“To be authentic, sociology for one world should be utterly devoid of xenophobia and jingoism. This calls for the recognition of the assets in other cultures and civilisation. The oneness of the world is to be reflected in its rich and variegated past and present, in its cultural diversity and pluralism”- T.K. Oommen.Remembering ancestors of our discipline is an important part of our life as academics and remembering is also a political act because many of the ancestors go unnoticed after their times. The month of February this year witnessed the loss of two towering sociologists of India; both of them in many ways shaped how we practised Sociology as a discipline in the subcontinent, Andre Beteille (1934-2026 ) and T.K. Oommen (1937-2026 ). We need to remember these ancestors, and the contributions they have made in making Sociology an integral part of universities and public debates. Oommen was a leading figure in Indian Sociology and was emeritus professor of Sociology at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was also an important sociologist internationally. He is internationally known not merely because he was the past president of the International Sociological Association (ISA), which is important and it demonstrates his ability as a remarkable leader and institutional builder.But we also need to remember his Sociology globally which is more relevant in our times when we are dealing with global crises such as ethnic divides, wars, deepening Islamophobia and cultural nationalism across the world. It is in this regard that we need to read and re-read Oommen’s rich body of work that he left us with, on understanding security, nationalism, social movements, caste, ethnicity, religion, and globalisation, among other questions. His large body of work contributes to social theory and must be taken seriously in global sociology.Oommen’s Sociology has a remarkable genealogy. When he started doing Sociology in India (at the Poona University, under the supervision of Y.B. Damle, a renowned sociologist of his time), the dominant culture of doing Sociology was very much influenced by Social Anthropology tradition shaped by M.N. Srinivas (1916-1999). The Srinivasian tradition of Sociology (structural functionalism) was the dominant way of doing sociology during those days and continues to be an important tradition of practicing sociology in India. In fact, Oommen mentioned in his interview with the sociologist Susan Visvanathan, that he had the option to pursue his PhD with Irawati Karve (1905-1970), a legendary anthropologist in Poona, but it was ‘accidental’ and technical circumstances that led him to work with Y.B. Damle (a Parsonian sociologist. Oommen was absolutely original in the sense that he decided to pursue an unconventional theme for his PhD at the time Sociology in India was focused more on micro studies of caste, village, kinship, family and religion. Oommen decided to study an ongoing social movement (Bhoodan Gramdan movement) and with his PhD work, social movements became a theme to explore in Indian Sociology. Oommen inaugurated a new culture of doing political sociology in India.However, it is also important to note that although Oommen shaped a new culture in Indian Sociology by studying an ongoing social movement, it is also the case that Oommen engaged with the existing tradition of Sociology of his time without compromising on his own style of doing Sociology. He mentioned that after he joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as a faculty member, the first paper he designed and taught was a course titled Anthropological Monographs. And in his collection of essays on sociology and social anthropology, he talks about the futile divide of sociology and social anthropology in India, and alerts us to the colonial past of both the disciplines and what we can learn from each other conceptually and methodologically. Writing about Oommen’s Sociology, which ranges from understanding social movements to professions (he wrote on nurses, doctors, lawyers, christian clergy and supervised PhD dissertations on various professions) is not an easy task and hopefully there will be a comprehensive study of Oommen’s sociological oeuvre in the coming days.I belong to a generation of sociologists who didn’t have direct interaction or personal connection with Oommen, unlike our professors. We were more of observers and readers of his body of work. When I was a graduate student of Sociology at JNU, where Oommen was an emeritus professor, I didn’t miss the occasional seminars and talks he gave when he visited the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (Sociology) once or twice a year. I was more of a silent observer. His lectures were engaging and witty in nature. He was generous and supportive on the few occasions when I had to interact with him. When I was teaching Sociology at Delhi University (2015-2021), the college (Jesus and Mary College) I taught at was organising a seminar on environmental sociology in 2016 and I invited Oommen as the keynote speaker. He readily agreed to speak and had a memorable interaction with the students in his own style of wit and humour. I remember him commenting after looking at the audience, mostly undergraduate students of Sociology, “ I am not used to a small audience” and laughed. The undergraduate students of Sociology found him witty and they laughed with him. When he started his lecture, they found him serious, strict and inspiring. His keynote lecture was on the environmental sociology of Radhakamal Mukerjee.In 2018, I was asked to review his memoir titled Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs: Life and Times of a Sociologist (2018) for the journal IIC Quarterly, where I raised the concern that T.K. Oommen did not discuss his field and fieldwork in detail in the memoir, which he called ‘workography’. I pointed out in the review that biographies such as Oommen’s will be an important entry point in understanding the genealogies of sociology and in that way the biography is significant. It works as an archival source for scholars working on the history of sociology globally as well. Oommen’s intellectual generosity was visible when he replied to my email on the 18th May 2022 as follows, “…… I do remember your review of my book Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs. The present book is a continuation of the same and in fact attends to some of the gaps you have pointed out for example my experience in doing fieldwork in rural Rajasthan and Rural Kerala in terms of my differing identities in these 2 contexts……” He was referring to the second part of his memoir which was released in 2022 titled, From Bharat to India: An Academic’s Journey. Remembering our ancestors is an act of writing and rewriting the history of sociology. Sociologists such as Oommen and his contribution to sociology has to be seen as global in nature. For Oommen, Sociology was a calling, although it was an ‘accidental’ entry as he would often remind us. However this accidental entry made him fall in love with the discipline of Sociology and the rest is history. In his long career as a sociologist and social theorist, not only did he contributed and institutionalised sociology in India, but he also made his presence felt in the international sociological community. May his soul rest in peace.Renny Thomas is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. He is the author of Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (2021). Email: renny@iiserb.ac.in