My first encounter with professor J.P.S. Uberoi was after completing my B.A. in history at a lecture designed to entice potential students into the Department of Sociology at the University of Delhi. He was mesmerising in his elucidation of ‘sign, symbol, and symptom’ and was successful in converting several students, including me, to sociology. I went on to pursue my M.A. there and remained under his guidance as my research supervisor for 13 years, despite my inclination to work full-time in the theatre. This was due to his mesmerising personality, his overturning of my former worldview, and my desire to contribute to the advancements in the new fields of thought he had unveiled.During most of his teaching years, he was clad in shorts – with the addition of a string tie on more formal occasions. If asked, he would retort that it was to denote that he was a professor and not a bureaucrat. He was certainly not a bureaucrat nor average in any respect, ever blending his puckish sense of humour with professorial gravity. Ready for any adventure, he once accompanied me on a bicycle trip in the environs of Poona where we ended up sleeping on a dining table under a narrow roof in a raging storm.On another occasion, he came unannounced to Poland – then on the other side of the iron curtain – and managed to track me down in a remote mountain village where I was performing, intriguing everyone with his snug black turban. Those were the days without mobile phones or computers when landlines didn’t function, and trains were choc-a-bloc. Being vacation time, no seats were available on the trains, but I am told his compelling eyes worked their magic with the ticket lady.He was the only academic I have ever known whose life and thought were wholly united. Occasionally, one would ask what one considered a private non-academic question and would be immediately jolted back into considering the matter at hand through the more rigorous prism of analytical thought. As Shiv Visvanathan once said, he could talk for an hour on the sociology of the tomato that he discovered on his plate. Even when in hospital during his last days, when his body was failing, his mind remained ever sharp, actively analysing the medical industrial complex he found himself a part of and trying to educate his nurses about what they were supposed to be doing.The range of subjects that engaged him and that he wrote about were phenomenal. They ranged from the atom bomb to socio-linguistics, from Sikhism and Islam to the structure of the modern university, from swaraj to the life of things, from the nature of frontiers to the theory of colours, from martyrdom to the industrial worker, from civil society to the semiotics of modern science, from the theory of Trobriand potlatch to Andarabi social structure, from the rainbow to the Eucharist. I absolutely agree with a reviewer of one of his books who wrote that his work was of such originality that there was nothing with which it could be compared.What turned my personal worldview was particularly his analysis of Western civilisation and the modern university which most took for granted at the time. It was eye-opening for me to be able to look at modern Western Europe, its systems of knowledge and educational institutions (to which we ourselves belonged) through an independent prism of sociological scrutiny. We learnt that the same binoculars through which European anthropologists had looked at non-Western cultures could be turned the other way.He established, despite much opposition, a European Studies Programme at the Department of Sociology. This was not intended to be yet another variation of regional studies but a laboratory for new Indian perspectives on Western theories and practices with sociology and social anthropology viewed and understood as a single spectrum. Sadly, this project remained misunderstood and unappreciated and was abandoned by the next generation of departmental governance.Uberoi held one of the longest professorships at the Delhi School of Economics and, as a result, nurtured several generations of students with equal doses of love and severity. Students loved and flocked around him even if they didn’t quite understand what he was all about. They were simply fascinated by the phenomenon of such a man. He was witty, charming, and uncompromising. His upstanding principles and aversion to compromise cost him many opportunities which others, less burdened by ethics, would have eagerly seized.For instance, if he received an invitation to lecture on a subject that demonstrated the inviting party’s unfamiliarity with his views, he would refuse to go. Many of his research students were reduced to tears by this same refusal to take shortcuts. While other supervisors were eager to usher their students rapidly through their research degrees in order to swell their bags, Uberoi would inevitably hamper the progress of his own through this same refusal to make concessions.Despite this, all his pupils have continued to love and admire him throughout their careers, even those who abandoned him for less demanding mentors. His refusal at academic and ethical compromise made him demanding and difficult, but he was simultaneously a most caring and gentle human being who went out of his way to help not only students but many others in times of difficulty. However, if one needed a book that he possessed he would refuse to lend it, saying he wanted you to find out where another copy existed in the country. Despite being short of means he could be extremely generous. He once invited a professor from the UK to a sumptuous dinner at a grand hotel in Delhi and spent three weeks’ of his salary doing so. When visiting the same professor much later in London, his English counterpart, blessed with a far grander income, thought it would be impossible to return the favour in one evening but they went out to try and succeeded at four in the morning.Uberoi was born in Lahore, the son of Mohan Singh Diwana, an eminent scholar of Punjabi literature and culture. Part of his unique intellectual ability owes to his having started out in electrical engineering at the University College, London, and then switching to anthropology at Manchester University after discovering from reading a friend’s anthropological paper that this was something he did ‘all the time’. Thus, his intellect combined the precision of a scientific mind with humanistic imagination and observation. The intricacy of some of his analytical figures are indeed reminiscent of circuit diagrams.His life partnership with the esteemed professor Patricia Uberoi was not only a relationship of shared domesticity but of a shared, mutually stimulating intellectual space.He is a man who has done great service to the cause of independent sociology in India, to the swarajist quest, and to the debunking of commonly held academic assumptions. May his work continue to inspire us all.Khalid Tyabji was a student of Professor Uberoi during his M.A., M.Phil, and doctoral research on European science from 1977 to 1992. Primarily known for his performances on stage, street, and in special institutions, he has occasionally appeared in films. Additionally, he served as a visiting professor at the National School of Drama in Delhi for several decades. Tyabji is also a translator and co-editor of Acting with Grotowski (2015) and has compiled and edited Professor Uberoi’s Mind and Society, published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
