Abstract
Professor Vasudevan taught Russian and European history at Calcutta University, was Director of MAKAIAS (2007–2012), was UGC Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, Kolkata. He was member of many committees set up by the Government of India and was Chairperson of the Textbook Development Committee for the Social Sciences at the NCERT. He had teaching assignments in many foreign universities, including Cornell, King’s College, Kiev, Uppsala and Dagon University.
He was appointed as Professor in 2002/2003 in the newly set up Central Asian Studies unit at the Academy of Third World Studies (renamed in 2011 as the Academy of International Studies) in Jamia Millia Islamia. This Central Asia Studies unit was set up by Mr Shahid Mehdi (then Vice Chancellor, Jamia Millia Isalmia) and Prof Mushirul Hasan (then Director of the Academy). Prof Vasudevan was Director of the Academy from 2004–2005. He left Jamia Millia Islamia in 2005 and returned to Calcutta University, although he remained close to us at the Academy and came whenever invited to participate in the numerous conferences and workshops we organise.
History and Contemporaneity
One of the best examples of Professor Vasudevan’s immense command over history writing in both Europe (particularly England, where he studied) and in Russia/Soviet Union, without bias towards either, is the Presidential Address in the section ‘Countries Other than India’ he delivered at the 71st session of the Indian History Congress. The theme of the Congress was Education and Knowledge Transmission in India. His address was entitled Towards A Broader Canvas Historiography on Countries Other Than India in the Textbooks of the NCERT. The broad-ranging address traced the history of liberalism in pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; the differences in the Cambridge and Oxford histories of Russia, the opening up of archives after the fall of the Soviet Union and the new material available, to the changes in methodology and approach to history writing in France (the Annales School, in particular) and in Britain (particularly in the work of EP Thompson). He then presented in detail the new themes to be taken up by the textbooks in relating India to the events in other parts of the world along with new associative linkages and periodisation.
His writings in the 1990s on the many transitions Russian and Soviet society went through from perestroika to the fall of the Soviet Union to Boris Yeltsin’s rise to power and the Presidency, remain some of the best accounts in Indian writing on this volatile period for their intricate knowledge of the myriad political processes in play. The focus of a lot of his lectures and writings was how the post-Soviet political formations desovietised and made the actual changes to shift from socialist to market economy on the ground.
Professor Vasudevan was that rare breed of academician who could ‘pass on the excitement’. His was specifically an excitement about the Eurasian continent. Now this particular excitement was difficult to pass on in the 1990s, as those of us who have studied Russian language, literature or history, know. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of takers for courses on this area fell across disciplines. Prof Vasudevan, therefore, was very special because nothing seemed to stump his enthusiasm for this Eurasian/Soviet/Post-Soviet area, and he remained steadfast, despite shifting geopolitical needles of interests in the world around him.
Area Studies
This steadfastness and excitement was tempered with an acute sense of changing historical emphasis and new areas of study in this region that would include focus on not just Russia, but Central Asia and other newly independent countries of the CIS. More importantly, he did not just stop at the usual divisions of area studies, including the new geopolitical ones of clubbing Central Asia along with South Asia, rather than with Russia (as the Americans – Frederick Starr, for instance – were wont to do). What was important for him were the communities, neighbourhoods, localities and spaces across Eurasia. He mentored younger scholars to study Buddhism in Russia, the Buryats in Siberia, the trans-Himalayan space, the neighbourhoods of Russia and Central Asia (and Turkey, as an important part of this neighbourhood). During his tenure as Director of MAKAIAS, Kolkata, a range of important national and international conferences were held on Eurasia and its many regions and proceedings published. He had a great ability to inspire younger scholars to do innovative work.
The area for him was not to be just studied in geographical or historical terms but also in broader cultural terms. Social communities, their forming and unforming, particularly in periods of transition, such as the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union were of particular interest to him. The ‘community’ as a concept, I got a sense, could not be made to correspond to the more prevalent concepts of civil or political society or some kind of an imagined nation. The other concept that was the focus of his attention was ‘institutions’ – again not as state apparatus or apparatus of any sort, but to be studied as entities on a more informal level. These were concepts through which Professor Vasudevan’s interest in the mingling of the local and the micro with the global and the macro manifested itself.
His last presentation at the Academy in March last year was his Valedictory Address at the national conference, ‘Status Update on International and Area Studies’. Professor Vasudevan critiqued the over-dependence of Area Studies on the Social Sciences. The multi-disciplinary approach of Area Studies as it had developed in Europe and the United States, ignored the indigenous resources of information gathering and intellection that existed in countries of Asia and Africa, where he said, area studies centres were hard to come by. This did not mean that these countries had not developed ways of reaching out to the world and creating their own space in a larger system. In India, for instance, according to him, there was the encounter with the west through educational modes; the nationalist perspective; oceanic interactions with Africa and South-East Asia, localised communities in coastal, Himalayan and other regions; and Nehru’s contribution to a very different understanding of Area Studies (an Afro-Asian perspective) in the period immediately after Independence.
Indo-Russian Relations
New Perspectives
Vasudevan’s contribution to International Studies was that he brought many new perspectives to the study of India-Russia relations. He was an expert on these relations from the point of view of history, trade and economy. His attention, over the years, expanded from Europe and Russia to Eurasia and Eastern Eurasia, to Russia’s East and to the countries of the Asian East. Some of his recent engagements were with the ‘Look East’ policies of the Indian government. One of the last papers he has written was India’s Far East: The Vladivostok Moment in Indo-Russian Relations for ORF on India’s move away from Moscow-centrism to participate, at the invitation of President Putin, in the EEF (the Eastern Economic Forum).
