Dr Zareer Masani: Author and historian who challenged accepted versions of history dies at 75
Aug 12, AM IST
Zareer’s writings which appeared under headlines like Koh-i-Noor belongs in Britain and not India; Britain’s Empire was a matter of pride, not guilt; British didn’t plunder antiquities distanced him from many friends and admirers, including fellow historian William Dalrymple
LONDON: Author and historian Zareer Masani who died on Friday aged 75 in Switzerland, was a quintessential upper-class Bombay boy. He studied at Cathedral and John Connon and Elphinstone College before moving to Oxford where he finished his doctorate in History and embarked upon a successful career as author, historian, and broadcaster.
Born in the lap of luxury, his parents’ marriage symbolised the city’s famed cosmopolitanism. Zareer’s father Minoo Masani was a leading light of the Swatantra Party, which was established in and espoused classical liberalism in response to Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialist policies. His mother Shakuntala was the daughter of Sir Jwala Prasad Srivastava, a wealthy industrialist from Kanpur who was a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in the s. Shakuntal
On August 9, Dr. Zareer Masani passed away. An eminent historian, he dedicated much of his later life to providing a holistic view of the British Empire in India, countering many of the post-colonial culture-war perceptions of British imperialism.
Born in India three months after independence from Great Britain into a family, or rather as he called it, “two families, as proud of their services to empire as of their resistance to it.” he was the son of the key independence movement politician, Minoo Masani—a confidant and rival of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru—and the grandson of Sir Rustom Masani, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay and the first Indian to hold the position of Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai.
Moving to the United Kingdom in the s, Zareer achieved a doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford and spent several decades working as a current affairs producer for the BBC.
He published four books in his lifetime, including a biography of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and a memoir entitled And All Is Said: Memoir of a Home Divided. His seminal work, a biography of Lord Thomas Macaulay, was published the following yea
With Dr Zareer Masani’s death last week, the country has lost a fine historian and academic. Born in Bombay in , Dr Masani moved to Britain in the early s and lived there for the rest of his life. He spent two decades as a current affairs producer for the BBC before moving on to work as a historian. Amongst other things, he served as a member of Policy Exchange’s History Matters advisory board. Notably, Masani defended controversial monuments shortly after the initial Black Lives Matter protests of
Above all else, Masani should be remembered for his moral and intellectual courage in the face of an ideology which sought to alter and denigrate our understanding of our shared past. In , after the President of India’s BJP Party, Rajnath Singh, denounced the widespread use of the English language, Dr Masani published a biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, the politician, intellectual reformer and promoter of English on the subcontinent. He argued that despite recent ‘decolonising’ revisionism around Macaulay’s views, he “is still celebrated as a saviour by many Dalits [formerly “untouchables”] who believe that his progressive educational ideas freed them from caste tyranny.” M
Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist
Thomas Macaulay always inspired both admiration and hostility. He introduced English education to India, creating a class of westernised Indians often reviled as 'Macaulay's children', but today many former 'Untouchables' literally worship him as their liberator from caste tyranny.
This biography gives a vivid insight into one of the towering intellects of Victorian Britain: a brilliant, complex, self-made man, who rose from middle-class origins to the highest circles of the world's largest empire. We follow his meteoric journey from child prodigy to Whig parliamentary orator, then imperial administrator and liberal reformer in India, and later Cabinet minister, revered elder statesman and famed historian back in Britain.
Zareer Masani reclaims Macaulay as a pioneer of globalisation based on the English language and Western values. A strong advocate of liberal interventionism across the globe, he was the ideological precursor of today's Western military interventions in the world's trouble-spots.
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