Dipesh Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College in the Department of History. Chakrabarty’s current students in History and SALC work on a variety of topics, including: 20th-century Kerala, prostitution in British India, India-China relations in the 1950s, modern Islam in Bangladeshi history, and youth culture in colonial Bengal, among other subjects. Professor Chakrabarty talks about his career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College in the Department of History. Chakrabarty’s current students in History and SALC work on a variety of topics, including: 20th-century Kerala, prostitution in British India, India-China relations in the 1950s, modern Islam in Bangladeshi history, and youth culture in colonial Bengal, among other subjects. Professor Chakrabarty talks about his career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
Lee 00:01
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host today, Lee, and I'm speaking with Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty from the Department of History. He is currently the Lawrence A. Kempton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College. Professor Chakrabarty's current studies in history and South Asian languages and civilizations work on a variety of topics, including 20th century Kerala prostitution in British India, India, China relations in the 1950s, modern Islam and Bangladeshi history, youth culture and colonial Bengal, among other subjects.
Professor Chakrabarty is here to talk to us about his career path and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
Welcome to The Course, Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty. It is a pleasure to have you with us today.
Dipesh Chakrabarty 00:54
Thank you for having me on this program.
Lee 00:57
So, let's get started with an overview of your career path. Let's start in your undergraduate years, and then you can take me all the way to your current role at the University of Chicago.
Dipesh Chakrabarty 01:09
Probably like many other people, I kind of zigged and zagged through many areas of interest before landing on, you know, the subject that kind of helped me to make my professional career. I grew up in India in the city of Calcutta and left that to do my PhD in Australia when I was 27.
So from and I was born to a family where my, the two parents, my father was initially a teacher of physics, a professor of physics, and my mother was a teacher of literature. I think I'm intellectually probably more on my mother's side now, but because of my father's interest and because of my own interest, I was always interested in natural history.
My father, I remember sort of from quite early on, would ask me questions like, why do you think the sun looks red in the morning, and different during the day, and then red again in the evening. And I grew up thinking everybody's father asked those questions until I really discovered the truth.
But I think my father planted in me a deep history in the nature around us, in the cosmos around us. And my mother planted in me a deep love of literature and, what you might broadly call the humanities. And I think my temperament, I was always more of a humanities person, but by the time I was growing up in India, you know, being an engineer, being a scientist was a valued thing, and I elected to do the sciences.
So I was a student of science for my high school years, and you had to choose in India whether you would be a humanities person or a science person. And I did my undergraduate, I majored in physics for my undergraduate degree in India, and in geology and maths. And then, at that moment, when I was growing up in the 60s, and 60s were radical, a lot of student movement, I got involved in student movements, and through my involvement in the kind of student movement, I became interested in social issues, political issues.
And when I finished my undergraduate degree, I didn't, I couldn't decide. I mean, I knew that I was not gonna be a scientist and I couldn't decide what to do. And in India there was no educational counseling in India. Just set up two business schools with one with the help of Harvard and another with the help of MIT.
And, you were joined by, you were admitted through a kind of, today's like something like a competitive exam process, something like GMAT. So I took the exam and got into a business school and did the equivalent of an MBA. But it was in the course of working for the degree that I came across a professor who was a very good historian, a very well known historian.
And I ended up being the only student who did all his elective courses because his courses wouldn't, didn't directly always contribute to his graduation. And when I graduated from that institute, they just set up doctoral studies program. And they're not called by that name, they're called fellowship program.
And he asked me if I wanted to be a manager and have a corporate sector life, or if I wanted to be a historian. I had just finished my master's degree and I knew nothing about history. But I was so interested in what he was, what he had taught me in his manner of thinking and his pedagogy, that I gave up the job that I had with a Scottish company, that job had been offered to me, I hadn't taken it up, I didn't take it.
And I said to him, no, I'd rather be a historian. And then I started doing, he was teaching me, you know, history and how to do research in history. And then I discovered that because I'd not done any history before, Indian institutions would not allow me to do a PhD in history, unless I again went back and did another undergraduate degree in the humanities, probably with a history major. And what had happened was that while I was being trained by him, I managed to publish five or six research articles in Indian journals, but good journals.
