Stanley Albert Wolpert (December 23, 1927 – February 19, 2019) was an American historian, Indologist, and author on the political and intellectual history of modern India and Pakistan and wrote fiction and nonfiction books on the topics. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from 1959 to 2002.

Biography

Early life

Stanley Albert Wolpert was born on December 23, 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, he arrived in Bombay, India for the first time on February 12, 1948. Upon arriving, he was both fascinated and overwhelmed by the extraordinary outpouring of grief over the death of Mahatma Gandhi—whom he then knew very little about—just two weeks earlier. On returning home, he abandoned his career in marine engineering for the study of Indian history. He received a B.A. from City College in 1953,

Career

Wolpert began his academic career in 1959, when he took a job as an instructor in the Department of History at UCLA. He was promoted in 1960–63 to assistant professor;

Personal life and death

He married Dorothy Wolpert (née Guberman) on June 12, 1953. They met in an American government class at City College of New York. She went on to become a senior partner in a Century City law firm, and made several visits to India with her husband. They had two sons and three grandchildren.

Participating scholars in the conference include Dilip K. Basu, Judith M. Brown, Basudev Chatterji, Walter Huser, Stephen Northrup Hay, Eugene Irschick, Raghavan N. Iyer, D. A. Low, James Manor, Claude Markovits, John R. McLane, Thomas R. Metcalf, W. H. Morris Jones, V. A. Narain, Norman D. Palmer, Gyanendra Pandey, Bimal Prasad, Barbara N. Ramusack, Rajat Kanta Ray, Peter Reeves, Damodar Sardesai, Sumit Sarkar, Lawrence L. Shrader, William Vanderbok and Eleanor Zelliot.</blockquote>

Delhi University historian Shahid Amin in his review for the Outlook, called it an "empathetic and meticulous biography". He observed, "Wolpert's attempt is to demonstrate through a close reading of Gandhi's own voluminous writings the unique combination of yogic tapas and Christian passion (the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross") that the Mahatma embodied in his body-polity." The biography was severely criticised by columnist Swapan Dasgupta, who wrote in India Today, "Wolpert's biography is not the work of a professional historian.... it is essentially a sympathetic assessment, a study of Gandhi the saint that only tangentially&nbsp;— and with some glaring factual inaccuracies (like describing the Jallianwala Bagh meeting in Amritsar as a gathering of peasants 'celebrating their spring harvest') and sweeping over-generalisations takes into account the environment he operated in."

Pankaj Mishra, in his review for The New York Times, described it as a "somewhat perfunctory biography". He wrote, "the best that can be said about Wolpert's book is that while it tells you nothing about Gandhi that hasn't been said before, it doesn't oversimplify its subject." Further adding, "Wolpert mentions Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela as having drawn inspiration from Gandhi's methods. Disappointingly, he doesn't go into the manifold ways Gandhi's distrust of modernity has found echoes among many political and environmental movements around the world."

Ahmed Abbas in his review for ISSI, called the book "a valuable addition to the literature on the contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent". Diplomat and author, Shashi Tharoor in his review for The Washington Post called it " a smooth, highly readable but flawed book." He added, "Wolpert's narrative is rather bloodless; the characters on its pages are largely just names, with little physical description, social background or political context provided. Two skimpy chapters on Gandhi's legacy are all that justify the book's subtitle.... the book is riddled with minor errors unworthy of a historian of Wolpert's eminence, ranging from the description of Ahmedabad in 1887 as the capital of Gujarat, a state that did not come into existence till the 1950s, to placing the British Viceroy in 1925 in Calcutta, though British India had moved its capital to Delhi in 1911.... Wolpert gives us the saint, but the shrewd politician is little in evidence in this book. And yet Wolpert gets all the essentials right, and he does so in lucid and lively prose."

Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India

Published in 2006, Shameful Flight is a chronological study of the last days of the British Empire in India from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the Jammu and Kashmir war of 1947–48.

Columnist Swapan Dasgupta in his review for The Times Of India criticised Wolpert's 'central argument' for mirroring 'the misgivings of the relics of the pre-War Conservative Party to the management of decolonization.' Yet, he refused to lump him with the Tory "revisionist" historians such as Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson and called his central thesis 'intriguing'. He observed, 'The problem is that Wolpert's own narrative doesn't justify singling out Mountbatten for all the opprobrium'. Furthermore, 'On Wolpert's suggestion that a united, independent<!--The 1947 partition created a divided Bengal--> Bengal would have prevented the tragedy in the east ignores cruel ground realities'.

Publications

Non-fiction

  • Tilak and Gokhale : Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (1962)
  • Morley and India, 1906-1910 (1967)
  • A New History of India (1977, 1982, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2008)
  • Roots of Confrontation in South Asia : Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and the Superpowers (1982)
  • Jinnah of Pakistan (1984)
  • Congress and Indian Nationalism : The Pre-Independence Phase (co-edited with Richard Sisson) (1988)
  • India (1991)
  • Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan: His Life and Times (1993)
  • Nehru : A Tryst With Destiny (1996)
  • Gandhi's Passion : The Life and the Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi (2001)
  • Encyclopedia of India (editor) (2005)
  • Shameful Flight:The Last Years of British Empire in India (2006)
  • India and Pakistan: Continued Conflict or Cooperation (2010)

Fiction

  • Aboard the Flying Swan (1954)
  • Nine Hours to Rama (1962)
  • The Expedition: A Novel (1967)
  • An Error of Judgment (1970)

References