The community, neighbourhood and institutions were concepts that travelled easily across disciplines, from History to International Studies, in particular. Speaking of BRICS at a workshop I had organized, he pointed that the neighbourhood and regional context were very important for the member countries and that each of the BRICS countries, particularly South Africa and Russia, represented not just themselves, but the region they belonged to. He focused on Russia and its role in the Eurasian Economic Union (comprising Russia, Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia) which was in many ways so much more than a Customs Union or free trading zone, and what it could bring to the table at BRICS.
Professor Vasudevan always thought out of the box, giving new perspectives on issues. While most specialists on Central Asia spoke of India not having been quick enough to move in to the region and use the existing goodwill in the newly independent countries to her own advantage, in the ’90s, particularly when it came to issues such as increase in trade or energy sufficiency, he pointed out that the inertia was due to several structural factors in the Indian economy and politics. On the one hand, India had never been till the 1990s, an export-oriented economy. On the other, India has never had an economic foreign policy. India’s foreign policy only had one leg to stand on and that was South Block.
This blend of the micro and macro, the core of his interdisciplinary approach, was nowhere more evident than in his study of energy relations between India and Russia. Professor Vasudevan pointed out, again in contradistinction to specialists who emphasized the ‘macro’ perspectives of pipelines, government policies and investments in oil fields in Sakhalin and Kazakhstan, etc. that there was a need for micro studies on the ground, because Russia was very different from other countries since it had transited from socialist to market economy in several stages. There was, he insisted, a need to look at energy issues ‘through the backdoor’ and provide an alternative view to being just another player in the New Great Game. The field needed to be played through intimate and deep connections, where the role of the Russian State’s legal rights over the country’s natural resource wealth; Putin’s regulatory authority over the Russian energy industry; and private players who were involved in production and distribution were to be understood. In this he focused on the ground level operations of the Khemkas and Imperial Energy.
Leg Work
Part of Professor Vasudevan’s multi-faceted engagement with India-Russia relations was the ‘leg work’ he also did. In 1995, he, along with Professors Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta and Purabi Roy, thanks to a protocol signed between the Asiatic Society and the Institute of Oriental Studies, travelled to Moscow and documented hitherto understudied links between Russia and India (such as the links between communism in the Soviet Union and in South Asia), through the material they found in the archives opened after the fall of the Soviet Union. To celebrate 70 years of Indo-Russian Diplomatic Relations he had curated an exhibition entitled The Russian State and India – Imperial Encounters to Contemporary Collaboration in October 2017 at the IIC, Delhi that charted the history of India’s relationship with Russia from the fifteenth century to the present day – including sign-posts such as the setting up of independent India’s embassy in Moscow in 1947 – through photographs, copies of paintings and illustrations, maps and engravings.
Nikitin, the Traveller
Vasudevan was deeply sensitive to the cultural turn and the critical turn in the Social Sciences. This is probably what explains his abiding interest in Afanasy Nikitin (1433–1475) and his book Voyage Across Three Seas. An ordinary member of the trading community in Tver, Nikitin set out down the Volga in 1468. He reached Chaula (in the south of Bombay) in 1471 and settled in the Bahmani kingdom. He left for Russia in 1473.
Professor Vasudevan points out that his life represented many different things in successive historical epochs: From the 15th to the 18th centuries he was only known to high level Orthodox priests and officials as the first traveller form Russia to India. Nikolai Karamzin, the palace historian, treated him as a symbol of Russian national pride. His writings became a source for scholars on Indian history for accounts of the Vijaynagar and Bahmani kingdoms. In the twentieth century he became a flag bearer of Indo-Russian friendship, a Russian traveller who had reached India even before Vasco da Gama did. A statue of Nikitin was unveiled in Kalinin in 1956 and an Indo-Russian coproduction on his travels, Pardesi, was made by K. A. Abbas and Vasili Pronin.
What is interesting in Professor Vasudevan’s analysis of Nikitin’s account is how the traveller’s identity as a trader in the western Mongol empire, induced in him a sense of curiosity only towards that which was culturally alien. The Islamic cultures he encountered were not alien to him, so he devotes very little attention to them, focusing rather on his encounter with what was culturally new to him. So fascinated was Professor Vasudevan with Nikitin, that he organised a journey on the very route that the Russian had travelled. A film was made on this 13-member expedition, which lasted 47 days in 2006–2007. Vasudevan’s book In the Footsteps of Afanasii Nikitin: Travels Through Eurasia and India in the Twenty-First Century was published in 2014.
Portrait of a Scholar
He was a treasure house of knowledge and free with imparting and sharing it. He would always know of the latest interesting work on Eurasia, in English as well as in Russian.
Professor Vasudevan was a warm, witty person, very approachable, with a genuine interest in the work others were doing in the Russian field. He had this way of closing his eyes and listening at conferences, making people wonder if he was asleep. But the moment he started speaking, his eyes shining through his glasses, he would amaze with his ability to recall what had just been said and create insightful bridges with different streams of thought and ideas. I always felt that he was a person who belonged more to oral culture, even though he has left behind a considerable body of writing.
He was very energetic and always on the go, with a briefcase in his hand or a leather bag hanging from his shoulders. He always had somewhere he had to be, but that did not mean that he would not devote his full attention to whatever or whoever was at hand. I would call him to remind him of the session he had to speak in. In his clipped and somewhat British accent he would say, “Don’t worry, Rashmi, I’ll be there’ and would always slip in, on time for his session.
Everyday when I see the latest update on COVID-19 deaths, I cannot help remembering that Professor Hari Vasudevan is one of those numbers. So sudden and unexpected has been his departure that it seems like he has, in his characteristic way, just left because he had to be somewhere else.