In Memoriam. Premen Addy PhD; June 26, 1938 - January 15, 2020
NB: Premen Addy passed away on January 15, 2020, coincidentally exactly a year after the death of my old friend and comrade Rabindra Ray. He was my kaka - my late father E.J. Simeon's maternal cousin. His father, Kiron Chandra Addy, was my granduncle, whom my father had nicknamed 'Mejo'. He was Principal of St Pauls College Calcutta. His mother Shanti Addy (nee Sinha) was educated in Rangoon (her birthplace) and Calcutta, where she graduated from Victoria Institution. She too, was in the teaching profession for over 30 years.
This is a fine obituary by one of his old friends, and I have little to add to it but personal memories. Between 1970 and 1972 I was in the Naxalite movement, out of touch with my family and a source of grave anxiety to my parents. At the time my father was Principal of La Martineire Boys' School in Calcutta. In December 1971, Premen happened to visit Calcutta to research an essay he was writing - to be published later as 'Politics and Culture in Bengal', in Robin Blackburn's edited volume Explosion in a Sub-continent (1975).
I too was in the city, and stayed in the family home in 28 Beniapuker Road, Mejomama's and Mamima's abode. The Indo-Pak war was in full swing, and a massive geo-political crisis underway, with the US under Nixon on Pakistan's side, along with the Peoples Republic of China; and the Soviet Union ranged on behalf of India and Bangladesh. Troop and naval movements in the Bay of Bangal made the situation especialy dangerous, and Calcutta was the epicentre of the crisis. Our own area was constantly being subjected to police raids, as the Bihari bustee next door was suspected of harboring razakar's from East Pakistan. One one occasion there were armed police right under our house and Premen and I watched from the balcony. We thought they might be after Naxalites - and at one point Premen told me to think of shinning down the drainpipe behind the house to escape.
I was still in the underground, but not on the radar of the Calcutta Police. Unbeknownst to me my father had asked Premen to try and 'talk sense' into me, and over the course of a few days, that is exactly what he did. He was the only one in the family who could do that, as he was literate in Marxism and could engage critically with my Maoist fantasies. He told me about Lin Piao's falling-out with Chairman Mao, about the finer points of the Sino-Soviet dispute, and showed me how the Chinese Communists were nationalists more than communists. He spoke about the Pakistan crisis, and how it was a political and moral disaster for any self-respecting communist to side with the Chinese position on Pakistan. This is the barest description of a very complex, dramatic and dangerous situation.
It took time, but I found myself convinced that Premen was right and Naxalite politics deeply flawed. I decided to drop out of it, and was encouraged by some comrades who had just been released from jail. It was at Premen's instigation that I penned a damning criticism of the Chinese line on Bangladesh, which Premen got published in the Trotskyist journal Red Mole, in London. The following year (April 1972) I joined my parents in Dehra Dun, where my father had taken up the position of Headmaster of the Doon School.
In July 1972 I went to the UK for six months, and Premen (who then lived in a small flat in Formosa Street in London) helped me get my bearings in a strange environment. He introduced me to left-wing political activists and intellectuals such as Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, and gave me an education in global history and politics. A lot more could be said, but this is about him, not me. But for Premen, I would have remained in an untenable and dangerous situation for much longer - and who knows at what cost? I owe him a major debt of gratitude for the impulse to save myself from ideological stupor. My parents loved him deeply and he kept in touch with them throughout his many years in the UK. I remember him calling me from London in May 2007 after my father passed away - and he said just one sentence: "He was a great man."
Thank you Premen, for everything. You will always remain in our hearts.
Rest in peace with all our departed family
Your nephew, Dilip
How Great Thou Art
Dr Premen Addy
Dr Premen Addy, intellectual, historian, author, former editor Asian Voice and columnist passed away in a Kolkata nursing home on the morning of 15th of January 2020. Kolkata is truly defined by its intellectual life and its creativ yearnings and Dr. Premen Addy can be justly deemed one of the many luminaries that gave content to its identity. Kolkata and the wider region had huge impact and produced creative and intellectual giants, from Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. But a true galaxy of unrecognised gems, like the unknown mourned in the bleak lines of Thomas Gray’s, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, also throng the alleys and cafes of the city, not least the memorable café of College Street, its Coffee House. Premen Addy, I hazard was one the last of them, in a city transformed in the past five decades beyond recognition, passing away suddenly following complications after an operation.
see also
Naxalites
should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the
Constitution
This is a fine obituary by one of his old friends, and I have little to add to it but personal memories. Between 1970 and 1972 I was in the Naxalite movement, out of touch with my family and a source of grave anxiety to my parents. At the time my father was Principal of La Martineire Boys' School in Calcutta. In December 1971, Premen happened to visit Calcutta to research an essay he was writing - to be published later as 'Politics and Culture in Bengal', in Robin Blackburn's edited volume Explosion in a Sub-continent (1975).
