SOCIAL SCIENTIST chose to switch from science to history. So history did not come to him accidentally. The choice was a deliberate one. Even when he was writing history, his training in science hovered in the background. The choice was not out of a purely intellectual interest, but was as much conditioned by trying to understand how Indian society has functioned in the past and how the past links to the present. I met him in the early 1960s and he was working on social history. Although his focus was on western India in colonial times, he had a Braudelian sweep in integrating early and later periods. We would compare notes on the recent and the distant past. Nevertheless I was surprised to hear that he had joined the excavation at Ujjain and spent a season at the dig. And excavations in the 1960s were tough going, often in biting cold weather and living at a level of minimum comfort. He had recognised that archaeology was going to play a major part in providing data on early social and economic history and he wanted to get a hang of the discipline and its application. For a modern historian this was quite extraordinary. This sense of searching for the tangible reality of evidence from the past stayed with him in much that he thought and wrote. For the historian archaeology provides an immediate link between the past and the present in a manner more insistent and direct than other kinds of source materials. I recall that in my first serious experience of excavation at the Harappan site of Kalibangan in Rajasthan, this link was almost exhilarating. One was actually touching, feeling, handling the objects that people had handled four thousand years ago — the pottery, the mirror in the hand of a woman buried in a grave, a brick with the finger marks of the mason... The historical fact was not an abstraction. There is in this link a long distance view of Indian history in which the past assumes an immediate presence. I am not suggesting that his sensitivity to Indian social history was because of his experience of digging at Ujjain, but possibly it reinforced the need to see connections that historians tended to ignore and that help towards more incisive readings of the texts. And somewhere in his subconscious it nurtured the notion of the multiple cultural levels of societies in India. His understanding of social history was wide ranging in terms of what went into its making, but at the same time the questions implicit ia his research were very focussed: a rich-peasant society in western India and the ensuing politics, as also the impoverishment of peasants who were not kulaks; the essay on the tensions in the urban history of Lahore just prior to the Rowlatt Act, which has since become a