In the numerous tributes after his death, Jim (he was always “Jim”) Masselos was celebrated for his modesty, kindliness, generosity and scholarship, as well as his commitment to the two cities he loved – Sydney and Mumbai. “His legacy endures,” an Indian scholar and friend wrote, “in the scholars he mentored, the readers he inspired and the streets he chronicled with such care.”
Jim was born in Townsville, Queensland, to George and Fofo Masselos, the only son among four siblings. His parents owned a café in Ingham, 110 kilometers north of Townsville. In 1947, troubled by the flooding in Ingham the previous year, the family moved to the Sydney suburb of Rose Bay where they again had a café. Jim attended a government primary school and then the celebrated Sydney Boys’ High School, a selective government school. As a clever student in a family that valued education, he went on to the University of Sydney in 1957.
At university he became captivated by films, an interest that he retained for life. “I remember my first year,” he told an interviewer, “and the Film Group was showing all these incredible movies …and it just blew my mind as a young kid.” Among the films was Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which helped spark his growing interest in India. The Sydney University Film Group, of which he was president in 1960, eventually provided the foundation for the Sydney Film Festival.
As an undergraduate, Jim gravitated towards History, where he took courses from Marjorie Jacobs (1915-2013), who later became the second woman to hold a chair at Sydney University. Her teaching was “new and for us, pristine fresh,” he wrote. She downplayed the role of colonial governors and imperial policy and stressed the centrality of colonized peoples. Students were “attracted by her intellectual adventurousness and by how she made the alien familiar – and exciting.” An association and friendship began which ended only with her death.
With her support, he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship to Mumbai (Bombay, as it was then) University. He arrived in Mumbai during the monsoon of 1961 from an Air India flight that took two and half days and came down in Darwin, Jakarta, Singapore and Madras. He wrote that he “instantly liked Mumbai.”
Enrolled in the Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture at St Xavier’s College, he was assigned Professor William Coelho (1905-72) as his supervisor. Professor Coelho was a practised archival historian who had written a book about a south Indian dynasty of the 14th century. By the time, Jim arrived, Professor Coelho’s interests had shifted to Indian constitutional history, an area relevant to the roots of nationalism, the topic Jim explored for his PhD thesis.
Professor Coelho’s wide knowledge of Mumbai’s libraries, archives and the people who ran them were invaluable to someone beginning a PhD in a new country. Jim dedicated his first book, Towards Nationalism (1974), to Professor Coelho and in the preface, he thanked him and Professor Jacobs for “stimulus and encouragement when it was much needed and … friendship when it was equally wanted.”
Though the stipend from his studentship was meagre, there were benefits from living in a student hostel in B Road next door to Churchgate railway station in the heart of the city. Old Mumbai was all around him, and Jim, who never owned a car, walked everywhere. His walks and love of photography enabled him to develop a fine-tuned sense of the spaces, streets and architecture of the city, which he enhanced with every visit.
One of the characteristics that endeared him to his Indian friends and acquaintances was that he had lived as an Indian student and taken his PhD from an Indian university. A number of the people he met in the Churchgate hostel became friends for life.
After the award of his PhD in 1964, Jim returned to a lectureship at Sydney University in 1965 and remained there for his entire career. Entranced by the two cities, Mumbai and Sydney, he left his mark on both, partly because his interests were so wide and deep. He collected art – Indian, English and Australian – and loved films (though not Bollywood, one of his admirers has pointed out).
At Sydney University, Jim quickly established himself as a kindly, inspiring, demanding teacher. From his first undergraduate classes in the 1960s to his last PhD student in 2007, he built a reputation for “true collegiality and a generosity of spirit.” He invited classes to his home for end-of-term meals and suggested ways eager undergraduates could broaden their experience by joining a film society or working on student publications, as he had done.
He was one of the founders of the South Asian Studies Association in 1970 and crucial in the creation of its highly successful journal South Asia, now in its 54th year. He was on the council of the Asian Studies Association of Australia from 1982-90 and created and oversaw its arts committee. He was a founding member of the Asian Arts Society of Australia and regularly contributed to its TAASA Review. His last article was in 2024 – on matchbox labels.
