Professor Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (1939-2022), who passed away on July 13, was one of the two pillars on whom our understanding of early medieval India stands, the other being Professor Ram Sharan Sharma. Though he taught briefly at Burdwan University and Viswa Bharati, Shantiniketan, and was a visiting professor in several institutions abroad (including the universities of Chicago, Heidelberg, and Leipzig), he had spent most of his teaching career in the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). His research was instrumental in slowly transforming the way history of early and early medieval India was conceived and studied. It is worth remembering that Chattopadhyaya’s first major work, Coins and Currency Systems in South India, c. 225-1300 (1977), developed out of his doctoral thesis prepared under the supervision of Professor Raymond Allchin in Cambridge University after Chattopadhyaya had finished his graduation from the Presidency College, Calcutta and his postgraduation from the University of Calcutta. The book had brought a fresh perspective in how numismatic evidence could be useful in a meaningful analysis of economic history, and had won him the prestigious Prix Duchalais of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres from the Institut de France the next year, even though numismatics was not his principal area of research in the subsequent years. The numismatist in Chattopadhyaya, however, remained active in providing a survey of the developments in eastern India in the Numismatic Digest, published every five years, and in his critical engagement with the numismatic studies of D.D. Kosambi in the much-needed collection of Kosambi’s Indological essays (2002), which he had compiled, edited, and introduced.Also read: Parsing the Math in D.D. Kosambi the PolymathHowever, Chattopadhyaya, as a historian, will be best remembered for bringing in a paradigm shift in early Indian historiography. The periodisation of Indian history was long dominated by the perception of an opposition between a ‘Hindu’ Ancient India and a ‘Muslim’ Medieval India. The concept of a different periodisation going beyond the tripartite division set by colonial scholarship, not on the basis of religious affiliation of the rulers but on the basis of social-political-economic changes, revolutionised the understanding of Indian history. While Sharma, a path-breaker in this direction, perceived a new era (between the sixth and 12th/13th centuries CE) in terms of concepts like Feudalism and urban decay, deriving its vocabulary from the history of western Europe, Chattopadhyaya’s works kept on reshaping the understanding of this new phase – termed ‘early medieval’ – in a context-specific, processual, and non-Eurocentric manner.Brajadulal ChattopadhyayaThe Making of Early Medieval IndiaOxford University Press (December 1994)Hence, what appeared like political fragmentation was reinterpreted as the coming of integrative, regional polities, going beyond the bias towards the search for imperial powers. The narrative of the decay of urban centres was supplemented by the novel processes of the ‘Third Urbanisation’. His landmark collection of essays, Making of Early Medieval India (1994), provided a comprehensive picture of these processes for understanding this new period, and showed how the religious/caste identities of the rulers, such as the Rajputs, could be a result of these changing historical patterns. In another work, Aspects of Rural Settlements and Rural Society in Early Medieval India (1990), his minute empirical study had also challenged the notion of self-sufficient and isolated Indian villages, as he had shown the process of the formation of ‘nuclei’ as village-level exchange centres, and transformed the way of looking at the village-space of the early medieval period.Also read: There Is Nothing Shameful About Being a Medieval IndianChattopadhyaya’s vision of history was integrated with the spatial dimensions of the past, both in a physical and cultural sense. Hence, he would explore the often-neglected field of historical landscapes in A Survey of Historical Geography of Ancient India (1984) and An Annotated Archaeological Atlas of West Bengal: Prehistory and Protohistory (co-edited with Gautam Sengupta and Sambhu Chakrabarty, 2005). Through these texts, he also pointed out the need to look at urban centres as cultural spaces characterised by elements constituting the ‘city-ness’ of cities and the politics of various Brahmanical texts in asserting the state’s claim on the forest-space. These works, and the two volumes of his essays, Studying Early India: Archaeology, Texts and Historical Issues (2003) and The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays (2018), demonstrate the awe-inspiring range of Chattopadhyaya’s scholarship in terms of sources (numismatic, epigraphic, textual, and archaeological); time period (from prehistory and protohistory to the Mughal period); and regions covered (from the coins of South India to