30 Facts About Rajnarayan Chandavarkar

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar was a reader in the history and politics of South Asia and fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar worked toward defining a new interdisciplinary approach for understanding processes of urbanisation, the nexus between the city and the countryside, and the evolution of industrial capitalism.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's insights prompted research on a wide range of topics in South Asian social history and politics.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar grew up in Bombay before going to England for his advanced education.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar completed the final years of his schooling at Lancing College in West Sussex.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar did his undergraduate studies at Gonville and Caius College from 1973 to 1976, where he was deeply influenced by Gareth Stedman Jones, his undergraduate supervisor.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar went on to finish his PhD under the direction of Anil Seal at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar became a fellow at Trinity in 1979, and remained associated with the college until his death.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar has served as the director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Cambridge since 2001.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar interrogated his records, deconstructed evidence critically, and sought to unravel the wider social and political processes his data revealed.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar thus moved far beyond the narrow confinement of a straightforward "empiricism".

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar had been attending a conference at nearby Dartmouth College.

The origins of capitalism, in Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's view, lay not just in the initiatives of a few captains of industry but in a host of social forces that all played an active part in shaping the new economic structures of late colonial Mumbai.

Rather than see the development of large-scale production as a simple matter of technological diffusion from Europe to India or as evidence of the triumph of entrepreneurial pioneers, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar placed this process squarely within a historical context conditioned by imperialism, rural poverty, insecure markets, and the agency of workers.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar argued that the formation of factories was often a risk-minimizing effort by almost marginal figures in the nineteenth century economy, men who were in positions of subordination to foreign businessmen in the export trades, who faced constant difficulties in mobilising capital, and who rushed around from one form of investment to another in hopes of making quick profits in this uncertain business climate.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar especially highlighted the role of the workforce in conditioning the form of industrial capitalism in Mumbai.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar saw industrialists and workers as participating in a common theatre of interaction; both sets of actors constrained the other's behaviour.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar looked at social formations ranging from the workplace to urban neighbourhoods to the workers' rural-urban connections.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar viewed workers as involved in an extremely heterogeneous and constantly shifting set of relationships.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar demonstrated that jobbers in Mumbai competed with other figures in workers' neighbourhoods, and their power was limited by their need to satisfy the requirements of their clients.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar argued that there was no straightforward tendency for class-based social ties to develop in the context of industrial employment.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's work stretched beyond the usual studies of labour politics in that it explored not just workers' participation in trade unions and the Communist Party but their involvement with the full range of groups and parties with which they became affiliated.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar argued persuasively that workers' political affiliations and identities, including those of class, were dynamic and shifting, and were constantly being constructed in changing political contexts.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar reacted against approaches that attributed workers' behaviours to "traditional" commitments rooted in rural India.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar insisted, for instance, that the maintenance of rural connections should be seen as a strategy for subsistence by workers rather than as evidence of emotional attachments held over from an earlier period.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar left a rich legacy in South Asian history writing through his students.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's iconoclasm facilitated their abilities to question received wisdom about historical theories and his formidable engagement with archival material prepared them to treat evidence in original ways.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's influence is reflected in research by his students in such diverse fields as the politics of the urban poor in the towns of Uttar Pradesh; the interplay of gender, class and community among jute workers in Bengal; and the shifting patterns of community formation and the development of Communism in Malabar.

Indeed, according to rumour, one student of Rajnarayan Chandavarkar hid under a bridge to evade him and another calibrated her movement in Trinity College by spotting his car.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar warned them not to rush for the most fashionable product in the market, and he encouraged them to explore beyond what is apparent.