When, well known professor of African and Asian history from Australia from the Australian National University in Canberra, happened to be in town, and he came to give a talk to a research center of which my history, Indian history professor had then become the director.
And I met him, and he said to me that they, in Australia, would take my published six articles as the equivalent, as being the equivalent of an MPhil degree in history, and try and see if they could offer me a scholarship to do PhD, and they did. So I ended up at the very end of 1976 in Australia, in Canberra, the national capital, at the Australian National University in Canberra, to do PhD under the supervision of this gentleman called DLO Professor, DLO, who by the time I got Australia, had become the vice chancellor, the Chief Executive at the University, but was still a tremendous supervisor. So my first degree, my degree in history, the only degree in history is my PhD. I had not done any history before.
And then, I finished the degree and I initially, I got a research fellowship and then an assistant professorship at the University of Melbourne teaching history and Indian history. And I taught there for 10 years before Chicago made me an offer to join Chicago. So I came to Chicago initially in the South Asian Languages and Civilizations Department and then was moved to the History Department.
So I came to Chicago in, I visited Chicago in 94 and joined the university in 95 in the beginning of academic year. So I've been here ever since from 1995. Here I am, talking to you. So that's the story.
Lee 06:56
Thank you for that, Dipesh, and you've had a long career, but I'm curious, what is your current research interests?
Dipesh Chakrabarty 07:04
Oh, my current research is of two kinds, you know. So I'm actually, see, my native language is Bengali. So I would be identified as a Bengali speaker. Because the majority of Bengali speakers, what 70 percent in today's world are Muslims, and I'm a Hindu. And the Bengali people were partitioned in 1947 when India got partitioned.
And the majority of them who were Muslims elected to join Pakistan, the eastern part of Pakistan, which used to be called East Pakistan, until they fought with Pakistan and made themselves into the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971. And I have strong ties to Bangladesh, I have students from Bangladesh, so I'm deeply interested in the history of these Muslim Bengalis people, and also my family, part of them were refugees from Pakistan when East Pakistan was set up. So that's partly what I'm doing now.
And for the last 13 years, I've been very interested in the question of climate change and how anthropogenic climate change, that's human induced changes in the climate of the whole planet and in the contemporary environmental degradation that we see, how that changes how we look at human history.
So in 2009, I published an article arguing why climate change actually changes the climate of my discipline the climate of history. So I published an article called The Climate of History, which became quite well known. I've got translated many languages and it's really out of that work that I eventually in 2021 published a book called The Climate of History in a Planetary Age.
So, a lot. A large part of my work, which I'm identified today is really, the new work is really on what I've done on questions of climate change as a humanist historian.
Lee 08:52
So, when you look back at your childhood, or who you were when you were a young person, were there formative moments then that makes sense now that you ended up in the place that you did?
Dipesh Chakrabarty 09:07
Absolutely. Because first of all, so let me see, I mean, with the work on climate change, I'm able to bring some science and the humanities together in my work. Because a lot of it depends, a lot of what I've done is I've really done through a fairly deep reading of geology and evolutionary biology and things like that.
So I kind of think I have reunited in my work, the two streams of interests that came into my life, that flowed together in my life. Thanks to my father and my mother and I think that's been, that's given me a tremendous amount of satisfaction to be able to bring them together in my own way.
So I think I would say they were the, they were the primary influences in beginning life in my school years. Then I would say my involvement in student politics of a Maoist kind, I should say in the sixties. Because if you remember, I mean, you may not remember, you're too young to remember all that.
But in 1962, India and China had a war, a border war, and one of the fallouts of that war was that a lot of young people in India, paradoxically and strangely, instead of supporting India, eventually came out in support of China and what was happening in China. The Cultural Revolution had just started in 66.
And I was very influenced by that kind of student politics then. I mean, I see the extremism and the excesses of that politics and even itself, it's falling now. But it came as a tremendous. force kind of, precipitating on my part and on part of my contemporaries are kind of reckoning with our own society.
