Life & work

Hukam Chand Jain was born in Jaipur on 10 January 1955 to Shri Chandmal Jain and Smt. Raj Devi, the fifth child of a family with deep roots in Kota, where his grandfather had served the princely state as its Bakshi. He grew up and went to school in Jhalawar.

His father worked as a clerk in a government office. There were five brothers and a sister, money was short, and the family went through hard years. They shared everything, he remembers: clothes, books, whatever there was. He credits his brothers with shaping him. One improved his English; another, later a scientist in America, has supported him all his life.

When he was seventeen his father died. His elder brother took charge of his education, and he moved to Jaipur to study history at the University of Rajasthan. In 1976 he completed his M.A. in History and a PG Diploma in Indian Culture.

While still an M.A. student he was selected for a permanent job. For a family short of money it was a blessing, but he felt he was not made for it and did not join. His mother wrote him an angry letter; his brother still says a mother’s scolding is a blessing in disguise. He took a scholarship at Udaipur University instead, and in 1978 completed his M.Phil. on the Jain community of Jaipur.

In 1978 the friend he shared rooms with, a young physics graduate, wrote to say he would take Jain diksha and become a monk. Hukam Chand wrote back urging him to sit the IAS exam instead, to marry, to live in the world. His friend had already made up his mind.

He calls it the turning point of his life. Watching someone set aside every ambition taught him what he still tells his students: knowledge begins where ego ends. He visits his friend, now a Jain muni, two or three times a year, and feels his friend’s blessings have been with him in everything since.

He began teaching at Vijaynagar College, Ajmer, in 1978. In 1982 the Rajasthan Public Service Commission selected him, first in merit, as a college lecturer in History. For eight years after that he cycled to college; the scooter and the car came later, and so did the move from rented rooms to a home of his own.

He spent most of his career at Government College, Kota, where he became head of the History department in 1997; apart from three years at the government college in Bundi (2002–2005), he stayed there until 2013. He was the college’s National Service Scheme officer from 1989 to 1992, and for more than two decades he also counselled students of the Vardhman Mahaveer Open University. Then he became a principal: first at Chhipabarod, then at the Government Commerce College in Kota, and, after retiring from government service in 2015, at Aklank Girls PG College, Kota, until 2019. His last post was Professor at the University of Kota.

In all he taught undergraduates for 36 years, postgraduates for 32 and M.Phil. students for 6. Asked whether he is a teacher or a writer, he answers that he began as a teacher.

His first book came out in the mid-1980s, when he was in his late twenties. At the time there was no serious book on modern world history in Hindi, so his book quickly found readers among civil-services aspirants in Delhi. Writing it was hard: he ordered books from America, improved his English to read them, and sat at his desk eight to ten hours a day with no promise of money. Looking back, he calls that first edition raw, like half-cooked food.

The book kept growing, edition by edition. By 2026 A History of the Modern World had run to 29 Hindi and 18 English editions, and his history of Rajasthan for the Rajasthan Hindi Granth Academy to 36. Three of his books appear in Marathi, a Gujarati translation of his world history was in preparation in 2023, and his works are held in the US Library of Congress.

He still writes by hand, with pen and paper. He once rewrote a page six times; now it takes one or two drafts. On paper, he says, the words come out on their own.

His own Ph.D. (MDSU Ajmer, 2004) studied ‘Itihas Martand’ Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha, the great historian of Rajasthan, and was published in Hindi and English. He has written 18 original research papers on Rajasthan’s history and culture, on subjects such as the Bhattarak tradition and Jain society, has presented papers at more than 25 seminars, and attended a workshop on medieval history at Aligarh. One of his ideas is that the account books (bahi) of medieval Rajasthan can be used to reconstruct the region’s economic history.

He has guided 10 Ph.D. and 19 M.Phil. scholars, most of them on Hadoti, the region around Kota: the coming of the railways, the jagirdari system, the art of its monasteries. His advice to young researchers is to do the fieldwork and go back to original sources.

He has also helped decide what students learn. For 13 years he was convener of the University of Kota’s Board of Studies in History, which sets the syllabus. He led the committee that revised Rajasthan’s Class 10 history textbook, and he is a member of the Academic Council of the University of Rajasthan.

He is President of the Aklank Shodh Sansthan in Kota, which publishes old manuscripts and promotes Jain literature, and in 2022 Jain World Mission honoured him as Jain Dharma Ratna.

Even so, he says his faith is not in ringing temple bells but in people. Since childhood he has not been able to bear seeing anyone in pain. Of all the people he has met, he says, hardly two in a hundred turned out to be bad.