the Naraka legend of Assam; from the archaeology of Bengal to the political and economic processes of Rajasthan), which was combined with new methodological interventions, historiographical reflections, and critical comments on historical pedagogy. Perhaps the secret of this tremendous magnitude of work was embedded in his deep-rooted commitment to the idea of plurality as an alternative to singular or monolithic approaches in perceiving the past as well as in interpreting the Indian civilisation.Also read: A Tribute to D.N. Jha, a Historian Who Will Be Remembered for Treasuring PluralityThis notion of plurality had inspired him to deconstruct the age-old representation of the Hindu-Muslim relationship in terms of the binary of ‘self’ and ‘other’. With an in-depth study of a diverse range of Sanskrit sources, dating between the eighth and 17th centuries, he had demonstrated how Muslims were not viewed as a monolithic other because of their different religious faith, but were sometimes accommodated; sometimes valorised; sometimes considered as one among the many possible allies and antagonists; and sometimes stereotyped among the various generic, regional, and ethnic others. As such, in Representing the Other?: Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (1998), Chattpadhyaya challenged the search for ‘cultural fault-lines’ in the medieval period – based on the utterly selective use of source materials supporting a singular, generalised narrative – in the writings of the Indologist Sheldon Pollock. As the attempt to showcase India as a singular, monolithic cartographic entity increased with the rise of hyper-nationalism in recent times, Chattaopadhyaya kept on showing how the concept of Bharatvarsha grew as an open-ended, unbounded idea in which the specificity of at least four different quarters was recognised in relation to a porous, expansive madhyadesha (central land). In his address as the general president in the platinum jubilee year of the Indian History Congress, he had pointed out how the political slogan of ‘unity in diversity’ often resulted in the suppression of the notion of diversity to emphasise the perception of unity, while the sense of diversity and difference were integral to how the civilisation(s) of the subcontinent traditionally viewed identities. Chattopahyaya reminded us that “the idea of unity… may at best be considered as a process of interaction – as a process of transformative but unequal dialogue – among varied local, sub-regional and regional elements of culture… across time and across spaces.” The rapidly reducing space for such dialogue, in recent times, was his constant source of concern, along with his decaying health, in the last few years when I had an opportunity to interact with him personally.I had found BDC (as Chattopadhayaya was known best in JNU) formidable yet approachable, a kind and warm personality, on the first two occasions on which I had met him; as a young presenter in a seminar he had chaired and as a scared applicant in front of an interview panel he was part of, respectively. I could experience his warmth more closely as he shifted close to our locality in Kolkata from Uttarpara, a few years back.Jawaharlal Nehru University campus. Photo: PTIWhile his body was causing him one trouble after another, his mind worked with superb clarity and sharpness, inspiring many new works and sharing many novel ideas. He would not speak much about his struggles in the early phase of his career, but his ready support would always be available for (but not limited to) the worthy students and researchers from underprivileged backgrounds. The discussions would not necessarily be academic, and could often be interesting anecdotes about his younger days, nostalgic reminiscences of Uttarpara (the place my partner also belongs to), the avid interest he had in different genres of films and books, and his expertise on and preference for Bengali culinary exclusivities, including sweets and certain breeds of mango. It was only last month when some controversial comments by a film actor and a politician on historical pedagogy had him clearly agitated, and that triggered a long conversation. He had shared his ideas about how to respond to these comments in both English and the vernaculars, and concluded that the rebuttal must come from the younger generation. “Why should all protests in defence of historical scholarship initiate from the Romila Thapars and Irfan Habibs?” he had asked. That turned out to be the last conversation we had. Professor Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, one of the strongest narrators of the multidimensional and pluralistic civilisation that is India, departed with the pain of witnessing what seemed like a dystopic present, but with optimism about the potential of the younger generation, leaving us in doubt as to whether we are worthy at all of that optimism.Kanad Sinha is an assistant professor at the Department of Ancient Indian and World History, The Sanskrit College and University.