As a person who has rarely shied away from writing lengthy despatches about transparency and accountability in governance, probably causing much boredom even for interested readers, I am suddenly at a loss for words to pay a fitting tribute to my teacher Shreen F. Ratnagar. She was professor of Archaeology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi and a world-renowned expert on the Harappan and Mesopotamian civilisations. After bravely putting up a fight against a life-threatening illness, which was unfortunately detected at an advanced stage, she passed away this May 25, at the young age of 81. Barely a day before, I had spoken to M.S. Ganesh, senior advocate at the Supreme Court and my mentor on matters of law, interpretation of statutes and advocacy for human rights, who was by her side during her final hours. I was hoping against hope that she would recover. Little did I expect that the end would come so soon.Sprinting towards the milestone of senior citizen-hood, I have begun wondering, of late, how more women than men have moulded and influenced my life, personality and career. As a child my parents often said to me- “varna maatra kalisidaatam, guru” which means even if you learnt just one letter of the alphabet from a person, he is your teacher. “Shereen ma’am” as we fondly called her, is one of those who taught me to think and analyse critically, a faculty that I believe has served me well even after I quit academia to pursue an activist’s career in the public sphere.This tribute will not be a summation of her rich and erudite contributions to shaping our understanding of ancient India. That onerous task I leave respectfully to experts in the field because I have remained out of touch with that discipline for almost three decades now. This is more of a personal account of the immense debt of gratitude that I owe to Shereen ma’am.It was early 1989. I was on the threshold of earning my graduate degree in the humanities from Bangalore University. Another noted archaeologist S. R. Rao (whom I met fortuitously during a visit to Lothal for completing an under-graduate project along with my class fellow Shahid Khan and was given a guided tour of the important Harrapan site that he had excavated during the late 1950s) advised me to take up the JNU entrance exam if I wanted to do something worthwhile with my life. After touring with his team in Poondi, Tamil Nadu, picking up palaeolithic tools that lay by the side of rivulets, I wrote the entrance exam for the subject of ancient history. How I got selected in the very first attempt is a mystery to me even today. Our under-graduate syllabus was so outdated, I was not even aware of the names of scholars like Shereen ma’am and several of her illustrious colleagues whom I would eventually study with at JNU’s Centre of Historical Studies (CHS).Come July, I made my first trip ever, outside Karnataka, with my father and took admission at CHS. Even though the monsoon semester had commenced, classes had not yet begun. Barely 20 years old, I was all alone in my twin-sharing hostel room for about a week under the sweltering summer of Delhi, eating hostel food which was so alien to my palate that I dreaded the thought of going through the next meal. In less than 48 hours, homesickness set in. I was frantically writing letters to my parents every day begging to return home at any cost. I thought, I would pursue post-graduate studies in history at some university in Karnataka itself. Thankfully, my folks alerted my paternal cousin sister’s family, also living in Delhi, about my predicament. They did their best to offer comfort and solace but I was quite determined to return home. Then, CHS announced the schedule of classes for that semester. Reluctantly, I decided to attend the first one, promising myself to go to the railway station that very evening to book my return ticket (those were the days before there was public access to internet booking). The first class of the semester was from the compulsory course Ancient Society which Shereen ma’am always taught. Frankly, I confess today, I do not remember what I learnt in those two hours. But I do recall what I did next, like it happened only yesterday. I took a bus from the JNU campus to the Chanakyapuri post office to call up my parents and told them that I had changed my mind. I wanted to stay back and learn everything that CHS had to offer and more. That was the impact that Shereen ma’am’s very first lecture had on my yearning to make sense of our past.Those four months of the first semester passed like a breeze. With a tutorial assignment of considerable length required to be handed in, every 15 days, for each of the four courses I had taken plus the compulsory Sanskrit classes, there was no time to spare for homesickness. Having spent five years at the pre-university and the UG-level studying history as a narrative of kings and queens, the kingdoms and empires they built or squandered away, and a few pages devoted to the accomplishments in the field of literature, art and architecture under their patronage, the study of history as an inquiry into how social formations emerged and transformed over millennia was not just novel, but terribly exciting. The history studies at CHS were about ordinary people like me whose exertions had shaped society, polity, ideologies, culture etc.Also read: Tributes Pour in as Archaeologist Shereen Ratnagar Passes AwayAs a teenager, I had blundered my way through books which claimed that the pyramids of Egypt and Latin America and other similarly grandiose monuments were built by aliens and that we had vimaanas (flying vehicles) which at least one epic villain and some celestial beings used to fly above the heads of lesser mortals (I continue to have those books in my collection as evidence of my misguided teen years).Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.The classes of Shereen ma’am and her colleagues who focused on historical methods – how to conduct inquiries into sources of information and interpret their contents – be it archaeological, literary, epigraphical or numismatic in origin – opened my eyes to evidence-based research replacing fanciful interpretations that had caught my imagination earlier. For example, technological advancement was not always made through ground breaking inventions and discoveries. Exaptation was also a contributory factor to such advancement. In simple terms, exaptation is a process by which one kind of tool developed for a certain purpose and used for millennia is deployed for a completely novel task later on. For example, saddle querns which were used to grind red ochre for cosmetic and artistic purposes became the tools for grinding wheat, barley and other grains which prehistoric communities took to as sources of nutrition. Decades later, when my RTI ‘missionary work’ took me to Cairo, a visit to the pyramids and a short climb up inside the Great Pyramid was enough to make me pity those writers who had desperately tried to take away the credit for such engineering marvels from their own ancestors.Visits to a couple of megalithic tombs in Karnataka before my move to JNU had me in complete awe of those massive structures. So, I decided to select their study as the topic for my M.Phil. thesis and who better than Shereen ma’am to guide me in that endeavour? The number of anthropological works that I had to read to put together the rudiments of a theory to explain why our ancestors invested so much energy and resources on the construction of these massive monuments to the dead would have made any student immersed in that discipline proud. That inter-disciplinary approach could not have been possible without her guidance. From the Hmong funerary customs in Southeastern Asia to the primary and secondary burial ceremonies of the Todas in the Nilgiris, I had to familiarise myself with contemporary pre-modern societies that invest so much energy to commemorate the dead. This cross-cultural approach has continued to serve me even in my current profession- examining what solutions societies devise to combat opacity in government and which systems work better or worse and for what reasons. There is no single policy prescription that can fit all politico-ideological contexts. Every element of good practice has to be adapted to the unique context of each country.Those two years spent earning my M.Phil. degree also helped me understand that archaeological expertise is not dependent on the number of sites one has excavated, a charge that Shereen ma’am’s detractors have often lobbed at her, undeservedly. Of course there is no substitute for field archaeology. That is how evidence of material culture left behind by the inhabitants is unearthed. But that evidence also has to be interpreted in the light of standards and theories developed across the discipline. Otherwise, there would be little difference between the excavation of an ancient site and the digging of ditches and wells. Shereen ma’am’s tutelage helped me appreciate the importance of desk-based archaeological studies.Those two years involved intensive interactions with Shreen ma’am along with other students whose dissertation-related work she was supervising. We would meet formally at the CHS premises regularly and occasionally at her home on campus. She was an excellent host- an attribute of several Parsis whom I have had the good fortune of interacting with over the decades. We would be regaled by the razor sharp witticisms of M. S. Ganesh on current affairs who would sometimes join us. After supper, Shereen ma’am would never forget to tell us, especially the boys, to do the dishes. “I am training you to be a good husband to your future wife,” she would teasingly say. The one thing we missed was getting to know her skills at the piano. She told us that she had stopped playing after a freak accident fractured one of her fingers and the healing had limited the stretch of her palm on the keys. It was our loss as well.After completing the M.Phil. course with a good grade, I must confess, I made a complete ass of myself, not realising the potential of the readings on horses and their remains discovered in archaeological contexts that Shereen ma’am shared with me as a potential topic for my Ph.D thesis. Had I appreciated the importance of that topic, perhaps I would have been in the thick of the debate over whether certain animal bones discovered at various archaeological sites across India belonged to ancient breeds of horses or wild asses and onagers, or simply mules and donkeys. To researchers of a certain ideological disposition every equine bone looks like the remains of a horse which is then used to claim that horse and chariot riding, Sanskrit-speaking communities originated from India