”
As the former Soviet Union’s archives began to open, Hari Vasudevan was one of the researchers responsible for their exploration, resulting in an important anthology of documents on Indo-Russian and Indo-Soviet exchanges and the early history of the Indian and Soviet communist movements, and a guide to archival sources that were then opening up. At the time of their first publication in 1999, Hari had commented that the Indian delegation had not had the money to do what the American universities were doing: in effect, plundering the archives for material they would take back to US universities and use to enhance the ‘I-told-you-so’ Cold War victors’ histories that would start to appear in the early 2000s. I started teaching full-time at a British university about that time, and I remembered his words vividly as these histories started to appear in mass production, authored by various Cold Warriors.
Towards the later part of his career, Hari Vasudevan was involved to a far greater extent than he himself would have liked in institutions and institution-building, which inevitably led him into various compromises with power, such that many of us could feel upset or betrayed by a man who had taught us so much about academic integrity. Ever gracious and self-effacing, Hari was also able to amend his views or apologise if he felt in retrospect that his judgement had been wrong. This was a trait that allowed for little bitterness in the aftermath of disputes that otherwise would have left a longer trace. Our last meeting was in October last year at the house of Subhas Ranjan Chakarborty and Uttara Chakraborty; we had no idea it was to be our last.
(The writer read history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is a researcher at the University of Trier, Germany.)