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PAPIYA GHOSH : IN MEMORIAM
The
tragic death of the historian Papiya Ghosh
marks the demise of a truly extraordinary
scholar, a popular teacher and a dearly
loved friend. The manner of her death also
exposes the rot that lies beneath our boasts
of progress and in our systems of
governance.
BY SUPRIYA ROYCHOWDHURY IN
ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY, JANUARY 13,
2007
Papiya Ghosh, professor of history, Patna
University, died under tragic circumstances
on December 3, 2006. Papiya graduated in
history from the prestigious Patna Womens'
College in 1975. She then studied at the
history department in Delhi University, from
where she received her masters, MPhil and
PhD degrees. She taught for a few years at
the Hindu College in Delhi, and then moved
to the Patna Womens' College. In the early
1990s she joined the postgraduate history
department in Patna University. During these
years she periodically took time off from
teaching to hold two prestigious
fellowships, first at the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, New Delhi, and then at
the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies,
Simla. Papiya had been a Rockerfeller Fellow
in Residence at North Carolina State
University and at the University of Chicago.
She had also been a Fellow of the Indian
Council of Historical Research.
Papiya's research spanned a range that is
astonishing in a context where most research
in the humanities and social sciences has a
tendency to be spatially and temporally
limited. Her doctoral dissertation was on
the Civil Disobedience movement in Bihar,
1930-34. Her subsequent work, in the late
1980s and early 1990s, was focused on
understanding the formation of Bihari Muslim
identity in the context of colonial
politics. As much of the scholarship on
Muslim identity formation has focused on
Muslim majority areas like Punjab and
Bengal, her research on Bihar, where Muslims
were a minority, clearly filled a gap. In
later work she chronicled the multiple
contestations and challenges to the
formation of an exclusivist Muslim League
type identity in Bihar, examining the
politics and ideology of the
Jamiyat-al-ulema-i-hind's broadly composite
nationalism. Papiya's credentials as a
careful historian as also a scholar of
imagination were clearly established by this
work, published in two papers in the
Economic and Social History Review in the
early 1990s.
In later years she focused more and more on
the history, politics and culture of
partition and die south Asian diaspora,
presented in several papers, conference
presentations, and regular contributions to
the journal Refugee Watch. Her book
Partition and the South Asian Diaspora:
Extending the Subcontinent has been recently
published by Routledge (2007). Papiya did
not live to see her book in print, released
in New Delhi a few weeks after she died.
Scholar Extraordinaire
This book, the culmination of years of
meticulous research and writing, is indeed
an intellectual tour de force. Much of the
scholarship on diaspora has looked at 19th
century Indian immigrants to places like
Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam and Jamaica, as
well as 20th century immigration to the US
and Europe. Papiya's work in this book
locates diaspora in the partition
experience, but she also pushes the study
well beyond the 1940s into the 1970s and
1980s. This research connects the study of
two Muhajir formations in East and West
Pakistan, that had their beginnings in the
aftermath of killings of Muslims in Bihar in
late 1946, and then maps, the story of
Bihari Muslims displaced from Bangladesh in
the aftermath of 1971, located in refugee
camps, seeking a temporary base in Bihar,
and ultimately seeking asylum in Pakistan,
some in the US and Europe. The striking
feature of this work is not only that it
extends the conceptual horizon of diaspora
in time and space, but also anchors itself
in the story of a largely ignored and
powerless community.
But the conceptual framework is indeed much
broader than this. Looking at the post-1980s
diasporic experience of Muslims in the US
and Europe, she is able to contest standard
interpretations that speak of a pan Islamic
diaspora as opposed to diasporic Indiahness.
Papiya's work shows that subcontinental
diaspora, in the post-1980s, uses partition
as a reference point not only in instilling
but also in resisting Hindutva. Thus she
reconfigures the interface of nation,
diaspora and region, to use her own words
"even as they reconfigure". Mapping six
decades, and incorporating an astonishing
intellectual sweep, this book awaits much
more substantive review than has been
possible here. Perhaps the most striking
aspect of her work was the understanding of
history as process, highlighting the tension
between choices and patterns, the contingent
and the determined. Her most current areas
of research were contemporary patriarchies,
Ganga-Jamni literature, backward and dalit
politics, Bhojpuri cinema and electoral
music. At the time of her death, she was
completing two volumes on pre- and
post-partition Bihar.
Her work stands testimony to her
scholarship. Of the countless tributes that
have come in after her death, to quote one,
her scholarship was indeed silent but
stupendous. In a discipline that in India is
marked by closed networks, highly
self-conscious and exclusive professional
fraternities, and, at least until recently,
a pronounced Oxbridge/Ivy League bias, the
recognition of her research, when it came,
was on the basis of her work, and her work
alone.
