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living and being people of the book but worries about their racism. He worries about English racism too. He d ecides to help the English b ecause they profess to a government of laws. He values and appeals to being a citizen of the empire. I ndeed, he goes twice to London from South Africa to lobby for rights for the I ndian minority in South A f rica in the name of their being citizens of the empire. If the English win and he is not sure that they will Indians will be better off than if the Boers win. Of course, in both the so-called Zulu war and the Boer war, he parti cipates non-violently by o rganising a m edical service unit. In the case of first world war he volunteers to r ecruit Indians for service in the British Army. Again, he tells us that he can

do nothing to stop or mitigate the conflict u sing non-violence. He falls desperately ill. Some say his near-death illness was psychosomatic torn by the contradiction between belief that he benefited from the protection of British laws and rule and his commitment tonon-violence. In the case of second world war, he like Nehru and other leaders of the Congress offers to cooperate with the British war effort if Britain agrees to share power during the war and commit to independence after the war. Gandhimade clear at the second round table conference in 1931 in London that an India with dominion status would have armed forces. Indeed, he remarked on I ndias martial traditions by mentioning James Tods reference to Rajputs who had

demonstrated valour and courage like the ancient Greeks at Thermopylae. India needed armed forces to defend itself and, by implication, to deter aggressors. You might say that he was on the same page as Obama in his Nobel speech with res pect to just war, war fought to defend o neself and proportionately. Obamaspeech writers wouldhavedone well to find out more aboutGandhis views about non-violence with respect to war and violent conflict.Gandhimade it clear in many ways and in many contexts thatnon-violencecan be tried and might work only under the right circumstances. His views are particularly clear in connection with the conditions under which it is possible to use satyagraha to address and possibly resolve conflicts.

In Memoriam: Satish Saberwal

Sasheej Hegde

With the demise of Satish Saberwal (1933-2010), we have lost one of the most important links between the modernising phase of Indian sociology and the nonconformists. He will be remembered as a reference point for many, and as an inspiration for those seeking to actively transcend the anthropological mode of inquiry and straddle an interface with the historians concern.

Sasheej Hegde (sasheej@gmail.com) is at the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad.

atish Saberwal passed away on 25 October 2010, and with him has gone one of the key mediating links between what can be termed the modernising phase of Indian sociology (broadly the 1950s) and the nonconformists (traceable to the 1970s). Saberwals work in many ways defies the characterisation that I have (following R Mukherjee) summarily set out. In fact, his formal advent into Indian academia was only in the late 1960s, having had a stint as fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (1968-73), before taking up formal appointment as a sociologist in the Centre for Historical Studies (CHS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (1973-96). Saberwals work speaks to us in many ways, although the contextualisation effectively marks out his historical positioning in the landscape of the discipline. He was 77 at the time of his death. He had written many books including Mobile Men: Limits to Social Change in Urban Punjab, India: The Roots of Crisis (subse quently enlarged as Roots of Crisis: Interpreting Contemporary Indian Society), Wages of Segmentation: Comparative Historical Studies on Europe and India, and

Spirals of Contention: Why India Was Partitioned in 1947 (I am not citing here the many books that he either singly or jointly edited). He was and will remain a reference point for many an inspiration, certainly, for those seeking actively to transcend the anthropological mode of inquiry and straddle an interface with the historians concern.

Intellectual Forays
Saberwals location as a sociologist among historians is pretty important for any engagement with the contours of his work. It is interesting that, CHS, in opening up to social history (as an adjunct to political and economic history), should have thought of a sociologist, so that even as the academic world around it was speaking of an anthropological turn to the writing of social history, CHS itself was commissioning a sociologist to augment this space. Saberwals formal training was in cultural anthropology at Cornell University, his doctoral dissertation involving ethnographic fieldwork among the Embus of Kenya (although venturing into political anthropology in this frame). But, as he recalls in a conversation with the editors of Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS):
I had gone there [CHS, that is] as a tribesand-castes man, and I faced a milieu thick with talk of capitalism, colonialism, the working class and the like. There was a

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yawning difference of scales between the two levels, and it was up to me to find bridges between them. It was this challenge that led me to explore the sociological tradition as against my anthropological background. It invited me to think both on larger social scales and over longer time horizons. It was a slow process but, by the time I was done with it, I could tell my colleagues in History that they needed to think in longer time periods (CIS, Vol 42 (3) 2008, p457).

