With the recent passing of Shereen Ratnagar, India has lost an archaeologist who combined academic rigour with rare courage and integrity. As I think back about her work, I can clearly see three main areas of interest: Harappan/Indus civilisation, the social context of early technologies in South Asia and her intervention in the Ayodhya dispute.Shereen obtained her initial training in archaeology through the two-year master’s programme at Deccan College, Pune, which was followed by a three-year post-graduate diploma in Mesopotamian Studies from the Institute of Archaeology, London. A yearlong fellowship then took her to the British School of Archaeology, Baghdad.After returning to India, she enrolled for a PhD at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. In her doctoral research, she explored the possible forms of exchanges that may have taken place between diverse communities of west and south Asia in the third millennium BCE. This study was not based on field work as is generally expected in archaeology, but it broke new ground for Indian archaeology at that time.There were two reasons for the significance of her work. The first being that most archaeologists in India then, and even now, simply collate and document data through their surveys and excavations but are unable to construct the big picture by drawing upon theoretical frameworks due to this lacuna in their training. The second problem was that the interpretation of archaeological data was often left to historians who had no understanding of archaeology or simplified the data to such an extent that it led to disastrous and sometimes even incorrect conclusions.Her sophisticated but often complicated analyses also come through in her books, Enquiries into the Political Organization of Harappan Society (1991), and The End of the Great Harappan Tradition (2000). Her books are not easy to read as one gets the impression that she is continually in a dialogue with herself to make sense of the archaeological data. These two books, together with the two editions (1981 and 2004) of her books on trade will remain landmarks in Harappan Studies even when one may disagree with her hypotheses. Along with these, another small book, Understanding Harappa: Civilization in the Greater Indus Valley (2001, 2006), remains the best book on this Early Bronze Age Civilisation in South Asia for senior school and undergraduate students or even the curious and interested general reader.Shereen’s interest in early technologies of South Asia came from questions about the interconnections with the social context and not from any sense of chauvinism, which is so rampant in Indian archaeology today. For her, the critical issue was to explore the links between the development of early technologies with the processes and organisation of labour as seen in her book, Makers and Shapers: Early Indian Technology in the Home, Village and Urban Workshop (2007).In her last book, The Magic in the Image: Women in Clay at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa (2018) she explored specifically the issue of women’s labour in relation to the clay figurines of women that have been recovered from the two major Harappan cities.As the discipline of archaeology was pulled into a political conflict over a mosque in Ayodhya in the late 1980s and early 1990s, few archaeologists were willing to even engage, let alone take a position, and among those who did was Shereen. Long before public archaeologists became fashionable, as is the case today through YouTube, podcasts or articles in non-mainstream media, she began writing in newspapers and magazines on archaeological issues that dominated the political landscape in India.More specifically, she analysed two controversial issues, one concerning the Aryan homeland question and the second was the Ayodhya dispute. What is important to note is that her writings were not limited to the popular alone. With her hallmark academic rigour, she also published in academic fora, for instance, her chapter titled, “Does Archaeology Hold the Answers?” in an edited volume, Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology (1999), and her article, “Archaeology at the Heart of a Political Confrontation: The Case of Ayodhya” in the Current Anthropology Forum on Anthropology in Public (2004).Shereen belonged to a time gone by when the ‘other’ Indians too mattered and she could bring her empathy into the classroom and her research.Supriya Varma is a retired Professor of Archaeology and Director (Academics), Azim Premji University, Bhopal.