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H-ASIA August 8, 2000 Arvind N. Das (1949-2000) ************************************************************************ From: Walter Hauser <wh2r@virginia.edu> Dear Colleagues: I am sorry to report that our friend and colleague, Arvind Narayan Das died of cardiac arrest day before yesterday, August 6, in Amsterdam. He was 51 and is survived by his wife Manoshi, also a historian, and his daughter Piya, a student at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. Das was enroute to London for medical treatment when he was stricken on July 21. He was frequently in Europe and the UK, primarily at the University of Amsterdam and its Centre for Asian Studies. Among his occasional visits to the United States was that in May 1997 when he participated in the symposium on Power, Agrarian Structure, and Peasant Mobilization in Modern India at the University of Virginia. His presentation on that occasion, titled "Swami and Friend" was a wide-ranging survey of peasant activism in twentieth century India. It was that range of issues that were the primary focus of Das' scholarship together with an especially sensitive portrayal of his native Bihar, and more specifically of his north Bihar village. He was particularly candid in describing the remoteness of most urban intellectuals to the meaning of what was and wasn't happening in Bihar. For Das these observers were portrayed in his many op-ed essays in the Indian press as "the chattering classes," who knew less about Bihar than they did about Kosovo, Chechnya, or Sierra Leone. In an effort to bring a more subtle understanding to the experience of Bihar, Arvind organized an international conference on "Bihar in the World and the World in Bihar," which convened at Patna, December 16-19, 1997 under the sponsorship of the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) of Patna and the European Science Foundation of Paris. The volume emerging from that conference, edited by Arvind Das, is currently in press with Manohar Publishers of New Delhi. Arvind Das was a man of many parts. Beyond the eleven books which he either wrote or edited he was in every sense an activist and a publicist. He had been a senior editor of The Times of India, and more recently was a founding editor of <Biblio: A Review of Books> published since 1996 by Asia-Pacific Communications Associates in New Delhi. Biblio: quickly became the model review journal of India and one of the finest anyplace. At the time of his death Arvind Das continued as an editor of Biblio: and a director of APCA. He was also the producer of "India Invented: An Exploration of Culture and Civilization in Historical Outline," a multi- volume video recording that attempts to construct a visual montage of India's history and culture through the eyes of Arvind Das and others of India's most insightful historians. It has become an especially fruitful teaching tool across a range of disciplines. We have lost a friend and a colleague of vast energy and extraordinary intellectual and political vitality. He will be missed not only in India, but in the world beyond Patna and Delhi. We will especially miss the decency he brought to his work and to all of his associations, just as we will miss the insights of the human condition he conveyed in everything he wrote. Walter Hauser ******************************************** Walter Hauser, Professor Emeritus of History Randall Hall, University of Virginia Charlottesville, Va. 22903 Office Fax: (804) 924-7891 Residence: 261 East Jefferson Street Charlottesville, Va. 22902 Phone: (804) 979-9033 Email: wh2r@virginia.edu =======================================================================
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