Ranjeeta Dutta, Professor of History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, besides being a very conscientious teacher and colleague, was a distinguished researcher who enriched the discipline with her innovative perspectives and extensive fieldwork. Her passing on October 25 at the age of 56 after a brief illness has left her vast number of students, colleagues in several institutions like the Lady Shri Ram College, Jamia Millia Islamia and JNU, and admirers in the world of history immensely saddened.A Bengali by birth and culture but with no trace of religious orthodoxy, she bravely chose to engage with religious figures of medieval South India and the traditions associated with them as the field of her doctoral research. She was not content with unearthing and putting together historical facts from the texts in an empirical kind of conventional history; she was more interested in exploring the social context of the origin, evolution and transformation of these traditions over time. This necessitated learning the Tamil language besides Sanskrit. Her book From Hagiographies to Biographies: Ramanuja in Tradition and History (Oxford University Press, 2014), is a masterly exploration emphasising that ‘History’ and ‘Tradition’, far from being binaries, complement each other in recovering the past. The past of course comprises much more than an ‘objective’ record of events and archeological discoveries; it also comprises very diverse traditions, memories, legends, myths, mythologies, formation and assertion of identities: religious, ethnic or linguistic, folklores and so on; some of these evolve, some are forged, others are invented and foisted, all getting integrating into the vastness of the ‘Past’. It was in search of this past that Ranjeeta had immersed herself with illuminating results. She brought home the hagiographical figure of Ramanuja to a historical person and the immense complexity of the history of Śrīvaiṣṇavism in South India between the 12th and 15th centuries. She brought imagination to bear on understanding history and its ‘facts’. The last conference she had attended in June this year at Jena in Germany was on ‘Social Imagination’. Her other interests were towns, urban centres and the notion of urbanisation. She analyzed the Koil Olugu – the traditional chronicle of the Ranganathaswamy temple at Srirangam and showed that far from the firmly held view that it was an old almost eternal pilgrimage centre, it was constantly evolving as a town with many layers underneath. Another basic historical theme that greatly interested her was the problem of periodisation, constantly questioning the universality of the tripartite periodisation which is nonetheless universally applied by historians.In teaching, researching history and in her daily life, Ranjeeta was immaculately secular even as pressures on her grew to dilute her secularism to secure her position in the profession. A fascinating anecdote from her fieldwork was the discovery of two Muslim ‘goddesses’ being ensconced in Hindu temples at Melkote and Srirangam. The one in Melkote has now been hidden but not in Srirangam where there is a festival for her. On that occasion the idol is apparently dressed in salwar-kameez and prasada is made. We don’t know how long Hindutva will let her survive. Besides being an outstanding teacher and researcher, Ranjeeta proved to be an excellent Editor of the renowned Medieval History Journal, published by Sage. She had joined it as a member of the Editorial Collective in 2017, but over the past five or six years had virtually taken over the whole spectrum of tasks associated with producing an international journal: identifying scholars for peer review of contributions, pursuing them for response – the toughest of all tasks – getting her colleagues to edit them, corresponding with personnel at Sage and the post-production and distribution. It was tough, but she proved tougher. She had brought it up to a state where as recently as a week ago the journal received fulsome compliments from a supposedly global scholarly development group and an offer to purchase it. At the journal, it was taken as a compliment to Ranjeeta’s competence and dedication, with no intention of accepting the offer. Harbans Mukhia taught history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.