SOCIAL SCIENTIST
deliberately contrary positions that sharpened your own, or by meeting an over-strongly held position through a mild, self-deprecatory and often elusive indirection. Or, carried away on the volatile current of his own thought in what seemed like a circling conversation, he would neatly recover the edge just as you thought he had forgotten what the conversation was about. He could maintain disagreements in intellectual and political opinions without belittlement, rancour or aggression, and at the same time articulate the very terms of the difference with remarkable precision and objectivity. This unique combination of passion and detachment, this capacity to challenge and to support made every interchange with him both inspirational and sustaining.
He understood the academic institution as a space to think, read, discuss, digress, as a space of expectation and trust but not pressure, as an expanding milieu of conversation and scholarly interchange, of an unannounced but assiduously cultivated reciprocity and rich relationship between institutional concerns and diverse individual projects.
His was an intellectual voice that came from an older set of concerns, an earlier generation, but which compellingly and constantly engaged with the new. He had a vision, a vision of enduring and hospitable institutions, of intellectual comradeship, academic excellence, ethical and socially relevant work, a vision that was peculiar to his generation perhaps, but he succeeded in living it and in transmitting its strength and integrity to others even in adverse times. For him intellectual freedom lay as much in the giving as in the taking, in allowing differences to co-exist yet firmly drawing the line when it came to right-wing authoritarianism.
Ravinder Kumar's demise has left many full hearts and an empty space that no one else can fill. For me, knowing him was an unrepeatable privilege, understanding what that knowing was about will take much longer.