Why was there so much poverty? Why was there so much inequality? How do you build a just society? And so, I would say that involvement really created an interest in politics and interest in politics in the sense that an interest in social justice and an interest in questions of poverty and inequality and oppression.
And, between the rich and the poor, men and women, urban versus peasant, all of those questions. And that's what I took to my business school. So I was somehow not the typical business school student. And then my history professor in business school who kind of made a historian out of me.
And then along the way, my supervisor and eventually from 2003, sorry, I go back, I have to go, from 1983 I worked for 10 years or 15 years in collaboration with some historian friends based in England, some based in India and some in Australia on a, on a project and a journal or a series of publications we actually edited together called subaltern studies, which were histories of socially subordinated which opened up new ways of looking at human history. And out of that, I did 2000 wrote a book, which is another of my significant publications called provincializing Europe, where I was discussing the role that European knowledge. and civilization has had in the lives of non European people.
And then so I think the other, influence I would, mention is sort of going to Australia. Getting to know Australia as a country, society, and two influences I think are fundamental in my work. One is my exposure to Australian Aboriginal history and culture and their struggle for recognition in a settler colonial context.
That influenced a lot of my thinking in provincializing Europe and Australian interest in environmental history, Australians, many white Australians out of their sense of guilt about having taken over Aboriginal land.
White Australian historians, I should say, came to see in the land itself, in landscape itself, something that was shared between Western Christian derived sense of spirituality and Aboriginal sense of spirituality. And I think my interest in climate work came, I think, has some roots in the role that environmental history and environmentalism played in Australian society.
So I would say these have been the most fundamental influences before coming to Chicago. And of course, Chicago has nurtured my work. I go a lot to my colleagues to discussion and arguments with them and not just colleagues in Chicago, but colleagues outside Chicago. And since I would say, since the publication of Provincializing Europe, which was 2000, I've also had a strong degree of involvement with many intellectuals in Europe. So they have also been very strong influences.
On my work, I might mention a couple of them. One is, of course, the late Bruno Latour, who became a very good friend, died very sadly last year. And, and intellectuals like Etienne Balibar or François Hartog. So a large part of my, I developed a kind of involvement, kind of, or a sense of participation in European conversations. I would say from around 2000, around 2000.
Lee 14:13
So, Deepesh Why become an academic? Why become a professor? What did that offer you? And why does that feel like your calling?
Dipesh Chakrabarty 14:24
Because, you know, I think it depends on what kind of person you are. As I told you that I always felt I'm more of a humanities person, though I have a strong interest in the sciences and have a deep respect for what my scientist friends do. I mean, having done some physics, I now actually, I mean, some of my old physics class friends are still friends, very close friends with me, and they are kind of, some of them are still practicing physicists.
One or two of them are quite renowned practicing physicists. And I've all, in all my life, I've remained in conversation with them, trying to understand what they do. At the same time, trying to explain to them what I, what I do And I think, I mean, as I told you, I was, you know, in my life, I've zigzagged through many things to be where I am but I feel enormously fortunate in that, I've worked through institutions, where sometimes the institutions themselves, and oftentimes people in those institutions, have been very helpful, helped me to become what I am, and personally, in my case, I can tell you that, All my, see there's a statement that the philosopher Kierkegaard used to make, where he used to say, in life the most difficult thing is to be yourself.
And that's because most people don't even, either don't even know who they are who they would want to be, or the question doesn't interest them. But some people, have a search for themselves. They go into the world looking to understand what is it that they want to be. And some people are lucky, they know it from the beginning and they become, they are what they want to be.
Some people have to find out through these kind of traveling through many experiences. And I think, I'm, I'm unfortunately the second sort, I belong to the second type. But I've been very lucky in finding a path through life that has. Let me do that. And I think, you know, I'm in the last lap of my academic life and I feel very satisfied that I've been that somehow through serendipity, I've fallen into a kind of research and writing that allows me to combine the two kinds of interests that I've always had. One is the interest in the physical world, its history its structure and all those things. And then the interest in literature, philosophy, poetry, and in this, and the question of being human and I think my climate work is the work that speaks to both of those interests.