I too was in the city, and stayed in the family home in 28 Beniapuker Road, Mejomama's and Mamima's abode. The Indo-Pak war was in full swing, and a massive geo-political crisis underway, with the US under Nixon on Pakistan's side, along with the Peoples Republic of China; and the Soviet Union ranged on behalf of India and Bangladesh. Troop and naval movements in the Bay of Bangal made the situation especialy dangerous, and Calcutta was the epicentre of the crisis. Our own area was constantly being subjected to police raids, as the Bihari bustee next door was suspected of harboring razakar's from East Pakistan. One one occasion there were armed police right under our house and Premen and I watched from the balcony. We thought they might be after Naxalites - and at one point Premen told me to think of shinning down the drainpipe behind the house to escape.
I was still in the underground, but not on the radar of the Calcutta Police. Unbeknownst to me my father had asked Premen to try and 'talk sense' into me, and over the course of a few days, that is exactly what he did. He was the only one in the family who could do that, as he was literate in Marxism and could engage critically with my Maoist fantasies. He told me about Lin Piao's falling-out with Chairman Mao, about the finer points of the Sino-Soviet dispute, and showed me how the Chinese Communists were nationalists more than communists. He spoke about the Pakistan crisis, and how it was a political and moral disaster for any self-respecting communist to side with the Chinese position on Pakistan. This is the barest description of a very complex, dramatic and dangerous situation.
It took time, but I found myself convinced that Premen was right and Naxalite politics deeply flawed. I decided to drop out of it, and was encouraged by some comrades who had just been released from jail. It was at Premen's instigation that I penned a damning criticism of the Chinese line on Bangladesh, which Premen got published in the Trotskyist journal Red Mole, in London. The following year (April 1972) I joined my parents in Dehra Dun, where my father had taken up the position of Headmaster of the Doon School.
In July 1972 I went to the UK for six months, and Premen (who then lived in a small flat in Formosa Street in London) helped me get my bearings in a strange environment. He introduced me to left-wing political activists and intellectuals such as Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, and gave me an education in global history and politics. A lot more could be said, but this is about him, not me. But for Premen, I would have remained in an untenable and dangerous situation for much longer - and who knows at what cost? I owe him a major debt of gratitude for the impulse to save myself from ideological stupor. My parents loved him deeply and he kept in touch with them throughout his many years in the UK. I remember him calling me from London in May 2007 after my father passed away - and he said just one sentence: "He was a great man."
Thank you Premen, for everything. You will always remain in our hearts.
Rest in peace with all our departed family
Your nephew, Dilip
How Great Thou Art
Dr Premen Addy
Dr Premen Addy, intellectual, historian, author, former editor Asian Voice and columnist passed away in a Kolkata nursing home on the morning of 15th of January 2020. Kolkata is truly defined by its intellectual life and its creativ yearnings and Dr. Premen Addy can be justly deemed one of the many luminaries that gave content to its identity. Kolkata and the wider region had huge impact and produced creative and intellectual giants, from Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. But a true galaxy of unrecognised gems, like the unknown mourned in the bleak lines of Thomas Gray’s, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, also throng the alleys and cafes of the city, not least the memorable café of College Street, its Coffee House. Premen Addy, I hazard was one the last of them, in a city transformed in the past five decades beyond recognition, passing away suddenly following complications after an operation.
Premen was a one-off,
hugely well-read and possessor of an astounding memory and with the ability to
instantly recall countless historical facts. In endless conversations with him,
I constantly found myself being educated about history and by his formidable
expertise on Russia, its socialist earlier incarnation, China and of course the
United Kingdom and India. He also lightly bore a vast reservoir of knowledge of
literature and poetry, especially admiring V. S. Naipaul among the modern
greats. Those who read his periodic columns in the Calcutta Telegraph, India
Weekly, the Asian Voice and many other publications will have relished his
scholarly analyses of myriad topics, leavened with refined prose and
penetrating insight.