and spread across Central Asia, Europe and elsewhere. But the study of animal bones excavated at ancient sites- be it equine or bovine or any other species cannot be undertaken superficially without regard for the inter-disciplinary research which has developed testing standards for proper identification of each species.After a few months of indecisiveness, I opted to take up the study of the emergence of regional polities in the Deccan during the post-Satavahana period (the period characterised by the rule of the Andhra-Ikshvaku, Kadamba, Ganga, Pallava, Vishnukundin, Vakataka dynasties etc. The practice of royalty granting arable lands and entire villages to brahmanas had begun and regional languages were making their appearance in the epigraphical record). To her credit Shereen ma’am never once expressed her disappointment to me. In fact, when my Ph.D supervisor advised me to contact her again for advice on anthropological research on the emergence of the ‘early state’ in various ancient societies, she ungrudgingly suggested several titles and articles. Even this learning has served me well in my current profession- to be critical of those who postulate the social contract theory to explain the emergence of the modern state. Social contract in the form of ‘constitution-making’ does not occur in a politico-cultural vacuum with entire populations emerging out of the woods and caves from a pristine natural state saying, “Hey, let us organise ourselves politically and frame a set of rules about how to acquire and transfer the power to govern ourselves.”The modern state is often grafted on an earlier version of a politically organised society whose foundational principle might not have been democratic always, which in turn might have emerged out of some earlier political formation organised on the basis of some other principle and so on all the way back to the ‘early state’ and beyond. With the exception of Liberia, I am unable to recall any other society which designed its polity on a clean state, but even Liberians brought to the drawing board their own lived experience of slavery in the New World.Moving into a new area for my doctoral research was not the only time I disappointed Shereen ma’am. Towards the end of my days in JNU, I was in a major dilemma about choosing a career to earn my bread and butter. An attempt at seeking employment at CHS itself came to nought. That story is best left for the day I decide to pen my detailed memoir, if at all.Also read: The Chauvinism in Indian Archaeology is Very Evident: Shereen RatnagarIt was Shereen ma’am who alerted me to a vacancy advertisement at one of the premier universities in West Bengal. But unlike many other academics, she never treated me like a protégé, and thank God for that. Her faith in my potential was my undisclosed letter of recommendation. I appeared for the interview and landed the job as well much to the chagrin of temps who had been on the job for several years. Later I visited that campus to familiarise myself with the nature of work I was required to do. But after getting back, I decided overnight to quit academics and take up a job in the human rights advocacy sector. What prompted me to take this decision is also a topic best left for my memoir. But I still have a copy of the letter I wrote to Shereen ma’am then, explaining my reasons for this 90-degree track change. Once again, she nodded her approval and wished me well. Kshamaya dharitri indeed (like the earth who is ever forgiving), that was Shereen ma’am.What has always surprised me is the dignity with which she responded to the venomous criticism, often bordering on filth and almost always lacking in intellectual heft, that was directed at her by the proponents of a certain ideological disposition when she made her views public about the archaeological findings from the erstwhile disputed structure at Ayodhya. That shows emotional maturity which none of the self-proclaimed defendants of our intellectual heritage have ever been able to match. Yet, we, her students, have not done enough to make easily digestible versions of her intellectual output accessible to people who are nose-led to believe that every cylindrical dome shaped stone represents a certain deity or every sculptural depiction of a simian be it in Asia, Europe or Meso-America represents a legendary army general of yore. It was not until a decade ago that I re-established contact with Shereen ma’am and told her about the nature of my work as an RTI activist. Thanks to the generous media reportage including several published on this very platform The Wire, she had been quietly following my work of advocating for transparency and accountability in the public and private sectors. We met often when she visited Delhi to research in the libraries there and I would explain the details of some of the public interest related work I was doing under the mentorship of M. S. Ganesh. Not once did she ask me about my peculiar career choice despite all the efforts she and her illustrious colleagues had put in to train me as a researcher of ancient history. Today, my major regret is that I could not tell her about the baby steps I have decided to take to return part-time to the discipline in which I trained at JNU. You will be sorely missed, Shereen ma’am.Venkatesh Nayak is director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi.