Social Scientist completed forty years of publication in the year 2012.
To mark the occasion, collections of essays on specific topics, culled
from past issues of the journal, are being published -under a series
titled 'From the Pages of Social Scientist*'.*
The present book, Tributes, is a collection of obituary articles
published in the journal from 1983 to 2013. For reasons that are not
very clear, Social Scientist published no obituaries until 1983, that
is, for the first eleven years of its existence. And even after it
started publishing obituaries, it was not systematic in paying tribute
to all those who deserved homage. Sometimes, those entrusted with the
task of writing the obituary could not produce it in time; sometimes the
lags in publication were such that an obituary seemed pointless as it
would appear too long after the death of the person being remembered;
sometimes there simply was nobody who could be successfully approached
to write an obituary; and sometimes the person being remembered was too
important a figure on the Left for a potential obituary writer to feel
equal to the task.
The list of omissions is striking. There are, for instance, no
obituaries on intellectual stalwarts of the Left political movement like
B.T. Ranadive, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Sundarayya and M.
Basavapunnaiah. And the coverage of the lives of artists and creative
writers has been generally very poor. The former set of omissions could
be because potential authors thought that the task itself was quite
daunting; the latter set of omissions could be because the number of
persons capable of writing insightfully about such creative
personalities was limited. The tributes collected in this book are also
of very uneven lengths, scope and quality. Some, as in the case of
Susobhan Sarkar, Ravinder Kumar and Kitty Menon, are long and
wide-ranging, while others, even for persons of great importance for the
Left, are extremely brief. Nonetheless, the volume, for all its
omissions and oddities, celebrates the contributions of some of the most
remarkable men and women who have shaped the life of this nation, or
helped the formation of the Left intellectual tradition.
