His sudden demise has cast a pall of gloom among students, colleagues and academics. He is regarded for his profound contributions to formal linguistics, sociolinguistics and language politics. His intellectual footprint bridged rigorous academic syntax with passionate advocacy for linguistic human rights and multilingualism.

He was born in Kolkata to an academic family. Dasgupta developed fascination with language structure and published his first article on phonology in Indian Linguistics at 18. His father, Arun Kumar Dasgupta, was a historian and his mother, Manashi Dasgupta, was a social psychologist.

He studied linguistics at Sanskrit College in Kolkata. He pursued higher studies at Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute in Pune, before moving to the US. He secured his PhD in Linguistics from New York University in 1980, focusing his doctoral dissertation on Bangla grammar. His doctoral dissertation at New York University, ‘Questions and Relative and Complement Clauses in a Bangla Grammar,’ had contributions in Bangla syntax. His research focused on Bangla syntax, morphology and sociolinguistics. He is highly regarded for developing the substantivist approach to linguistics, a theoretical collaboration with Rajendra Singh.

Over a teaching and research career spanning several decades, Dasgupta taught at Calcutta University, Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, the University of Hyderabad and the Indian Statistical Institute, where he headed the Linguistic Research Unit (LRU) from 2006 to 2018.

My memories of late Probal Dasgupta are located in several disjointed time frames. He was younger than me by about five years. We spent our days in schools and colleges in the same city but as we came from different layers of the community of Bengali bhadraloks, went to different institutions, pursued different callings, and followed different pole stars, we never met in our childhood and youth.

Scene One, Hyderabad: My first and only view of Probal as a person was from a distance. It was sometime in the middle of the 1980s. A small crowd of students had gathered around him outside the dining hall of what was then called the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (Hyderabad). He was so absorbed talking to some research students of English language about the importance of studying the texts of Galileo Galilei for mastering the spirit of scientific methods that he didn’t even notice that a few uninvited students from the department of Russian language were also drawn towards him. He did not notice us but me and my friend Amol Padwad saw and heard him.

Scene two, Mewala Maharajpur, Faridabad: Towards the end of the same decade as one of the participants in a workshop organized by the Central Party School of CPI in a building then under construction for what would subsequently become the Joshi-Adhikari Institute of Social Studies, I had the pleasant and honourable experience of introducing a paper by Probal on the evolution of the languages of our ruling elites from Sanskrit through Farsi to English, published in Bangla, and exchanging opinions on it with the late Ramvilas Sharma Jee, Randhir Singh Jee and G.J. Ramarao Jee among others. Here again our paths converged, though not physically but rather at the level of taking stock of some facts about our languages. Among the participants Ramvilas Jee already knew Probal personally.

Scene three, Kolkata: sometime in the first decade of the present century I came across his The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome (1993). I started communicating with him through emails. These exchanges soon embraced other areas of common interest; translation, the endangered languages of some of our tribes, Rabindranath Thakur as a linguist…. Shortly afterwards the late Sankar Ray started including the two of us in his numerous circular mails on various issues. The area and frequency of our exchanges widened. There were times when we exchanged the drafts of some of our papers on languages and translation theory. We shared a common interest in the books on the interfaces of mother tongues and father tongues of the people of South Asia by his linguist and musician friend Peggy Mohan.

The latest in this phase of our exchanges was the draft of my attempt to unpack Karl Marx’s observation on translation to the effect that the unequal commodity-and-money exchanges in the markets of commodities are comparable to unequal word-and-meaning exchanges in the markets of translation where texts are transferred from some source languages to some target languages. Probal read it thoroughly with the affection of an Aacharya, suggested some extensions in the domain of etymology and corrected some spellings and typos. This corrected text will go into the editorial apparatus of the forthcoming second revised and enlarged edition of the Bengali translation of the Mathematical Manuscripts and Notebooks of Karl Marx.

After the passing away of Paresh Chattopadhyay and Sankar Ray in quick succession in 2023, our communications lost some of their earlier momentum. Still two subsequent episodes deserve to be mentioned.

The first was his sincere and active efforts to get a dissenting note from Bangladesh on the events of 2024 there, published in some magazine in Kolkata. He was literally relieved when it got published in a local webzine and its English version came out in an online magazine of Delhi. He did not ask for the credentials of the author, did not demand that the views of others must coincide with those of him: be it an issue of truth or falsity in science or that of power or protest in politics. He was always tolerant of me in all of my encounters with him.

The second one was about a cycle of exchanges about a paper of mine on the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha and Karl Marx and their subsequent transformations into many Baudhha Dharmas, Darshanas and many Marxisms. Probal pointed out that a major shortcoming of the paper was its silence on the neo-Buddhisms of South Asia, especially on the political use of a variant of it by the late Bhimrao Ramjee Ambedkar. I conceded and pointed out that I was unable to survey the relevant literature in Marathi and hoped that in future our common friend AmolPadwad of Nagpur may pay attention to it.

We shall miss his expected response to Hindi sahitya Ka AadhaaItihas of Suman Raje that Amol had sent him. We shall dearly miss his sage advice and supporting gestures. He moved in a number of fields: Theoretical and Applied linguistics, Esperanto, Practical Translation and Translation Studies. I do not have the competence to write about his technical contributions in these areas. I hope that his competent students and colleagues will do that when they remember him and carry forward his legacy in the years to come. (IPA Service)