Rajendra Vora

Rajendra Vora, Lokmanya Tilak Professor at the department of politics and public administration, University of Pune, passed away recently at the age of 61. As a scholar placed at a regional educational centre, he left a rich and flourishing legacy of Maharashtra studies.

Since the early part of his career in the 1980s, Rajendra Vora tried to address this inadequacy and develop an agenda for the study of Maharashtra society and politics in their various dimensions. Taking a clue from an earlier work in the University of Pune, Rajendra Vora tried to shape ‘An Agenda for the Study of Political Economy of Maharashtra’ (an occasional paper published by the department in 1991). As a part of this broader agenda, Vora, along with his colleagues and students, initiated studies to look into the social, political and cultural aspects of relations of power as they shaped in the light of the postindependence trajectories of capitalist development in Maharashtra.