Abstract
Rabindra Ray (1948–2019)
Courtesy: Om Routray
Dr Rabindra Ray passed away on 15 January 2019. Anyone familiar with the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics would fondly recall this legendary teacher, thinker and poet who taught us the significance of life beyond classroom.
What I learned from our conversations and deep engagement with the courses he taught in the Department of Sociology—Sociological Theory, Sociology of Science and Research Methods—was how important it is to distinguish between rhetoric and polemics. 1 He would caution us not to get ensnared by rhetoric. His own narrative style was poetic and profound. Often, he would share his poems with us over cups of coffee. A listen-in to his talk in the series ‘In Conversation’ on YouTube clearly reveals that he wanted to introduce students to philosophical anthropology, urging students ‘to take the everyday seriously’ and to make it the subject of theoretical analysis. 2 His influential book on the ideology of Naxalites drew on his own life experiences.
His extraordinary contribution as a teacher lay in encouraging us to simultaneously read and think. When I would complain that I just stared blankly at pages for days on end, he would laugh and say: ‘You work when you think. You write when you think. Writing is not about concepts, articles, clauses and prepositions. Writing is about being able to think.’ How do you think? Is there a method to thinking? He would often tell us not to fall into the trap of saying that everything is a construct: ‘Things exist. Think about “how?”’ I remain grateful to a teacher and a philosophical anthropologist who taught us to develop our ‘hows’—not only in the realm of conventional sociological topics but those that grew out of mundane everyday affairs from the commonsensical to the personal. I now find that the book of life that he spread out before us serves my pedagogy well today.
By the time this tribute is read by fellow sociologists, we know who is heading the world’s largest democracy, and we will continue to debate on the rise of populism and the decline of the Left in Bengal. I cannot help but recall a conversation in 2014 when Dr Ray, with a wicked grin, asked me if I was going to vote for the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC). We had a heated conversation about the rise of populism. Dr Ray was right in perceiving that Bengal would see the advance of right-wing politics while I was naive and maybe hopeful about the future. Unfortunately, I cannot tell ‘Sir’ that he was prescient about the ascent of the right wing.
Rabindra Ray walked us through difficult times in our lives without hesitating to disagree with our views. As I look back, I thank him for not always concurring with us because he taught us how to disagree with civility. As a student, and now a teacher, I remain grateful to him for teaching me ‘how’ to listen, ‘how’ to disagree and the need for a dialogic mode of pedagogy. He would often guffaw and say, ‘Do not give sermons. The classroom is a place for dialogue’.
As a final tribute to a remarkable teacher, I conclude on the note that many of us, his former students, now bring his learnings into our classrooms and even though we may fail in our attempts at philosophical anthropology today, we will not give up.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Dr Subhadeepta Ray and Dr Amiya Kumar Das, both from the Department of Sociology, Tezpur Univerity, for their inputs and suggestions.
1
See Ray, Rabindra in this issue. ‘The teaching of darshan and its purpose.’ Translated from the Hindi by Satish Deshpande, 422–430.