At present the professional/institutional
context in the social sciences in India is
defined to some extent by the
marginali-sation of regional universities
and the concentration of resources,
connectedness, honour and power at the
centre, i e, New Delhi. Papiya had the added
disadvantage of being in a regional
space/university that has long been on the
decline. She developed a somewhat unique
professional persona whereby she straddled
different professional worlds with great
ease. A frequently seen figure at the India
International Centre, New Delhi, and at
national and international conferences, her
professional profile and life placed her
well beyond the boundaries of Patna, while
her research and teaching remained firmly
anchored in the state in which she was born
and where she so tragically lost her life.
As a teacher she indeed surpassed herself.
As many former and present students have
written in the last few weeks, she set for
herself the highest standards in the
classroom, and expected the same of her
students. In an era where research,
projects, funding searches, foreign
travelling have pushed teaching, for most
academics, very much to the back burner,
Papiya maintained an unshakeable commitment
to the classroom, amongst her many
accomplishments.
Papiya, the Friend
Beyond all this, was Papiya, the friend,
with the extraordinary capacity for warmth
that won her a place in the hearts of al
most all whom she met, across all divides. I
met Papiya in Delhi University where I was
doing an MPhil, and she had returned for
some months to complete writing her doctoral
dissertation. This was in 1983. Papiya's
room in the first floor of the South Block,
in the PG women's hostel in Delhi
University, was almost an institutionalised
space for much lively 'adda', before and
after dinner. Some were doing their MA,
others MPhil and PhD. As many in that cohort
would remember, one on one interactions with
her became the basis of many deeply rooted
friendships that were sustained over the
next almost 25 years. After that one year,
we all went our different ways, each in a
space of struggle with career,
relationships, marriage, children, balancing
opposed needs, demands, norms, institutions.
It was life. One could talk to Papiya
always, about anything. She had the uncanny
ability to highlight your flaw or weakness,
briefly, sometimes almost wordlessly,
without being judgmental.
But above all this was indeed her
overwhelming interest in a person, the
capacity to listen, for deep sympathy, which
extended really beyond the individual to her
understanding of the human condition itself.
It was this unusual quality of being able to
negotiate herself between individual
affection and a universal warmth, that made
her ah indispensable anchor in many of our
lives for the last so many years. She had
the capacity to perceive a friend from very
close, and from very far. The large circle
of persons, with whom she connected so
closely, could only have been possible with
that combination of nearness and distance
that she combined so effectively.
The uniqueness of her personality
perhaps-went beyond this, to a rock solid
bed of courage and humour. Her life was
full, with research and teaching, travel and
friendships, family. Beneath all this was
the predictable struggle, with a declining
city administration and a thoughtless
university bureaucracy, sometimes with ill
health, perhaps with occasional loneliness.
But she took every thing on, with a
combination of sardonic humour and a
self-confidence that did not wait for
anyone. Her every day life represented an
enviable narrative in independence.
One remembers her joyous appreciation of
things beautiful, be it a moving film, an
Urdu poem, a song or a painting, of good
food and wine, her sudden, hearty laugh, and
the softness of her smile that started from
her eyes. Again, in the many tributes that
have come in since her death, so many have
remembered her smile. Soon after her death,
as her photograph was flashed across the
country in the television news channels,
that smile came across to her friends in a
bizarre, last, farewell.
Papiya Ghosh was killed by intruders, in her
sprawling home, on the night of December 3,
2006, along with Malathi, the domestic help
who had stayed with the family for over five
decades. So why was she killed, this woman
of countless friends? The highly
premeditated nature of the crime, as also
its brutal and efficient execution, raise
many disturbing hypotheses about its source.
Of course, this is hardly the occasion to
ponder on the universal nature of crime. One
can only engage with the specificity of this
situation, where a woman who represented
achievement and affluence, and above all
exuded independence, and perhaps a certain
defiance, lived alone. The broader situation
of course is that of a deep rot in a
governance system that has lost all
justifiable claim to govern, except that
which stems from the inertia of citizens.
The physical vulnerability of women
-regardless of class or other defining
factors - is once again underlined by the
type of political institutional context that
frames our lives. The link between the
personal and the political, so ably argued
in Papiya's research, was so tragically
acted out in her own life. This politics is
not only that of a failing state, but also
perhaps of an emerging political economy
that not only generates greed but
legitimises it in all forms.
As our stunned anguish slowly gives way to
anger, frustration and a variety of
emotions, perhaps it is that link between
the personal and the political that we again
have to make, as members of the academic
community. Again, to quote one of the many
touching messages that have come in through
the internet, mourning her loss, "for all
the afternoons we spent together talking of
so many things, Papiya, this was no way for
you to go". But, the writer goes on to say,
that perhaps it was, perhaps this is one way
in which Papiya would galvanise us into
action. .
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