Eurasia, India and the Spaces In Between: Essays in Memory of Hari Shankar Vasudevan

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Hari Shankar Vasudevan (1952-2020) had an interest and engagement with history writing that belied the constraints of time and space. Eurasia, India and the Spaces in Between, is dedicated to his memory with contributions from his colleagues and friends from across the world, engages with a range of issues to give a sense of the diversity of interests that Vasudevan used to nurture. While prima facie they might appear to be on disparate subjects, each of the essays contribute to the understanding of different aspects of life in the Eurasian region in early modern and modern times, with particular emphasis on Russia, Central Asia and South Asia. For Vasudevan, though, these regional engagements were somewhat fluid and amorphous, and quite far from being the hermetically sealed spaces that national imaginaries now make them out to be. Hari Vasudevan was deeply interested in the interactions between and among the peoples of these regions, negotiating as best as they could the historical forces that shaped the landscapes of their time. The essays in this volume essentially address attempts at such negotiation undertaken in the Eurasian region, mostly in the modern times.

Kingshuk Chatterjee is Professor in the Department of History, Calcutta University, and was associated with the Institute of Foreign Policy Studies, Kolkata. He has been associated with the Department of History, Shiv Nadar University and as a Fulbright Scholar-in- Residence at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He is the author of Ali Shari'ati and the Shaping of Political Islam in Iran and A Split in the Middle: the Making of the Political Centre in Iran (1987-2004), and editor of several volumes on Middle Eastern politics and India's relations with the Middle East.