A PERSONAL TRIBUTE

A.L. Basham

I first met D. D. Kosambi during the 1949-50 university session, when I had been a lecturer at London for only a year or two and had much to learn. One cold day in autumn or winter (I forget which), a tall spare Indian with greying hair and rugged but pleasant features came into my room at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He introduced himself as D. D. Kosambi, who had come to London partly to meet mathematicians and partly to discuss his researches on Indian punch-marked coins with the numismatists at the British Museum. His stay in England on that occasion was a very brief one, but I had several long talks with him, and arranged for him to give a lecture to my students. From that time onward we kept up our friendship, meeting whenever possible, whether in India or in England, and exchanging fairly frequent letters. I have met no one who could crowd so much information into an air letter as he, partly by typing right up to the edges of the paper and partly by extreme conciseness of expression.

We argued a great deal. I did not go all the way with him in his Marxist interpretation of Indian history, though I agreed with many of his conclusions; and when, early in the course of our friendship, I published a lengthy review of his An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1956) in which I criticized some of his theories (rather sarcastically) I feared reprisals; but he accepted my remarks without rancour, and our friendship was in no way impaired. Whenever I was in the neighbourhood of Bombay I would visit him in his home in Poona, and, armed with a special stick which was equipped with a chisel-shaped point for prizing microliths out of the earth, he would take me and his dog Bonzo for long walks in the beautiful rolling countryside, introducing me to village shrines and sacred trees, and discussing their significance, as survivals of the prehistoric culture of the Deccan, In the last few years of his life he often complained of arthritic pain, but it rarely deterred him from his walks in search of microliths or from working In his study until the early hours of morning.

At first it seemed that he had only three interests, which filled his life to the exclusion of all others- ancient India, in all its aspects, mathematics and the preservation of peace. For the last, as well as for his two intellectual interests, he worked hard and with devotion, according to his deep convictions. Yet as one grew to know him better one realized that the range of his heart and mind was very wide. He had a great love of literature in all languages. Once he impressed me by quoting passages from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress from memory. I was surprised that he should know this seventeenth century English religious classic so well, and suggested that his taste for Bunyan was rather incongruous in a professed unbeliever. He replied that he loved Bunyan because his language was so beautiful and simple, he was a product of the popular culture of the time, and he imparted valuable moral lessons, even to one who had no faith.

In the later years of his life, when his attention turned increasingly to anthropology as a means of reconstructing the past, it became more than ever clear that he had a very deep feeling for the lives of the simple people of Maharashtra. When he described local festivals, and religious ceremonies or showed the excellent colour slides that he had taken of them, one felt that he would have liked to participate, to identify himself with the peasants worshipping at a village shrine or making a pilgrimage to Pandharpur. Once, when he was mildly complaining of the pains which the doctors seemed incapable of curing, it struck me suddenly that they might be psycbologically caused, the product of the tension between the unbelief, to which his reason compelled him and the deep-seated traditions of his ancestral faith, which his reason had rejected but which still, in reason's spite, affected his semi-conscious and sub- conscious emotions. Very tentatively I made this suggestion to him, and advised him, as a psychologist of the Jungian school might have done, to goon a pilgrimage to Pandharpur and perform all the rituals of the ordinary pilgrim, even if he had no belief in them, in the hope that his health would improve. He laughed, and replied that he could not do this, however beneficial to his health, for thus he would betray his faith in reason and common sense.

Impatient with hypocrisy, inefficiency, bureaucracy, dogmatism and intolerance, a man of very deep convictions and strong principles, with a very powerful will, he may have made enemies as well as friends. Some may have found him difficult to collaborate with as a colleague. As a friend I found him always loyal, sympathetic and helpful. His company was invariably stimulating; he was never at a loss for a subject of conversation and he infected one with his own enthusiasm. It was with a deep sense of personal loss that I learnt of the death of my very good friend "Baba".

It is as a friend rather than as a scholar that I shall chiefly remember him, but this statement is in no way intended to disparage his scholarship. I am not qualified to pass judgment on his work in mathematics, and have hardly the right to assess his editions of Sanskrit poetical texts, which, according to the specialists, are marvels of their kind.

As a historian he made very important contributions to the study of many aspects of Indian history. His statistical analysis of the punch-marked coins has produced one of the most convincing interpretations of these so far to have been offered. His An Introduction to the Study of Indian History is in many respects an epoch making work, containing brilliantly original ideas on almost every page; if it contains errors and misrepresentations, if now and then its author attempts to force his data into a rather doctrinaire pattern, this does not appreciably lessen the significance of this very exciting book, which has stimulated the thought of thousands of students throughout the world. In his later publications he continued to point the way to the only means whereby we can reconstruct a convincing picture of the early history of India as a whole, rather than of the India of pandits and dynasties-by a judicious combination of the techniques of history, archaeology and anthropology. In his stature, his intellect and his integrity of spirit, he was indeed a truly great man.