Modern Southasian history lost one of its stalwarts on 24 January 2021 with the passing of David Anthony Washbrook in Oxford, a few months before he reached the age of 73. I knew him for just under 36 years, about half his life, and our relationship constantly evolved and transformed over the decades. A number of rich tributes have already appeared from friends, colleagues and former students (including Joya Chatterji and Samita Sen in Cambridge), which have traced the broad lines of his career and his influence on several generations of scholars working on Indian history. Others will surely follow. My last exchanges with him before he was diagnosed with his terminal illness were, alas, on boring professional subjects such as referees' reports, and the academic politics of Oxbridge. In one of them, some months ago, he did slip in a more personal note: "We are all fine but looking forward to what is now promised as a steady 'unlockdown' in UK. Twelve weeks is a long time to be marooned even in Oxford! Let's try and meet up whenever we are allowed — preferably in Paris". That was surely a reference to a happy month some two decades or so ago that we had spent together in the City of Light, when he had been invited to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and taken an apartment on Rue de la Convention. His presentation of four quite polemical talks on the current state of modern Indian history left his Parisian audience – unused to such verbal fireworks, delivered moreover at machine-gun velocity – a little bit bewildered. The American historian John Richards, also present on some of those occasions, for his part found them very amusing indeed. But he did remark in passing that he could think of no American historian of India who would present historiographical questions in quite such a manner.
By the time I first met him, on a cold February day at the old India Office Library on Blackfriars Road in London in 1985, David Washbrook was already a rather well-known figure among historians of India. I had read several essays by him in the course of my education in the University of Delhi, and had also dipped episodically into his more substantial works. His essays usually appeared on the reading lists of my teacher and doctoral advisor, the economic historian Dharma Kumar, though she was actually no great admirer of Washbrook (a sentiment that was broadly reciprocated). In her courses on the economic history of colonial India, we read the writings of not only Washbrook but several others of the same milieu and generation: Christopher Baker, Christopher Bayly, Neil Charlesworth, Clive Dewey, Peter Musgrave, Tom Tomlinson, and so on. We set aside those writings that were largely or exclusively focused on issues of politics, in favour of those with an economic content. Dharma's notion of a proper education, no doubt as unfashionable then as it is now, was that one not only read those whom one agreed with, but those with whom one profoundly disagreed. There was quite a long list of those who fell into the latter category, but the fact is we read them all so long as their arguments passed a minimal test of intelligence and literacy. It was only later, when I was visiting other Indian universities in the early 1990s, that I realised that not everyone was quite so generous about intellectual disagreements.