Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Sanjay Subramanyam is the son of K. Subrahmanyam and his wife Sulochana.[2] His father, K. Subrahmanyam, was a prominent expert on strategic affairs. Sanjay has an older sister and two older brothers, namely Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who retired from the Indian Foreign Service as its head, and serves now as India's Minister of External Affairs; and S. Vijay Kumar, who followed their father into the highly prestigious Indian Administrative Service.[3] Subrahmanyam is married to a UCLA historian of modern France, Caroline Ford.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam did his BA and MA in economics from the University of Delhi. He received his PhD in 1987 in economics from the Delhi School of Economics on the topic of "Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c. 1550–1650".[1]

Subrahmanyam taught economic history and comparative economic development at the Delhi School of Economics till 1995. He then moved to Paris as Directeur d'études in the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where he taught history of the Mughal empire, and the comparative history of early modern empires till 2002. In 2002, Subrahmanyam moved to Oxford as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture. In 2004 he became the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian History at UCLA, and a year later, in 2005, he became the founding Director of UCLA's Center for India and South Asia.[2] In 2014 he was appointed to the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA.

In 2012, Subrahmanyam was awarded the first Infosys Prize in Humanities, for his 'path-breaking contribution to history'.[4] He also served as a Humanities jury member for the prize from 2019.[5]

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and as a corresponding fellow to the British Academy in 2016. Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania selected Dr. Subrahmanyam as the 2009 Mary Flexner Lecturer. In 2012, he won the Infosys Prize for humanities for his "path-breaking contribution to history". He was elected professor and to the chair Histoire Globale de la Première Modernité at the Collège de France in 2013.

On 67 February 2017, Subrahmanyam received an honoris causa doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain.[6]

The Martine Aublet Prize for 2018 was awarded to Subrahmanyam for his book, L'inde sous les yeux de l'Europe: mots, peuples, empires (Alma Editeur, 2018), by the Musée de Quai Branly.[7]

In February 2019, Sanjay Subrahmanyam was awarded the Dan David Prize for History (jointly with Kenneth Pomeranz, Chicago).[8]

Historian Srinath Raghavan wrote of Subrahmanyam in 2013,[9]

His scholarship spans the entire early modern period, from the 15th to 18th centuries CE, and more besides. Similarly, his geographical expertise stretches from South, South-East and West Asia to Western Europe and Latin America. Then there are his technical skills, ranging from statistical analysis of economic data to interpretation of literary and visual materials. Although Subrahmanyam began as an economic historian, he has branched out to work on political, intellectual and cultural history. He works in over ten European and Asian languages and draws on sources from a dazzling array of archives. Finally, there is his sheer productivity. Subrahmanyam seems to write top-class history faster than most of us can read.

• The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, London and New York: Longman, 1993.
• The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India, Delhi/Ann Arbor: Oxford University Press/University of Michigan Press, 2001.
• Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, (Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures), Waltham (Mass.): Brandeis University Press, 2011
  • French translation: Comment être un étranger: Goa – Ispahan – Venise, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris: Editions Alma, 2013.
• Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Mary Flexner Lectures), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Impérios em Concorrência: Histórias Conectadas nos Séculos XVI e XVII, Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012.
• Is 'Indian Civilization' a Myth?: Fictions and Histories, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2013
  • Revised French version: Leçons indiennes: Itinéraires d'un historien, Paris: Editions Alma, 2015).
• Aux origines de l'histoire globale (Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France), Paris: Fayard, 2014.
• Mondi connessi: La storia oltre l'eurocentrismo, sec. XVI-XVIII, Rome: Carocci, 2014.
• Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800, New York: State University of New York Press, 2019.

• Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. "V. S. Naipaul: Where Does He Come From?". London Review of Books. Vol. 29 no. 21.