Premen was once
attracted to Trotskyism and engaged with its British house journal, the New
Left Review, where he had published. But he became less convinced of Trotsky’s
historical significance, recognising instead the unparalleled role of Joseph
Stalin in defeating Nazism and his unquestionable political acumen. He never
succumbed to the temptation of Maoism, which decimated a generation of
Kolkata’s best and brightest and inflicted a calamity on the city from which it
never quite recovered. In recent years, Premen accorded approval to India’s
advance under Shri Narendra Modi though he was uneasy about its ideological
direction. His favoured personal friends and acquaintances were great thinkers
and writers like the historian Victor Kiernan and the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
In London, he had
succeeded his redoubtable predecessor, Iqbal Singh, as editor of India Weekly,
writing a searing weekly commentary, as Scrutator, on the misrepresentation and
libel against India in the British media. Few interlocutors survived the
scrutiny of his pen and logic, expressed in prose as eloquent as a precision
scalpel wielded by a surgeon. Although he found the carping criticism of India
in the British media irritating and libellous, he was a great admirer of many
aspects of British society. With his profound knowledge of its literature and
history, he found so much in to admire and worthy of emulation. Dr. Premen Addy
also taught a history course at Kellogg College, Oxford and was hugely popular
with his students who had never been exposed to such in-depth and diverse
knowledge of so many subjects. He was also a visiting fellow at the Centre of
International Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
He retired to Kolkata 2008, surrounded by his prized private library and a
devoted family nearby that assumed responsibility for his mundane daily needs.
Dr. Premen Addy, the
son of the distinguished late Professor K. C. Addy, principal of St. Paul’s
College, Calcutta, studied at Presidency College. He represented it as a keen
debater, also captaining the Presidency cricket team, a sport on which he
continued to write informed comment throughout his life, including the
Sportsworld. He began a history Tripos at Selwyn College, Cambridge University
in 1963. At Cambridge he was a contemporary of renowned economists Professors
Partha Dasgupta and Pranab Bardhan, the latter remaining a lifelong friend. He
wrote his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies and went on to
become India’s leading expert on Tibet, on which he has recently published a
second perceptive comparative historical study. He was carrying on a family
tradition established by his maternal uncle, Mr. Sumol Sinha of the MEA, whom
Prime Minister Nehru came to trust as principal adviser on China after the 1962
debacle. Premen had a soft spot for Jawaharlal Nehru, applauding his
modernising zeal and contrasting him with power-hungry third world dictators.
Premen Addy was a
cosmopolitan renaissance intellectual who lived the life of the mind,
unconcerned with material possessions. He was modest in life-style and dressed
with dowdy self-confidence and spoke incessantly of India’s progress, its
setbacks and sorrows, but always confident of its eventual reprise. Despite his
nominal Christian identity, he was the person asked to write the introduction
to the meaning of Durga puja for the London Committee in its magazine.
Sometimes he would surprise me by quoting a Hindu ‘myth’, with evident
conviction, to explain a contemporary event, underscoring he was nothing if not
learned! Like the philosopher, Bertrand Russell he admired, he was not a
believer, but was nevertheless a deeply religious man.
His home town,
Kolkata,which has suffered so much setback still hosts book fairs where the
impecunious throng in their thousands to spend hard-earned money. It is the
city that celebrates Ho Chi Minh and others from distant lands, recognising a
common humanity of the courageous, and a shabbily-attired anonymous person will
unexpectedly recite Coleridge and one of Kolkata’s own innumerable poets of
romance and despair. It is the city of so many without means or indeed future
who dream and create beauty and also take to violent protest for no good reason
and good reason. Premen Addy, the intellectual combatant, defined Kolkata’s
identity and his passing is a loss to the city in its twilight years that he
lit up with his prodigious learning, knowledge and infinite humanity.
Dr. Gautam Sen
21st January 2020
Professor of international
political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science for
more than two decades
see also
The
Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon
Dilip Simeon: Closing the Circle: On Revolution (Frontier, 2012)
Dilip Simeon: Closing the Circle: On Revolution (Frontier, 2012)
