The fact that a middle-aged woman, well-connected but living a solitary life, was horribly murdered without sparking off more outrage than it did, speaks volumes about our inertia, if not downright callousness. Papiya Ghosh was very well-educated and served in many prestigious posts (joining Patna University’s History Department in the early 1990s, fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, etc) but she never, ever, neglected the first duty of a teacher – teaching (and teaching well) in a classroom. India International Centre, New Delhi, talks, foreign trips, research projects, etc, were icing on the cake, not the cake itself, as so often becomes the case with today’s academics.
Her book, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent has been published after her death. Indeed, she was completing two volumes on pre- and post-partition Bihar when she died.
