Anjan: A man of many facets

He wore his scholarship on his sleeve. He was unassuming and generous to a fault. He was a perfectionist personified — to the point that he would leave huge volumes of research unpublished because a few small details had remained unexplored. He moved from studying English literature to sociology and anthropology with consummate ease even as he deepened his knowledge of the political economy of India and the world. He researched topics as diverse as the role of rumours in communal riots in South Asia over the last half of the 20th century to the pattern of labour migration in the coal mining areas of Dhanbad district (now in Jharkhand).
He studied in St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and the University of Michigan in the United States. He taught at some of the most prestigious educational institutions here and elsewhere — including the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, the Indian Institutes of Management at Kolkata and Ahmedabad, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, the University of Oregon and the Foundation for Research in Human and Social Sciences, Paris — besides being part of the faculty of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Yet he was equally at home discussing the intricacies of cinema, theatre and street food.
Anjan Ghosh passed away on June 5. He was barely 59. His end came suddenly, unexpectedly, just about a month after he had been diagnosed with leukaemia. After initial rounds of chemotherapy, he developed a lung infection. Then came a cardiac arrest and he was no more, leaving behind his wife, daughter and elderly mother (one of the important reasons why he chose to be based out of Kolkata though he could well have been working out of just about any part of the planet). His friends and colleagues are finding it difficult to believe that his absence is permanent. Even those who had just a passing acquaintanceship with him could not have failed to have been charmed by his candour, won over by his wit and enthused by the energy he exuded.
One of the notable aspects of his personality was his phenomenal memory, his encyclopaedic ability to remember facts, names and details of situations gone by (even trivia). Above all, he had the amazing ability to link all these bits and pieces to a bigger and more holistic picture and to a theoretical framework of knowledge that was neither pedantic nor obtuse or high-sounding. He had a deep understanding of Marxism (and was often jocularly described as Kolkata’s Lenin because of his bald pate and goatee) but was far from doctrinaire — in fact, many Communist academics till today patronisingly look down on sociology as an academic discipline in comparison to politics or economics.
Anjan had another significant quality. He was a teacher who let his students make up their mind without imposing his personal views on them. In that sense, he was a quintessential instructor who encouraged those he taught to broaden their horizons as wide as possible but never let go of his own ideological inclinations. Also, unlike armchair intellectuals, he was an activist who was closely associated with human rights organisations like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and the Association for Protection of Democratic Rights on the one hand, while, on the other, he helped run film societies and wrote for small publications like Frontier besides a host of scholarly journals.
Perhaps the most fulsome tribute to Anjan came from his Ph.D. adviser from the University of Michigan, Nicholas Dirks, who, on hearing about his sudden death, wrote to his colleagues stating that as a teacher, he had learnt much more from Anjan that what he had been able to teach him. His former colleague Partha Chatterjee has written about how he had chided him for travelling frequently, often to meet fellow sociologists and anthropologists in small district universities in Bengal, instead of concentrating on his own research. Chatterjee later realised that Anjan treated such meetings as an obligation to less fortunate members of his professional community.
Anjan was self-effacing to an extreme. Nearly three decades ago, when I was writing a long article on the underground coal fires in Jharia in Dhanbad, I was introduced to him by Ram Guha, a former student of his at the IIM in Kolkata who is today a well-known public intellectual. He recounted amazing facts about how the coal mines in eastern India used to operate during colonial rule, how the area was “colonised” by workers from different parts of eastern and central India, the impact the pattern of migration had on the working of the coal industry and on the infamous mafia bosses of the area, notable among whom were important trade union leaders belonging to the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) affiliated to the ruling Congress Party.
It was a paradox that the Congress leaders from Bihar — including former chief minister K.B. Sahay — had a reputation of being “progressive” socialists of their time although some of their confidantes came to be known as ruthless exploiters of the underprivileged. After my first interview with him, Anjan insisted that all his remarks be kept off-the-record ostensibly on the ground that his research was incomplete — he was at that time, enrolled for a Ph.D. programme in JNU, a programme he never completed. He was, however, ready and willing to be quoted on the Dhanbad mafia a quarter of a century later when I interviewed him for a documentary film series. His thesis on the subject, however, remains incomplete and unpublished.
Over the years, Anjan came far closer to my family than to me because my sister and he were colleagues in the same research institute and the two of them were collaborating on a project to study the annual Durga Puja festival that is held in Kolkata and Bengal. I bumped into Anjan purely by chance in the corridors of the IIM in Ahmedabad last year — we exchanged a few pleasantries and promised to connect later. Little did I realise then that that would be my last meeting with Anjan Ghosh.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator