There was no condolence message from either the President of India Ramnath Kovind or Prime Minister Narendra Modi, although he was Governor of Rajasthan in the very early 1990s and was honoured by the former President of India, Pratibha Patil with Padma Vibhushan in 2009. No less gullible has been the national media which did not even carry the news of his demise.

Chattopadhyayaya did his masters in philosophy, LL.B and Ph.D at the University of Calcutta and Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. Grapevine had it that he wished to do his thesis with Karl Popper as his supervisor in Ph.D dissertation, but unfortunately for Chattopadhyay, Popper was then on a visiting scholarship in the USA. Among the 35 books he authored some 13 are rated high in the academia. Among them are Individuals and Societies: A Methodological Inquiry(1967), History, Individuals and World (1976), Rupa, Rasa O Sundara (in Bengali-1980), Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx: Integral Sociology and Dialectical Sociology (1988), Anthropology and Historiography of Science (1990), Induction, Probability and Skepticism (1991) and Sociology, Ideology and Utopia(1997). He was a Life Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Member of the International Institute of Philosophy, Paris.

He rose to heights during the ascendancy of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, breaking out of the conservative shackles of once powerful Congress ‘Syndicate’ led by S Nijalingappa, S K Patil, Atulya Ghosh, K Kamaraj Nadar and the like in the morrow of post-Nehru years. Mrs Gandhi picked up progressive-minded scholars into the new Congress –then coined by the media as Indira Congress – like Chattopadhyay when he was professor of philosophy at the Jadavpur University. Chattopadhyay headed the influential think tank of West Bengal that included Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, Saugata Roy and Subrata Mukherjee. But the sunrise that happened suddenly ended in an early sunset for the advent of Sanjay Gandhi during emergency.. Chattopadhyaya failed to fit in to the authoritarianism of Mrs Gandhi and silently walked out of political arena.

He went back to academia and founded the Indian Council of Philosophical Research in 1981 and was the founder editor of the Journal of ICPR, Sandhan . While his treatise on comparative analysis of Sri Aurobindo and Marx remains highly controversial and there being little scope on highlighting them here in this obituary, his last book, Sociology, Ideology and Utopia, examines the epistemological and methodological implications of induction and probability. Opposed to foundationalism and the thesis of certainty of human knowledge, he has defended a qualified form of fallibilism and constructive kind of skepticism.

Chattopadhyaye will be remembered as chairman of the National Commission on Teachers (1983-85) that brought out the seminal document ‘The Teacher and Society’ that cautioned against the ominous culture of growth of vested interests in the teaching community which has been treating parents of students as clients. ‘Our enquiries often revealed utter disillusionment of the public with teacher performance.

This was due to two factors, as pointed out .(i) the pre-occupation of teachers with private e tuitions and income-generating activities rather than with efficient classroom teaching, and(ii) increasing politicisation of educational institutions and teachers' organisations, with teachers politicking and having no qualms in joining bands with the forces of disruption and indiscipline on the campuses’. Devastating the money-spinning propensities of teachers thriving on roaring private tuition that helped hundreds of teachers become nouveau riche , the Commission asked the teaching community: "Where is the teachers 'accountability' and 'duty- mindedness'?"

The Chattopadhyay panel focused also on the need for a new policy of 'decentralisation' in educational administration. ‘While increasing state control over non-Government institutions through the grant-in-aid device had definitely seemed to give a sense of greater security to the teachers, paradoxically it had also vitiated the climate of aided institutions to such an extent that their teachers were no longer inclined to take their work seriously’. About the government institutions, the panel observed ‘the stranglehold of bureaucratic control and its remedial suggestion of rescuing them from the cobrahold of anti-education bureaucracy by giving them ‘a greater autonomy and by making them answerable to a properly constituted managing committee.’

Several universities in India conferred honorary D.Litt. degrees on him in recognition of his scholarship and academic leadership. The ICPR Silver Jubilee Life-Time Achievement Award for the year 2010 was conferred on him. (IPA Service)