On April 28, three civil society organisations in Bengaluru organised a public discussion on the book Umar Khalid and His World, edited by Anirban Bhattacharya, Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and published by Three Essays Collective. In the days prior to the event, a BJP MP urged the Bengaluru Police to cancel permission, while right-wing groups threatened to disrupt proceedings. Fortunately, the local authorities held firm, and the book discussion went ahead. What follows is the text of historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha’s talk that day.§The editors of Umar Khalid and His World must be congratulated on bringing together a rich and diverse set of contributions in this volume. Apart from Umar Khalid himself, whose writings constitute about one-fourth of the book, the contributors include journalists, activists, academics, legal scholars, scriptwriters and poets. They are variously young, old and middle-aged, and men as well as women. They come from diverse religious backgrounds: Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and atheist.The literary genres represented here include the essay, the memoir, the book review, the personal letter and the poem. Though the bulk of the volume is in English, there are a fair number of pieces in Hindi. The editors have curated the collection well, and written an excellent introduction to the book as a whole, as well as shorter introductions to the individual sections.Unlike the editors, I have never met Umar Khalid. I have read about him, of course, and more recently read something by him that is not in this book. This is his three-hundred-page doctoral dissertation on the social and environmental history of what is now the state of Jharkhand. My own short contribution to this volume describes the structure of the thesis and its many merits. My talk, however, draws on the other and more substantial pieces in this volume. To my mind, they richly reveal at least eight different Umar Khalids.First, they show us Umar Khalid as a thinker and scholar. In his writings, he displays a keen understanding of Indian history, sociology and politics. He presents sharp and pointed analyses of the fault-lines of caste, class, religion, gender and region. Khalid clearly has a very curious and inquiring mind; moreover, unlike some academically trained historians, he writes a clear, direct prose uncluttered by jargon.Second, the book presents to us Umar Khalid as a critic and judge of other writers. Particularly noteworthy here are his pieces on the legacy of the pioneering historian Ranajit Guha, founder of the ‘Subaltern Studies’ school, and on Neha Dixit’s book The Many Lives of Syeda X, which portrays the travails of a working-class family in the decades of economic liberalisation.Third, the essays and reflections in this book, whether by him or by others, show us Umar Khalid the democratically minded citizen of India, with a passionate commitment to freedom and justice.Fourth, his own writings and the ‘mulaqat’ memories of his visitors present a moving portrait of Umar Khalid in his current predicament, as a prisoner of the Indian state. The volume contains several quite detailed descriptions of the arduous conditions of prison life in our country, of the oppressive heat, the insanitary facilities, the loneliness and neglect, and, not least, of the fear and paranoia felt by prisoners during the years and months of the Covid pandemic.Fifth, the articles in the book reveal Umar Khalid to be an individual of enormous courage and an unquenchable zest for life. To illustrate this, I can do no better than quote his description of the unexpected benefits of being incarcerated. In a letter to a friend in September 2022, Umar Khalid remarked:For all its hardships, jail has also led to several ‘positive’ changes in my life. I have quit smoking. For two years I have lived without a mobile phone, which means I am over that other drug too – social media. I came here with the concentration span of a tweet, but now I read several novels every month. And finally, after several years of trying, my sleep cycle is back in place (my mother would be glad to hear this).Sixth, the book shines a spotlight on Umar Khalid as a human being deeply invested in sustaining personal and family relationships. The recollections of his friends especially reveal him to be loving, kind, witty, and not least, with a sense of mischief.Seventh, the book underlines how Umar Khalid has become a victim of the India we live in. Our country is currently ruled by a party that is both authoritarian and majoritarian, whose repeated violations of the law and Constitutional procedure have been enabled by corrupt and compromised state institutions. One should have little doubt that Umar Khalid has been persecuted because he is young, independent-minded, and, not least, Muslim. Of course, in this Umar is by no means alone. Other young and idealistic Indians, Hindus as well as Muslims, languish in prison because a vengeful and vindictive state has been willy-nilly aided by a timid and tardy judiciary.Finally, even as it describes a life of suffering and struggle, this book encourages us to view Umar Khalid as a symbol of the better, nobler, India many of us here wish to see being born – or reborn.Allow me to end on a personal note. When I was young, in my twenties and thirties, I met and was influenced by several remarkable Indians who represented the finest values of the Republic. They included the great leader of the Chipko movement, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, who is happily still with us, having celebrated his ninetieth birthday a few months ago (and whose autobiography Gentle Resistance I would strongly recommend to readers of this article); and the remarkable scholar-activist C.V. Subba Rao, the moving spirit of the Peoples Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), who died tragically early in 1994, having just turned forty.(Among Subba Rao’s many contributions to Indian democracy was the landmark report on the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, Who are the Guilty?, in whose writing he played a major role. Other important PUDR reports he helped put together were on the rights of miners and informal sector workers, on the predicament of undertrials, on a draconian forest law, and on the pogrom against Muslims in Bhagalpur in 1989).The example of these two individuals has long sustained me in my work and writing. A third Indian who inspired me was the celebrated Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, although I by no means knew her as well as Chandi Prasad Bhatt and C.V. Subba Rao. One conversation with Mahaswetadi remains imprinted in my mind. This occurred in the first week of March 2002, when she unexpectedly rang me from Kolkata.The riots in Gujarat were into their second week. Disturbing reports were coming in of state complicity, of mobs being aided by officials in identifying Muslim homes and shops, of the police idly looking on. Mahaswetadi had written a strong letter to the President of India, appealing to him “to immediately intervene as the constitutional head of the country to protect the lives of innocent citizens and prevent the carnage from spreading any further”.She now wanted me to ask the distinguished Kannada novelist and Bengaluru resident, U.R. Ananthamurthy, to write likewise to the President. Our conversation was in English, but before she put down the phone she muttered one line in impeccable Hindustani, as rendered in a Bengali accent: “Hum moyeedaan nahin chhodenge,” she said, and again, “Hum moyeedaan nahin chhodenge,” I shall not leave the field (of democratic combat).At the time of this conversation Mahasweta Devi was in her late seventies, while I was in my early forties. Today, I am not far short of seventy myself. Now, it is the example of Indians much younger than myself, such as Umar Khalid, that keeps me going. We hope and pray that one day – soon – justice will be done to such prisoners of conscience, and they will come out to join us in the field of democratic combat. Meanwhile, so long as we here are still around and alive, hum moyeedaan nahin chhodenge.