On 10 May 2020, there came the devastating news that Professor Hari Shankar Vasudevan had succumbed to COVID-19. Vasudevan was only 68 at the time. A UGC Emeritus Professor at the Department of History, University of Calcutta, he was in the words of one of his illustrious peers, ‘a fine historian of Russia and Europe, a gifted institution builder and a person of exceptional warmth and goodness.’ Another historian wrote an obituary, where she called him ‘Hari the indestructible’. Eurasia, India and the Spaces in Between, which Kingshuk Chatterjee has edited in Vasudevan’s memory, is a tribute to his outstanding scholarship.
The volume begins with Bhaskar Chakraborty’s poignant reminiscences of his association with Vasudevan and the work that Vasudevan and his colleagues did at the University of Calcutta in the 1980s and 90s, which ‘created an academic milieu in what was then undoubtedly one of the best history departments in the country’ (p. 12). There is nostalgia in every paragraph that Chakraborty writes. ‘I do not know’, he says, ‘whether I shall live long enough to witness the renewal of the enthusiasm of our younger days in the university, to which many of us had given our lives.’