Bipan Chandra

Bipan Chandra (24 May 1928 to 30 August 2014) was an Indian historian of the nationalist and Marxist school whose books and textbooks shaped how the freedom struggle is taught in India. He was born in Kangra, then in Punjab province, and studied at Forman Christian College, Lahore. Partition forced him to leave Lahore. He then studied at Stanford, left the United States as the McCarthyite campaign intensified, and took his PhD at Delhi University in 1959 (Wikipedia; Prabhat Patnaik's obituary in Social Scientist).

He taught at Hindu College, Delhi, and from 1969 at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he helped build the Centre for Historical Studies and was later emeritus professor. He joined the University Grants Commission in 1993 and chaired the National Book Trust from 2004 to 2012. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2010. Prabhat Patnaik, in his obituary, called him a fighter for secular anti-imperialism.

Main works and moments

• The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (1966); Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (1979); Communalism in Modern India (1984).
• 1985: general president of the Indian History Congress, whose session met at Amritsar (Wikipedia; Hindustan Times obituary reproduced by Delhi University's alumni archive).
• India's Struggle for Independence (with others) and India Since Independence (1999, with Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee).
• April 2016: Chapter 20 of India's Struggle for Independence, by Chandra and Mridula Mukherjee, called Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Surya Sen and others "revolutionary terrorists." Bhagat Singh's family wrote to the Union HRD minister Smriti Irani seeking changes, and she called the wording an "academic murder" of sacrifices. The ministry asked Delhi University to reconsider the chapter or the book. The university said it was a reference book rather than a textbook and that it would look into the request (The News Minute, 28 April 2016).

He is remembered as one of the most widely read historians of modern India. Punjab readers know him as a Punjab-born scholar who presided over the history congress at Amritsar in 1985, and for the dispute his best-known textbook caused with the family of Bhagat Singh.