We were both Professor Sumit Sarkar’s students at Delhi University in the 1990s, and are now teachers there. At his cremation, what was striking was how widely the memory of his teaching had travelled beyond those he had formally taught. An erstwhile student of Botany came because she had heard so much about him from her hostel-mates; friends who had studied Economics or English and had gone to his classes 30 years ago sent messages of condolence. Sumit was a rare combination of an extraordinary teacher and a scholar of immense depth, with each enriching and deepening the other.So many of his students remember Sumit’s Social History paper on Modern India, and indeed it was a remarkable class, taught in his quiet, persuasive, never flashy manner. His knowledge was immense, but his erudition was never a performance. He had a way of opening up the worlds of history before his students, giving them both the detail and the larger questions that made the detail meaningful. There was a rigorous empiricism at the heart of his teaching, but also a recognition that historical experience could be recovered through art and literature, and through the many kinds of sources that make up the larger archive of history.That breadth was part of what made him such a distinctive teacher. It was also the product of an extraordinary amount of preparation and hard work, done in the pre-internet days, when putting together a lecture or a course meant painstakingly locating books, articles and sources, reading widely and making connections across fields. His teaching was also connected to his deep investment in the public university, in the teachers’ movement and in democratic practice. These commitments were not confined to large political questions; they were present in the often painstaking work of syllabus revision, in the classroom, and in the everyday practices through which a university is made. Also read: History Must Be Based Solely on Evidence: Irfan HabibFor both of us, although we were in different batches, one course stood out perhaps even more vividly – a transformative MA first-year elective on early modern Europe. It ranged across witchcraft, popular beliefs and practices, print and the woodcut, and the social worlds of the period. We were introduced to historians such as Robert Scribner, Peter Burke, Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, among many others. Although the course had been allotted for one semester, Sumit announced that he would teach it for the entire year. Years later, when we were lucky enough to travel in Europe, Sumit’s teaching would return to us unexpectedly – in a Masaccio painting in Florence, in a woodcut, a church or an image encountered along the way. We had not simply learnt about early modern Europe; we had been guided in how to understand it.As a supervisor, he read closely, helped shape the material before him and paid attention to the historian’s craft, while at the same time encouraging students to be ambitious and innovative, and allowing them to dream. Regardless of topic or distance from his own research, what mattered to him was the quality of the historical work before him. He taught us what it meant to take a student’s work seriously. He remains, for many of us the teacher in our heads, a model of what we need to be in the classroom, and of what it means to take students and their intellectual possibilities seriously.Much has already been said about his work on the Swadeshi movement, his writings on social history and his enormous influence on Indian historiography. There is something particular to be said, however, about Modern India. More than a textbook, it opened up a world of historical inquiry. Its extraordinary detail and analysis offered students possibilities for thinking and researching further with its influence traveling across generations and universities. Students and teachers inherited not only Sumit’s arguments and interpretations, but a way of thinking about what historical scholarship could make possible. It suggested other histories, other archives, other questions. In that sense, Modern India did more than teach modern Indian history – it helped produce historians. His histories made space for ordinary people, social worlds, beliefs and practices, and for contradictions that grand narratives tended to smooth away. His commitment to social history was inseparable from a larger intellectual to accept histories in which the past appeared singular, inevitable and already resolved.We said goodbye to him on August 15, Independence Day. What mattered to Sumit was a commitment to the complexity of the nation’s history, its people and its past, and to the possibility of arguing about what they meant. His legacy is of a historian of extraordinary scholarship, and a teacher who taught generations of us to take history seriously, to look beyond the obvious archive, and to remain open to the difficult questions that history asks of us. Shahana Bhattacharya teaches history at Kirori Mal College.Aparna Balachandran teaches Modern History at Delhi University.