The Telegraph, dated 14.9.2026, Jayanta Sengupta has written about the legacy of five great historians from Bengal,

In an op-ed article in

all of whom have passed away now. The selection, as the author states, is based on his personal choices, and -- therefore -- has some amount of arbitrariness. Yet, the five whose works he has presented in a nutshell -- Ranajit Guha, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Ashin Das Gupta, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, and Sumit Sarkar -- are all great historians on their own rights. Their works have reshaped how the discipline is practised in India. They were all born in 1920s and 1930s and studied in my alma mater, Presidency College. Three of them also received their doctorates from the University of Calcutta. All five were prolific authors in both English and Bengali. The statistics would remain similar if we include some other world-famous Bengali historians who were their contemporaries and near-contemporaries -- Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya and Rajat Kanta Ray to name a few. It was a time when Presidency was the finest undergraduate college in South Asia at least in terms of producing historians and Calcutta University still the premiere research University. The next generations also included Bengali historians of global repute, and still Presidency produced the bulk of them, though Delhi-based universities -- Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University -- gradually outperformed the Kolkata-based universities in their research outputs. Those were different times. JNU and DU, especially the former, are now in ruins. India's finest centres of historical learning have been systematically demolished. Presidency, Calcutta University, and Jadavpur await their turns. It is, indeed, high time that we remember the heights we had reached in historical scholarship, as Sengupta makes us revisits the works of five outstanding historians. See less