He was fascinated with the visual, and as early as 1967, he was organising and contributing to exhibitions of art and photography. That first exhibition, A Survey of Indian Art, was held in the Fisher Library and required participation from various local institutions and private collectors. Some of these events produced handsome catalogues such as Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in Indian Art (1997). He edited or contributed to at least eight such publications and exhibitions. A display of textiles at Sydney University in 1986 was followed by Divine and Courtly Life in Indian Painting (1992), the prize-winning Goddess: Divine Energy (2006), which featured items from Jim’s collection, and finally Indian Empire: Multiple Realities and The Great Empires of Asia (both 2010). He donated 280 items, including photographs, artworks and textiles, to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and 80 paintings, prints and textiles to the National Gallery of Victoria in 2024.
He collaborated with Narayani Gupta and the legendary publisher Ravi Dayal to produce the beautiful volume, Beato’s Delhi, resurrecting the photographs of Delhi taken in 1858 by Felice Beato in the aftermath of the city’s recapture by the British during the great revolt (the so-called “Indian mutiny”) the previous year. He was a welcome and generous collaborator – with scholars such as Jackie Menzies at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Narayani Gupta in Delhi, Naresh Fernandes and Sujata Patel in Mumbai, Rachel Dwyer in the UK and Alice Thorner in France, as well as with Australian colleagues.
He published two single-authored books – Towards Nationalism in 1974 and the much used, revised, reprinted and photocopied Nationalism on the Indian subcontinent: an introductory history in 1972.
But his forte was the essay. He published more than fifty, according to one count, and he edited and inspired half a dozen collections, arising from thematic conferences. He often used vignettes – close inspection of small things – to throw light on great events and processes. He wrote about petty clerks, religious occasions, and riots, as well as the national movements that increasingly drove a wedge between Hindus and Muslims.
In 2017, Jim’s admirers staged a conference in Mumbai in his honour. The collected essays became Bombay before Mumbai (2019). In his introduction, Professor Prashant Kadambi, a talented urban historian, celebrated Jim as a forerunner of “a new kind of urban social history.” Mumbai was not merely a “colonial port city,” invented and moulded by the imperial power. Jim’s contribution was to have uncovered the neighbourhoods and the social groups, varied in religion, caste, class and language, that shaped Mumbai as a cosmopolitan city. The British imperial power was only a participant in the shaping.
For all his love of Mumbai, Jim acquired only basic Marathi and Hindi. When he arrived in Mumbai in 1961, the city was multi-lingual, with Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Hindi and English all commonly heard in the streets and in the hostel in B Road, Churchgate. There was no pressing need to learn a language, and later, time was eaten up by professional responsibilities and irresistible historical questions that could be tackled in English. As another admirer wrote about Jim’s essay on Bombay’s unique time zone (“Bombay Time/Standard Time”), which the city retained till 1955, “the cosmopolitan city of Bombay [was different] from the rest of India.”
From youth into middle age, Jim was a smoker. The mental picture many of his friends carry from early days was the sturdy, bearded figure of Jim, his bag (jhola) over his shoulder and one hand perhaps fumbling for his blue packet of Gauloises. He later gave up smoking, but not the jhola. Walking in Mumbai meant a person might need a water bottle or, more likely, one might spot a book, newspaper or piece of street art that needed to be bought.
His house in the Sydney suburb of Stanmore became an archive, a gallery and library. Friends spoke of the need “to skip and jump over these piles of books lying on the floor and find a comfortable chair that was empty.” Only a portion of his collection has found its way to appropriate galleries, libraries or archives.
In Australia, his colleagues and friends had convened a conference in his honour in February 2020, just as Covid hit. An old friend noted that the event elicited from him “a sheepish smile” and she detected “a sense of pride and fulfilment that his colleagues had honoured him.” In India, the number of warm tributes after his death was rare for a foreign academic. The Asiatic Society of Bombay, which had made Jim a fellow, convened a memorial meeting attended by the Australian consul-general in Mumbai.
A former faculty member of St Xavier’s College wrote that “Mumbai bids farewell to a true friend, whose words ensured that its stories – ordinary and extraordinary – would never be forgotten.” A younger Indian admirer paid a compliment of one walker to another: “his writings make me walk a little slower, [to] notice a crumbling cornice, imagine a long-vanished tram.”
