Ram Pande

Ram Pande (September 1945 – 17 September 2019) was an Indian historian and civil servant.

Pande was born at Bhusawar in Rajasthan's Bharatpur district in September 1945. He did his master's degree from the University of Cambridge in the UK and his Ph.D. from the University of Rajasthan in India. The doctoral supervisor for his Ph.D. was Arthur Llewellyn Basham, and the subject of his doctoral thesis was "A Social and Political History of the State of Bharatpur upto 1826". He pursued his D.Litt with "The History of Mauritius" as the subject of research. He spoke multiple languages including French, Marathi, Persian, and Rajasthani languages. Between 1967 to 1974, Pande taught at the Meerut University in Uttar Pradesh and at several colleges in Rajasthan. From 1975 to 1997, he had worked as a "senior civil servant" for the government of Rajasthan. He had served as the "senior research officer" at the Rajasthani government's Department of Labour. Pande died on 17 September 2019 at the age of nearly 74 years.

Pande was of the view that Mewar State's Bijolia movement of 1897 was Rajasthan's first agrarian movement. He shed light on Rajasthan Seva Sangh's role in mobilizing the peasants against the oppression of landlords in the Bijolia movement. He provided a study of the origin of the peasants' struggle against the authorities and landlords. He identified the "excessive taxation", "maladministration", "rapacity of the officials", and the "atrocities committed by the Jagirdars" on the peasants in Alwar, Bikaner, Marwar, and Shekhawati as the root causes for the "agrarian unrest" in those areas of Rajasthan. He inquired into the Bhils' struggle against the British government and Udaipur State's Maharana, the roots of which he traced back to 1823, and pointed out the "census work" which was done in 1881 as one of the reasons for the "dissatisfaction among the Bhils". According to Pande, the Rajasthan Seva Sangh and the Vanvasi Seva Sangh supplemented their struggle from 1920 to 1946.