Braj Bhūm in Mughal Times : The State, Peasants and Gosā’ins

Irfan Habib (b. 1931). Educated till M.A. at Aligarh, with D.Phil. from Oxford 1958, he taught from 1953 to 1994 at Aligarh where he is now Professor Emeritus. His works include The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1656–1707 (1963, revd. edn., 1999 & 2014); An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (1983); Essays in Indian History, Towards a Marxist Perception (1995); Medieval India: the Study of a Civilization (2008); Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500 (2011); and Atlas of Ancient Indian History (with Faiz Habib) (2012). He has published twelve monographs in the People’s History of India series, two of these jointly authored. He has co-edited Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I (1982); UNESCO’s History of Humanity, Vol. IV (1999) and Vol. V (2000); and UNESCO’s History of Central Asia, Vol. V (2003). Tarapada Mukherjee (1928–90). Educated, Calcutta and Visva-Bharati, he obtained his doctoral degree (1959) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, with a thesis on Brajbuli poetry. Having already published an anthology of Bengali poetry (1954), he undertook (with T.W. Clerk) a translation of the novel Pathar Panchali (1969). In 1971, came his study of Krishna Kirtan, and later, with the collaboration of Sukumar Sen, a critical edition of Krishnadas Kaviraj’s Chaitanyacharitamrita (1988). In the meantime he organized the project of tracking down and photographing all old documents in possession of temples and individuals in the Braj region. Based on this material, he published four articles (one jointly with J.C. Wright and the rest with Irfan Habib).