REMEMBERING RAVINDER KUMAR 85 classic of historical writing; and the theme that I was especially interested in, namely, the idea of India as a civilisation-state as counterposed to a nation-state. Had there been a formal Annales School in India, Ravinder would have been its doyen. I did try and persuade him to write the replacement volume for Percival Spear in the Penguin History of India, but did not succeed. His interests had by then moved to contemporary studies and he was contemplating a two volume history of the last fifty years. His historical analyses, drawing on liberal and Marxist traditions, grew out of his readings but perhaps even more fundamentally, were rooted in his reflections on life in India and the possibilities of improving the Indian human condition. This was therefore, not only an ideological commitment. For him, as for thoughtful Indian liberals the understanding of Indian society was a necessary pre-condition to changing it. Which is why he was impatient with those who fostered the illiberal. Beyond this perhaps the single most striking feature of Ravinder's thinking was the obvious pleasure he took in exploring ideas. I have sat in on conversations where one saw his mind move like the game of a chess player, generally a few moves ahead. But where he was check-mated he acknowledged it gracefully. But this is at best a limited analogy, because he didn't see himself as a contestant, but literally as an explorer. He was fascinated by the degree to which and the directions in which, one could push ideas. Some people found this a little excessive. But the exploration was in good faith, because he paid no obeisance to intellectual fashions and came down heavily on jargon — whether Marxist or Post-Modernist. What mattered was the argument and the ideas it evoked. His critique of post-Modernists was on occasion quite devastating. But at the same time he was willing to listen to the best of them and engage them in discussion. This was evident in the talks that he organised in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Intellectual freedom was the hallmark of these, but Ravinder did insist on speakers having intellectual credentials. Teen Murti was not opened to pretenders. His appointment as Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library turned out to be a major contribution to the development of the discipline of history in contemporary India, and widened the horizon of this institution. The foundation had already been laid in the form of a fine archive and library. He extended this by making it into a major centre for discussion on history, the social sciences and contemporary culture.