Vidya Dhar Mahajan

Mahajan was born in 1913 in the Punjab Province of British India.[3][4] He did M.A. twice – in History at the D.A.V. College, Lahore and in Political Science at the University of the Punjab.[5] In 1945, he completed Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of the Punjab, and later did LL.B. from the University of Delhi.[2][5] He served as a professor of "history and politics" at the Sanatan Dharma College in Lahore, and later as a professor of history at the Pantas U. College in New Delhi and at the Panjab University in Chandigarh.[6][7][8] Mahajan was a member of the Indian History Congress Association.[9] He studied India's early, ancient, modern, and constitutional history. He also studied the Indian nationalist movement and international politics.[7] He was also an advocate at the Supreme Court of India.[3]

He was married to Savitri Shori Mahajan who was a historian. Their daughters Sucheta Mahajan and Mridula Mukherjee are also historians.[10] Sucheta and Mridula have been professors of history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Historical Studies.[10][11] Sucheta had been a visiting scholar at the College of Wooster in Ohio and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Foundation House of Human Sciences) in Paris.[10] Mahajan died on 10 July 1990 at the age of around 77 years.[3]

In The Constitution of India (1954), Mahajan presented an "analytical objective study" of India's constitution. In the book, he also briefly summarized the statements of India's Supreme Court and High Courts on 18 cases which declared the constitutional law on "important controversial matters". Assessing his work, Vidya Dhar Chaturvedi stated that he treated the subject matter in a "logical and lucid" manner. According to Chaturvedi, he was "not wedded to any political dogma, or party" and that his work was "free from doctrinaire or party bias".[12] Assessing Mahajan's International Law (1956), D. R. Bhandari stated that he provided a detailed study of the topics in International Law and presented opinions of various scholars on them. Bhandari, while noting the Joseph Gabriel Starke dismissed the Law of War "in a few pages", opined that Mahajan did "full justice to it". According to Bhandari, Mahajan gave "equal attention to both the aspects of the law of nations viz., the Law of Peace and the Law of War".[13]

Mahajan's Chief Justice Gajendragadkar (1966) was a legal biography of the former Chief Justice of India P. B. Gajendragadkar. K. M. Sharma noted that, along with other biographical details, Mahajan presented a "trend analysis" of his thoughts as unveiled through his judgements in the court and pronouncements outside the court but did not provide an in-depth analysis of his decisions and his other works.[14] Mahajan's General Clauses Acts: Central and States was primarily a Case law study with the General Clauses Act, 1897 as its subject matter. It also covered the Adoption of Law Orders, the English Act, and the State General Clauses Acts. Assessing the book,[note 1] P. M. Bakshi (then-member of the Law Commission of India) stated that Mahajan did not organize the work on a number of clauses under enough headings and sub-headings. Bakshi noted that he also focused on the "questions which are normally dealt with in books devoted to general rules of statutory interpretation", resulting in their limited coverage in the book. The Law Commission of India suggested that the book would have been better titled as "Interpretation of Statute or some similar expression".[15]