Hari Sankar Vasudevan (1952 – 2020). A tribute by Madhavan K. Palat
Hari Sankar Vasudevan
1952 – 2020 [Biblio, April-June 2020, p. 38]
We have lost to
Covid-19 a fine historian of Russia and Europe, a gifted institution builder,
and a person of exceptional warmth and goodness. He took his undergraduate and
doctoral degrees respectively in modern European and Russian history from
Cambridge in the early 1970s, taught at the University of Calcutta, had a stint
at the Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, headed the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAIAS) and the Institute of Development Studies
(IDSK), both in Kolkata, contributed to social science pedagogy and text books
at the NCERT, gave his time and expertise to sundry government committees, and
frequently travelled to the centres of scholarship in the USSR / Russia,
Europe, and America.
In the midst of all these commitments he regularly
attended seminars and delivered lectures at various universities and research
institutes all over India, but especially in West Bengal. However busy he was,
he never failed to find the time and the psychological resources to be a loyal
friend and an exemplary family man to all the three generations, both immediate
and extended. This was a rare combination of talents and virtues, and it
required an insidious and treacherous virus to remove from our midst one of the
best amongst us.
His early research was
on the local self-government institutions, known as the zemstvo, in
the Tver province of late Imperial Russia, the period from the late nineteenth
century up to the Revolutions of 1917. Russian history does not attract
interest in India except for the ideological battlegrounds of Leninism and
Stalinism. The zemstvo was very remote from these famed
obsessions, although they had generated much passion and angst in the years
before 1917. The zemstvo attracted people of a “progressive”
bent of mind, schoolteachers, doctors and nurses, agronomists, statisticians,
geographers, and folklorists, and all those devoted to the ways of life, the
arts and crafts, and the aesthetic of the “people”, usually congruent with the
peasantry.
In Indian history we would recognize them instantly as those engaged
in Gandhian constructive work, Nehruvian community development projects, the
cottage industries so lovingly nurtured by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and
others, literacy campaigns, environmental protection and similar NGO
commitments. They were liberal and socialist, democratic, earnest, and
peaceable, neither revolutionary nor engaged in partisan politics; but the
conservative establishment was venomous, with the emperor, Nicholas II, once
gratuitously dismissing their good work as “small deeds” and their ideals as
“senseless dreams” because it was feared that the zemstvo was
the first step to the “crowning of the edifice”, the parliament at the centre.
Their dedicated work of several decades laid the foundations for Soviet
developmental successes in the 1920s, whether in literacy, health, or
agricultural science. Their thrust toward democracy and autonomy made them
suspect in the eyes of the Soviet establishment also, and they were brusquely
integrated into the centralizing Soviet state and anathematized for their
autonomous NGO style. The subject was vitally important, even if unpromising
and unexciting to the non-specialist. Hari’s thesis was not eventually
published as India was (and is) bereft of academic libraries on Russian (and
European) history even in English, and he was for many years unable to visit
Russia. He did manage however to publish at least articles on this topic in
academic collections; but they are not known in India, though familiar to
specialists in Europe, America, and Russia.
He had a special
reason to choose the province of Tver, just north of Moscow. A merchant of that
town, Afanasii Nikitin by name, travelled to India in the fifteenth century and
left an account of his voyage. As may be expected, the story of his adventures
has been drained to its diplomatic lees by the Indian and Soviet states to
uncover the “ancient ties” between the two countries. On the face of it Nikitin
was not the right one to promote Indo-Soviet attachment any more than Katherine
Mayo could have improved relations between India and the Anglo-American world.
One of his nuggets about India reads thus: “The people are all black and evil
and all their women are shameless; everywhere there is quackery and theft and
deceit and poison in which the well-to-do are mired.” Yet it inspired the
Indo-Soviet collaborative film venture, Pardesi, in 1957. Not
surprisingly, that intrepid merchant attracted Hari also.
In somewhat nineteenth
century fashion, Hari accompanied a team of doughty explorers to travel the
same route as Afanasii Nikitin did, resulting in both a film and a book[1] on the
subject. The film is forgettable and has been duly forgotten, instead of being
the fascinating documentary that it otherwise might have been. The principal
paymaster was the Government of India, and nothing that Hari said or did could
mitigate its passion for propaganda. Instead of medieval archaeology, architecture,
and historical artefacts and analyses of that Russian Marco Polo, all of which
Hari was uniquely well-positioned to present, we are offered such aesthetic
treasures as the Indian embassy’s cultural centres in provincial Russian towns.
The book however told the story the film failed to do, of the historical past
of the various communities en route, their situation today, and the Indian
footprint in these regions. It is both an academic introduction to this
mysterious figure and a travelogue, recounting the experiences of the team as
they traversed the varied cultures of Russia, Orthodox, Islamic, and Buddhist,
with goodly remnants of the communist all the way, and then further through
Turkey and Iran on to India.
While he dipped into
various other subjects, his researches yielded a monograph on Indo-Russian
trade and military co-operation in the decade after 1991.[2] It was a
period of extreme turbulence in Russia and dramatic shifts in India; and while
the Russian military-industrial complex and Indian defence retained their
priority in Indo-Russian relations, the Indian private sector was able to make
an entry into a country that had known nothing but the public sector. It is a
pity that he was not able to follow up with another monograph for the decade up
to the crisis years of 2008 and beyond. However, he pursued his studies of
contemporary affairs, publishing often in the press, and always bringing to
them his depth of historical knowledge and sound mastery of the primary
sources.
He then turned to
building an academic institution, the MAKAIAS, between 2007 and 2011. It was
one of the innumerable somnolent, dysfunctional institutes that dot our
research landscape, poorly conceived, unfocused in its aims, under-funded, and
doling out academic charity, with a remit extending from the Mediterranean to
the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. But he turned it round
into a vibrant body, supported fellows who published monographs on Central
Asia, and organized regular seminars of high quality by bringing together
remarkable scholars from Siberia and Moscow, the Central Asian Republics,
Turkey, and other centres which nurture scholarship on Eurasia.
The languages
of these seminars were both Russian and English; but as a courtesy to those who
did not speak English, he would introduce the seminar in his excellent Russian
before turning to English. (He was equally fluent in French). Several of these
seminars culminated in published proceedings volumes also. He likewise fully
encouraged research and seminars on other parts of Asia also, and he pursued
initiatives on subjects like maritime history and the Bay of Bengal, although
they did not come to fruition. In between, in 2005, he found time to contribute
to the National Curriculum Framework, working closely with Krishna Kumar and
the NCERT to devise syllabi for the teaching of the social sciences and further
to compose text books in his own discipline of history.
His sound academic
judgment and sense of balance served him well in that storm centre of swirling
ideological debates. On retiring from Calcutta University, he became president
of the governing body of the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata in 2018, where
he would have acquitted himself with the same distinction that he had brought
to his tenure at the MAKAIAS. But that was not to be, and the IDSK, the city of
Calcutta, and the rest of the academic community in India have lost so much by
his premature death.
Madhavan K. Palat
[1] Hari Vasudevan, In the Footsteps of Afanasii Nikitin:
Travels through Eurasia and India in the Twenty-First Century (Delhi:
Manohar, 2014).
[2] Hari Vasudevan, Shadows of Substance. Indo-Russian Trade
and Military Technical Cooperation since 1991 (Delhi: Manhohar, 2010).
