Listen to this article:

On April 28, three civil society organisations in Bengaluru organised a public discussion on the book Umar Khalid and His World, edited by Anirban Bhattacharya, Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and published by Three Essays Collective. In the days prior to the event, a BJP MP urged the Bengaluru Police to cancel permission, while right-wing groups threatened to disrupt proceedings. Fortunately, the local authorities held firm, and the book discussion went ahead. What follows is the text of historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha’s talk that day.

The editors of Umar Khalid and His World must be congratulated on bringing together a rich and diverse set of contributions in this volume. Apart from Umar Khalid himself, whose writings constitute about one-fourth of the book, the contributors include journalists, activists, academics, legal scholars, scriptwriters and poets. They are variously young, old and middle-aged, and men as well as women. They come from diverse religious backgrounds: Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and atheist.

The literary genres represented here include the essay, the memoir, the book review, the personal letter and the poem. Though the bulk of the volume is in English, there are a fair number of pieces in Hindi. The editors have curated the collection well, and written an excellent introduction to the book as a whole, as well as shorter introductions to the individual sections.

Unlike the editors, I have never met Umar Khalid. I have read about him, of course, and more recently read something by him that is not in this book. This is his three-hundred-page doctoral dissertation on the social and environmental history of what is now the state of Jharkhand. My own short contribution to this volume describes the structure of the thesis and its many merits. My talk, however, draws on the other and more substantial pieces in this volume. To my mind, they richly reveal at least eight different Umar Khalids.

First, they show us Umar Khalid as a thinker........

© The Wire