Career and works
Datta was Professor Emeritus, Kurukshetra University, where he set up the Department of History in what was to become the newly founded state of Haryana, after leaving a lucrative position in government service. Besides a short stint of teaching at Kirori Mal College, Delhi University, in his early career, he was also a Visiting Professor at a number of universities including Moscow, Leningrad, and Berlin, and Resident Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Datta is the author of several books on the history of India. In 1967, he published Amritsar: Past and Present. Two years later, on the 50th anniversary of the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre,[5] he wrote the pioneering work, Jallianwala Bagh[6] (recently republished as a Penguin edition with a new introduction by Nonica Datta), hailed as a landmark classic on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.[7] Later, he edited some of the British reports on the massacre as New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919: Vol. VI and VII of Disorders Inquiry Committee Evidence (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975).
His other works included A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics, Being the Selected Correspondence of the Late Dr. Syed Mahmud (1974); Madan Lal Dhingra and the Revolutionary Movement (1978); History of Kurukshetra (1985); Sati: A Historical, Social, and Philosophical Enquiry Into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (1988); Maulana Azad (1990); Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Sarmad (2007); Gandhi and Bhagat Singh (2008). Datta often wrote for The Tribune, for which he started writing since 1946 as a student in Lahore. "His column 'Off the Shelf' in The Tribune won him great accolades."[8] Later he authored The Tribune: 130 Years: A Witness to History, a comprehensive book relating to the 130-year history of The Tribune,[9] a publication founded in 1881 by Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh commented "I compliment all those who have helped shape The Tribune into the newspaper it is today—the generations before us and the current torch-bearers of this fine institution. I congratulate the author of ‘A Witness to History’ Professor V.N. Datta for writing such a fine book."[10]
Ramachandra Guha called VN Datta a "pioneering historian of Indian nationalism and Modern Indian History", and a "profoundly decent and generous man".
"Like all good historians," Guha recalled, "he was driven by curiosity, not by ideology. His memory is that of a first-rate professional historian, who knew the tools of the craft and had mastered them." Guha said Datta was "comradely, collegial and friendly", which was at odds with the usual hierarchical structure in academics. "His command over languages – particularly over Urdu and Punjabi – meant he didn’t rely on English language sources, unlike many other historians. He wrote both on the non-violent streams as well as the revolutionary stream. If you see his writings on the freedom struggle, he wrote on Madan Lal Dhingra, Bhagat Singh, but also on Gandhi. Because he knew Urdu, he also wrote on (Maulana Abul Kalam) Azad and (Muhammad) Iqbal," Guha said. "He also did a very important anthology of documents on Jallianwala Bagh. That’s also the duty of a historian – to collect documents and make them available for all scholars, not just for yourself," Guha said."[11]
