Dr Ian Matthew Paton Raeside: 1926-2011
30 January 2011
Ian Raeside joined SOAS in 1954 as an assistant lecturer in linguistics, afterwards becoming Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Gujarati and Marathi. He was appointed Acting Head of Department for the four years prior to his retirement in 1991 and also served as Senior Tutor and Dean of Undergraduate Studies.
Dr Raeside was born in Coventry and educated at King Henry VIII School in that city and afterward Rydal Penros School in North Wales, following evacuation. After one term as student of French at University College, London, then evacuated to Bangor, he was called up and served first in the Welsh Guards and then as an officer in the Intelligence Corps in Egypt and Greece. On resuming his studies at UCL in London he met fellow student Valerie Wall, his wife of 57 years who survives him. They were married in 1953. In 1955 he took his PhD in Medieval French Literature, having at that time already been appointed at SOAS, after which he began his study of his two specialist languages. He was given tenure in 1960.
The bulk of his published work focuses on the close analysis and translation of texts in Marathi. In the case of supposed histories his aim was often to discover their degree of historical reliability. This scholarly approach was one he first developed as a postgraduate student, his PhD thesis establishing that a purported medieval history was largely invented.
His own aptitude for the languages he taught is proven by his winning a prize for his translation of a short story from Marathi after only having studied that language for three years (later published in the collection The Rough and the Smooth). He was also commissioned by UNESCO to translate a novel by the Marathi writer Shripad Narayan Pendse Wild Bapu of Garambi [Garambica Bapu]. His Bibliography Of Mahanubhav Works In Marathi was republished as a separate text in Bombay in 2003 because of its outstanding usefulness to scholars in the field even 40 years after initial publication. His final major work was a translation of Gadyarāja, a Fourteenth Century Marathi Version of the Krsna Legend.
Dr. Raeside visited India on several occasions after his initial year of study leave in 1957 and made many friends there.
In the late 1990s, after several years of happy and active retirement, he began to show signs of the vascular dementia that was eventually the cause of his death, and which caused him to withdraw from contact with his friends and colleagues inside and outside academia in later years.
He died peacefully at home on 30 January 2011.
