With deep sadness, we announce the passing of Patrick French, the Founding Dean of our School of Arts and Sciences and Professor for the Public Understanding of the Humanities. He was a very nuanced and eclectic human being, a very respected scholar, and a caring leader. The University will miss him.
Professor French was an award-winning historian, biographer, and political analyst whose books, including Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), a biography of Francis Younghusband; The World Is What It Is (2008), an authorised biography of Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the USA; and India: A Portrait (2011), have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He also won the Hawthornden Prize, the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Professor French had been a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award, and the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize (now the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction). He was presently writing the authorised biography of the novelist Doris Lessing. Much of his work focussed on political and social analysis of India in the decades directly before and after independence in 1947, and the period following the economic liberalisation in the 1990s.
At the School of Arts and Sciences, he strongly promoted interdisciplinary teaching and research. He worked passionately toward and succeeded in extending the scope of courses to cover Indian and South Asian intellectual traditions in the humanities and social sciences. Under his leadership, the School launched a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science Honours programme, alongside an Integrated Masters in Life Sciences programme, and innovative Majors specialising in History, Economics, Psychology, Physics, and Computer Science, as well as original Majors in Social and Political Sciences, and in Philosophy, History and Languages. He shepherded the development of the highly innovative interdisciplinary PhD programme in Humanities and Social Sciences. Under his mentorship, the School hosted over 100 eminent academic and public policy specialists from across India and the world, ranging from ground-breaking young scholars to Nobel laureates. Professor French was unflinching in his emphasis on academic distinction, on a commitment to mentorship for students and faculty, and to advancing the research and local public value of the School in order to connect with the communities it serves.
He held a PhD in South Asian Studies and an MA in English and American Literature, both from the University of Edinburgh. In 2016-18, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University, and in 2018 he was the Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He had held visiting positions at Ashoka University, the University of Warwick, the University of the South Pacific, NYU Abu Dhabi, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor French sat on the executive committee of Free Tibet, a Tibet Support Group UK. His interest in Tibet was triggered by a meeting with the Dalai Lama when he was 16. However, his third book Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (2003), emerged from "a gradual nervousness that the western idea of Tibet, particularly the views of Tibet campaigners, was becoming too detached from the reality of what Tibet was like. So I did a long journey through Tibet in 1999." In 2003, Professor French was offered and declined the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
Future generations of arts and science scholars from Ahmedabad University will carry Professor French’s interdisciplinary vision and sensitivity towards social issues in their education. His memory will live on in the memories and the hearts of those he touched with his presence and guidance.