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We were both Professor Sumit Sarkar’s students at Delhi University in the 1990s, and are now teachers there. At his cremation, what was striking was how widely the memory of his teaching had travelled beyond those he had formally taught. An erstwhile student of Botany came because she had heard so much about him from her hostel-mates; friends who had studied Economics or English and had gone to his classes 30 years ago sent messages of condolence. Sumit was a rare combination of an extraordinary teacher and a scholar of immense depth, with each enriching and deepening the other.

So many of his students remember Sumit’s Social History paper on Modern India, and indeed it was a remarkable class, taught in his quiet, persuasive, never flashy manner. His knowledge was immense, but his erudition was never a performance. He had a way of opening up the worlds of history before his students, giving them both the detail and the larger questions that made the detail meaningful. There was a rigorous empiricism at the heart of his teaching, but also a recognition that historical experience could be recovered through art and literature, and through the many kinds of sources that make up the larger archive of history.

That breadth was part of what........

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