He is the second son of Amiya Kumar Raychaudhuri, the Zamindar of Kirtipasha in Barisal, Bengal and a leader of the Congress party there before 1947. His uncle was Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri, Charmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture, University of Calcutta, and a son of the Zamindar of Ponabalia in Bengal. Another uncle of his was the prominent Congress politician, Kiran Shankar Ray, Home Minister of West Bengal from 1947-1948, and the Zamindar of Teota in Bengal.
After completing his school education at Ballygunge Government High School, Calcutta and then in Barisal Zilla School, Barisal he entered Scottish Church College, Calcutta for his I.A. Later he became a student of Presidency College, Calcutta where he completed his B.A. (Honours) and M.A. in History, with First Class Second in both the examinations. In his B.A. (Hons.) class he was a student of Professor Susobhan Sarkar. He completed his first Ph.D. on "Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir" at Calcutta University as one of the last doctoral students of Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the eminent historian of medieval and modern India and the son of the Zamindar of Karchamaria in Bengal. He completed his second Ph.D. (D.Phil.) on a Government of West Bengal scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford in 1957 on "The Dutch in Coromandel, 1605-1690" under the supervision of Dr. C. C. Davies, the Reader in Indian History at Oxford University, whose post he later came to occupy. On the first day of his arrival at Balliol, he was befriended by the eminent British Marxist historian, Christopher Hill.
Academic
In his long and illustrious career he has held several important academic posts: he started his career, before leaving for Oxford, as a Lecturer in the Department of Islamic History and Culture, at the University of Calcutta. After his return to India, he was appointed as the Deputy and then Acting-Director of the National Archives of India, New Delhi. Soon after he became Reader and then Professor of History at University of Delhi. Later, he was appointed Professor of Economic History and Director of the Delhi School of Economics under Delhi University, at a time when his colleagues at the Delhi School included Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Sukhomoy Chakravarty, Jagdish Bhagwati and Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri. He was also the Founder-editor of Indian Social and Economic History Review a leading Indian history journal. In 1972 he succeeded Sarvepalli Gopal as the Reader of South Asian History, St. Antony's College, Oxford. In 1991 he was appointed as the Ad Hominem Professor of Indian History and Civilisation, St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is very well known for supervising generations of Indian history students at Oxford. Presently he is Emeritus Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford and was until recently the Editor-in-Chief of Autumn Annual, the scholarly journal published by the Alumni Association of Presidency College, Calcutta.
He has been a Guest Professor at numerous universities: they include the University of California, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Yale University Collegio de Maxico, Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes, University of Sydney and University of Perth and a Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
He has also been a Founding-Member of the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi.
He was active in the national movement in the 1940s. As a college and university student living in Calcutta in that decade, and like other freedom fighters and patriots of his generation, he participated in the Quit India Movement (1942).