Lee 16:49
And on a day to day level, what would you say is the most fun part of your job?
Dipesh Chakrabarty 16:56
On a day to day level, so this is not, what I've described to you is not separate from what happens on a day to day level. So this discussion happens with colleagues at a day to day level, sometimes we teach together, say a colleague and I, you know, a fellow minded colleague sometimes I'm giving an interview, like I'm now giving to you.
Just a day before yesterday, I was in Poland and I gave a long interview to a couple of Polish scholars for a book they're editing on whether non Western resources are more helpful in thinking about the climate crisis than Western resources. That's how they pose the question. So actually, so it's what I'm describing to you is not something I feel only in my abstracted, self reflective moments. It's something I feel every day. And I feel a real joy when something very ordinary in everyday.
Let's say a classroom. Let's say examining a student's paper or discussing something with a student, or even in an official meeting, there's a connection made between the pragmatic everyday thing that one is dealing with, and the other things that sort of take you out of it every day.
So I'll just give you an example and that probably says something about the University of Chicago. Once the university was, the provost for the university was the interested and I did do it. I mean, I, the university set up a center in Delhi and I was its faculty head, which I did for five or six years.
This was before the center was set up and I was leading a committee that was charged with the foundation of the center. And we had done our job, and then the provost wanted me to continue, and I wanted to write books, some books, that were sort of building up in me. And I had a meeting with him, and I explained to him that I need some time off, because I want to write these books.
And he said, well, we need you to be doing this. And while we were arguing about this, my provost kept saying to me, “but you stand for the right causes, Dipesh. What you're wanting to do is what I also respect. Oftentimes we think of the everyday world of work as separated from these questions.”
But I think what I find fulfilling is precisely the moments when they come together. And so the highest moments of my everyday life are moments when this happens. This connection happens, but I'm, but don't thereby get the impression that all my, all everybody thinks the same way. They don't. I mean, people are different.
I'm just speaking of my experience, and for somebody of my temperament, what works the best?
Lee 19:14
Well, what advice would you have? For one, a young person who is interested in following a similar path or eventually ending up in a similar position to you.
Dipesh Chakrabarty 19:26
Couple of things I'd say, don't think of education as a source, as an instrument or a pathway to earning a livelihood. Think of education as a pathway to getting a life, to get a life. Think of education as something that makes of you a living, thoughtful productive human being who contributes to other people's well being through debates, through arguments, through research, through finding all of those things.
And that Kierkegaardian motive, which I would only recommend to not everybody, because this is not everybody's question, but I know that there are lots of people like me outside and who have a search, who want to, find out what does it mean to be a human being, whether as a scientist or as a doctor or, you know, what does it mean to age?
What does it mean to fall in love? What does it mean to love a sunset? What does it mean that human beings exercise power? And these are questions, about which the humanities, but also music and, you know, there are repertoires in human thought in every culture that have provisional answers, they're not the final answers.
And so the Kierkegaardian question of the injunction that try to be yourself is actually a quest. You're probably, you probably never become the person you want to be completely, but it's a quest and universities and education are really resources with which you can create your own path towards answering that question.
Lee 20:57
What makes you excited to wake up and do your job every day?
Dipesh Chakrabarty 21:02
There are two kinds of academics in the social science humanities. They're one kind of academics, and I'm not saying this complainingly, that's just how they are. They come to a point of view, or they acquire an outlook on the world. Let's say they become feminists, or Marxists, or whatever.
And then they want the world to keep reaffirming what they've thought. So that they, they said, ah, so I thought right. You know, what I thought is really what's happening. Whereas I am of, I'm a sort of person who wants the world to ambush me intellectually, to point out to me what's wrong, what's flawed in what I'm thinking.
And that's why the world remains a source of surprise. So eventually, my existence, I feel, is about, constantly understanding how my understanding of the world falls short of what the world is actually like.
Lee 21:56
Thank you, Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty for your time today and Course Takers, if you enjoyed listening to today's interview, please check out the other ones, leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the university of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.