Rajat Datta, an economic historian of 18th century South Asia, passed away at the age of 65 on October 30. He had recently retired from a decades-long teaching career as a professor at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Professor Datta was a beloved teacher, mentor and role model to many of us who walked on the footpaths and through the hallways of the red-brick buildings of JNU.Professor Datta was a firm but a fair teacher. I learned this quickly as an MA student when I requested an extension on a deadline due to my involvement in student union elections. His response was to grant the extension, but also to express in a kind manner his inability to not deduct points for late submission as he would for any other student.The next year, when I asked him for a letter of recommendation for graduate school applications abroad, he said he would gladly write one but only after he could vouch for my research abilities. The MA programme had not, until that point, involved research which meant Professor Datta could not yet write that letter. I decided to hold off on my graduate school applications till I had some research experience. By the end of the MA, I so enjoyed research that I gained clarity on my desire to not only be a historian but also on what kind of historian I wanted to be.I also decided to stay at JNU for another two years to complete my MPhil there. My intellectual growth at JNU owed much to Professor Datta’s strict but encouraging personality. In the process, I grew to admire him for his matter-of-fact adherence to his principles consistently and fairly with all students.Another principle to which Professor Datta was committed was the ethos of questioning everything: for him, nothing was beyond interrogation. This meant that as a teacher, he introduced students to a vast range of scholarly opinions on key topics and revealed an intellectual world that could not be contained within set syllabi and pat responses.For MA students coming out of the exam-based system and rigid curricula, classes like Professor Datta’s made plain just how alive, changing and expanding the world of history writing was. We could ask anything and question everything.Commitment to progressive ideals His unwavering commitment to fearless questioning, democracy, justice and freedom meant that Professor Datta did not cower in the face of growing illiberalism, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism and directed attacks on JNU’s culture of progressive activism.In recent years, he joined and spoke powerfully at protests. He was vocal on social media, skewering Hindutva politics with his acerbic wit and wry observations. From 2016, Professor Datta also wrote for the public on topics such as attacks on cultures of protest and critical thinking at JNU and on the misuses of history and public memory in Hindutva politics.Also read: Rajat Datta, an Inquisitive Teacher, Researcher, Historian and CitizenWhen I last met him, on a trip to Delhi in 2018, he told me over coffee in his office that he and other professors had faced legal threats for their roles in peaceful protests. Indeed, a news report about his passing has noted that he was bypassed for dean-ship despite his seniority and a court case was filed against him (and 48 other professors) for participating in a one-day strike at JNU. This case was used to put his retirement benefits on hold.Meticulous researchProfessor Datta’s scholarship was focused most centrally on the economic history of 18th century Bengal. Scholars appreciated his book, Society, Economy, and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760-1800 (Manohar, New Delhi, 2000), for drawing attention to the significance of the rural rice trade, a neglected aspect of the economy of early colonial Bengal. The book argued that mid 18th century Bengal had already experienced a high degree of commercialisation and monetisation and that food demands within Bengal intensified these trends.This, along with market and fiscal reforms by the English East India Company, led to closer integration of merchants, markets and rice growers. The peasants became more vulnerable to market fluctuations, and as a result, they slid deeper into debt. Merchants and moneylenders were the beneficiaries of this order, to such an extent that their economic power and agency could obstruct state efforts to counter or prevent famine.Professor Datta’s book and several of his articles argued against the conceptualisation of the establishment of East India Company rule as a total rupture in the economic history of South Asia. This aspect of his scholarly intervention elicited much debate.His book and articles traced continuities, whether in grain prices or net tax burden, even as he also traced out the importance of new developments or amplification of existing trends due to East India Company rule. Among these departures and intensifications under the aegis of the colonial regime were the inflexibility of the Company tax regime and an unprecedented drain of wealth to Britain through tribute and the private trade of Company officials.Over the span of his career, Professor Datta shaped the field through his editorial work at the Medieval History Journal. A devoted student, he edited a volume bringing together cutting-edge research on medieval and early modern South Asia in honour of his teacher, Professor Harbans Mukhia (the book is Rethinking a Millennium: Perspectives on Indian History from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century, Essays for Harbans Mukhia, Aakar Books, New Delhi, 2008).In recent years, Professor Datta branched into debates over the global history of capitalism and early modernity, writing about the transition from late medieval to early modern in South Asian history. He argued that rather than seeing the Mughal state as ‘failing’ to create conditions suitable for generating the types of economic transitions witnessed in western Europe or the North Atlantic, it is possible to trace in South Asia the rise of new forms of fiscal governance and agrarian taxation in response to a changed economic landscape from the 16th century onwards.Through this body of scholarship, Professor Datta joined in a lively field of debate on the 18th century and the transition to colonial rule. He was equally at ease with the minutiae of statistical tables and with big-picture arguments. As a teacher, he expected the same kind of critical interrogation from his students, encouraging them to tread new paths and arrive at different conclusions.Professor Datta was an encouraging, invested and responsive research supervisor and mentor to those who worked under him. Advisees could depend on him for regular meetings, detailed feedback on drafts and applications, and thoughtful advice on paths forward. I know from other teachers of mine at JNU that he was a supportive and collegial colleague. Professor Datta was a rare gem: he spoke up and stood tall. His scholarship, mentorship and courage will always be a model to us all.Though I left JNU after my MPhil, I met Professor Datta regularly on return trips to Delhi. In him, I found a proud cheerleader and an interlocutor with whom I could discuss our shared interest in the 18th century.Over the years, I got to know more about Professor Datta and his world: his warm and gracious wife, Ratna, his love and talent for music and singing, and how doting a father and grandfather he was. The image of him that stays with me, and that I will always hold in my heart, is of him in a grey tweed coat on a sunny winter afternoon in Delhi, satchel on his shoulder, smiling at students as he walked to and drove off in his Maruti hatchback.Divya Cherian is an assistant professor at the Department of History, Princeton University.