Remembering Jean-François Salles (1944–2023)

Asian Review of World Histories 12 (2024) 9–11 brill.com/arwh Remembering Jean-François Salles (1944–2023) Rila Mukherjee Retired Professor of History, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India; Chief Editor, Asian Review of World Histories [email protected] Received 3 December 2023 | Accepted 4 December 2023 | Published online 7 February 2024 I first met Dr. Jean-François Salles on the occasion of a conference hosted by him at the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée in Lyon in the autumn of 2000. This was actually a conference that was organized by his friend Dr. Jean-Marie Lafont that Jean-François kindly hosted, and for some reason the ticket that I was sent by the organizers flew me on Kuwait Airways from Bombay to Geneva, not to Lyon. But because Geneva is very close to Lyon, Jean-François was deputed to pick me up at the airport and deposit me in my hotel in Lyon. Which he did, very graciously. I did not see much of him during the conference because the conference was on a topic far removed from his interests – it was about Claude Martin and his adventures in eighteenth-century India. But I learned he had been leading the Franco-Bangladesh excavations in Mahasthan in Bangladesh since the 1990s, and when I asked him about the findings from this project, he was kind enough to share with me the contents of the first interim report for the period from 1993 to 1999. In fact, he took me into his office and photocopied all the pages of that report (this was before word processing, sending stuff through email attachments was yet to become the norm), and the report was voluminous! His doing this was an eye-opener for me since archaeologists are usually very guarded about sharing their work at the interim stage. I learned later that he was always generous about sharing his work with others. I next encountered Jean-François at the offices of the art historian Dr. Gautam Sengupta (subsequently the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi and thereafter professor of ancient history and archaeology at Visvabharati University in Santiniketan, near Kolkata) who had founded and was at that time leading the Centre for Archaeological Studies and Training, Eastern India, in Kolkata. I think this was sometime around 2004 Published with license by Koninklijke Brill NV | doi:10.1163/22879811-bja10052 © Rila Mukherjee, 2024 | ISSN: 2287-965X (print) 2287-9811 (online) Downloaded from Brill.com 07/25/2024 01:00:55AM via free access 10 Mukherjee or 2005, and soon after, due to some technical difficulties with the government of Bangladesh, the French part of the Mahasthan mission would be administered from CASTEI for the next few years. Although primarily a scholar of the Near East, Jean-François had by then become better known as a historian of classical South Asia and the Indian Ocean world. In 1998, he had published “Antique Maritime Channels from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean” in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes (1998), edited by Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak, an article that went on to be much cited. I know he wrote many such prescient pieces, but this article became a bit of a hit in the anglophone world. Sometime after that encounter, I changed universities and left Kolkata to take up teaching at the University of Hyderabad. In the flux of a midcareer move to a new city, busy coping with the demands of a new job and new teaching commitments, and working with a new set of colleagues, I lost touch with Jean-François. But he was kind enough to reconnect with me and visit the Department of History at Hyderabad in 2011, where he talked about the recent findings at Mahasthan at a seminar organized by us. That year he and his core team, which included Professor Marie-Françoise Boussac (who leads this special forum with a tribute to Jean-François), organized an international conference in Kolkata that was a great success. The proceedings were published in 2016 as Ports of the Ancient Indian Ocean, edited by Marie-Françoise Boussac, Jean-François Salles, and Jean-Baptiste Yon. The same year, he edited and published Mahasthan II, Fouilles du rempart est, études archéologiques (Mahasthan II: Excavations of the east rampart, archaeological studies), which continued his objective of presenting Mahasthan to a wider world (the first report came out in 2007). The volume was well received and I know he was planning a third volume, but I am not certain if, due to his failing health, he could finish it or even undertake the project at all. From October 2011 until 2015, I was sent on deputation from the University of Hyderabad to take charge of the French Institute at Chandernagore, a former French settlement located near Kolkata. Jean-François often visited us on his way to or back from Bangladesh. He was an indispensable part of the seminars and conferences organized at the French Institute from 2012 until 2015. He contributed a chapter to Vanguards of Globalization: Port-Cities from the Classical to the Modern (2014, edited by Rila Mukherjee), which introduced Indian readers to ports in the Erythraean Sea in pre-Periplus times, and he talked about ancient Greek descriptions of India in Beyond National Frames: South Asian Pasts and the World (2015, edited by Rila Mukherjee). Both the volumes were the outcome of conferences organized at the French Institute. Asian Review ofDownloaded World Histories 12 (2024) 9–11 from Brill.com 07/25/2024 01:00:55AM via free access Remembering Jean-François Salles ( 1944–2023 ) 11 We did a lot of traveling together in eastern India: twice to the Sundarbans in south Bengal, and once, along with Marie-Françoise, to the Buxa Tiger Reserve in north Bengal – where we did not see a single tiger! But we enjoyed the wild landscape of this mountainous borderland between India and Bhutan, which the English traveler Ralph Fitch had described ca. 1585, so in a sense we were following Fitch’s footsteps. We then went on to Bhutan where, at the serene frontier town of Phuentsholing, Jean-François invited us to lunch. Marie-Françoise was with us on that journey as well. In 2014 the Indian Museum at Kolkata and the French Institute at Chandernagore jointly hosted the Gauda conference, which was conceptualized and organized by Jean-François. We welcomed his team, which was composed mainly of French scholars but, as I recall, also included some participants from Bangladesh, because Jean-Francois was very committed to exposing his Bangladesh students and colleagues to various global fora and he encouraged them to participate in international conferences. The Gauda conference was one such occasion. Its proceedings were edited by Jean-François and published finally in 2020 as Sources on the Gauda Period in Bengal: Essays in Archaeology. This was the last major project he undertook. He was in poor health by then and was in and out of hospital. His emails too had become less frequent. I remember Jean-François as a gracious host in his sprawling house at Chapèze in 2013; it was light and airy and filled with books of all kinds (also a lot of popular literature, because he liked John le Carré’s spy novels and the detective books of Donna Leone). We spent a memorable day in the valley of the Ardeche and we went once to Ouchy in Switzerland for lunch by the lake. He loved music and we went to the famous jazz festival at nearby Vienne on a day when Chick Correa and Abdullah Ibrahim played. The date was 30 June, it was a mild Saturday afternoon, the concert was relaxed, the atmosphere like a mini-Woodstock. Jean-François Salles was a good friend to the Asian Review of World Histories. Despite his professional commitments, which kept him busy even after his retirement, he could always be counted on to turn in fast peer reviews of articles submitted for consideration. For himself, he was always reworking received constructs and questioning established categories, and he wrote a brilliant piece for the journal in 2015 (ARWH 3.1, open access), “Writing World History: Which World?” Along with his colleagues in India and elsewhere, we will miss his academic commitment, his energy, his affability, and his zest for life. Goodbye, Jean-François, rest in peace. Asian Review of World Histories 12 (2024)Downloaded 9–11 from Brill.com 07/25/2024 01:00:55AM via free access