Clearly, Saberwals work stood out amidst both historians and sociologists in India, and not just for the intellectual risks that he took but for the sheer craftsmanship quality of his oeuvre. Take his Mobile Men (1976), a work documenting aspects of status mobility and caste networks among three lower caste groups in an emerging industrial small town in Punjab. It sought to actively move the focus of I ndian sociology away from the village and into urban centres, in the process attempting to yield an alternative perspective on Indian urbanism (which, incidentally, was the thematic of a major essay anchoring a special issue of CIS published in 1977). India: The Roots of Crisis (1986), which he substantially enlarged as Roots of Crisis: Interpreting Contemporary Indian S ociety (1996), marks his systematic foray beyond the anthropological mode, explicitly invoking against the unproductive dualism of the book-view and field-view of Indian society what he termed a worldhistorical view, and whose reference points were explicitly history and classical sociology (in the figure and inspiration, really, of Max Weber). Saberwal explicitly spoke a language of scales and time horizons and of fit and its lack thereof, and even as the framework of roots of crisis meant a distinct measure of contemporaneity to his work. It also meant a re-forging of the alliance between sociology and h istory. For him, the crisis had its roots in the difficulties of transplanting institutional processes that had been mastered in Europe; and, what is more, the persistence of multiple codes of conduct in India meant the absence of a cohesive c ognitive apparatus through which Indian social life could be mediated. Wages of Segmentation (1995) consolidated this thrust, even as it meant a more active comparative locus of investigation implicating overextended swathes of time

(since early medieval times, more definitively) the emergence of the modern institutional order in Europe and India. Affirming the thought that the differences between India and Europe long antedated the colonial relationship, the work sought to dispense the normativity that often attaches to India/Europe comparisons, while mapping the trajectories of societal integration through political structures and religions across these two locales and time horizons. Saberwal was bracing himself to extend the India/Europe comparison by bringing in China (specifically pre-modern China) into the frame, when the question, closer home, intellectually and politically more volatile and perhaps also in a way personal, Why did we have Partition? came to preoccupy him. In a sense, the phenomena of communalism had always captivated Saberwal, and in his roots of crisis forays had engaged the theme. In Spirals of Contention (2008), however, he sought to formulate a detailed answer encountering not just the phenomena of communalism but engaging frontally the event of Partition. At once analytical and descriptive, the work traces the growth and historical roots of the Hindu-Muslim animosity as it led up to the Partition in 1947. Here too, within the ambit of this particularised question, one is witness to the fusion of sociological and historical elements in his compounded articulation. Saberwals substantive forays run alongside his methodological reflections, and even here he seemed to break routines (although he never quite served these up in unison). His 1996 essay On Reality: Its Perception and Construction (Sociological Bulletin, Vol 45, pp 161-88) marks an important exercise in clarification. Even as he admitted that the initial perception of any phenomenon is necessarily subjective, Saberwal affirmed that social existence presumes an intersubjective agreement between different persons. The scale question that preoccupied him in his substantive forays also engaged him here, along a methodological axis, as he posited a differentiation between the scale of things and the scale of representation of things at the level of phenomenal reality.

Memories
On strictly academic grounds, Saberwal represents a scale of work I have always regarded with profound admiration, but it also reminds me of the beginnings, more than 20 years ago, of an enduring friendship, reticently warm, yet courteous. Saberwal was not quite my teacher, nor did I meet him as a student (I had heard his name being mentioned often in passing by my research supervisor). I still recall my first meeting with him in Goa he was delivering some lectures at Goa University, and I attended them. In my own youthful enthusiasm, I had responded to his work (India: The Roots of Crisis was out then), and he had read an early piece of mine on sociology in India which also served as a fulcrum of our conversation. I recall my first impressions of him then at once impersonal and affectionate which over the years was to consolidate into a non-intrusive directness. I would send him my pieces which he would acknowledge by way of the proverbial postcard, often with a diffidence that I was always drawn to. The decisive point in our friendship came when he happened to broach the contents of a Seminar issue on Rules and Laws whose statement of the problem he had formulated and which he was planning to edit into a volume of essays (it was subsequently published in 1998 as Rules, Laws, Constitutions). He invited me to contribute, even visualised the ambit of my paper on Rules and Laws in Indian Traditions. The exercise of writing for Saberwal was deeply transformative of my writing practice, and looking back I see the experience as marking a shift in my own

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intellectual trajectory. It is not as though my questions, and the vantage point from which I tended to draw them, had changed; somehow, I now became able to set up camp inside a work, become more observant of the subject matter and not (quite only) to the critical performance of it. I moved to the University of Hyderabad in 1998, and awaiting me there on the very day of my joining was a postcard from Saberwal welcoming my shift and hoping that the wider and more diverse intellectual community in Hyderabad would give impetus to my work. I wish the thoughtfulness had been my quality as well. We kept mailing each others work, also off and on running into each other. Saberwal also was on my panel scrutinising my claims for promotion, and it is with some fondness that I recall making my first power-point presentation before him. Brevity and pointedness was always Saberwals forte; and even as he found my forays arcane and liberal, he admitted that my power-point presentation had been a success in marking out the contours of ones own work. I have not quite ventured the power-point route though, and to my

knowledge neither did Saberwal. He was very much a writer in the scholarly mould, and while his writings have been a single, undivided source of enlightenment, ones own has never quite measured up. One cannot think of him wanting to be ever impressively arcane. I must recall the dramatic intensity with which he poured into the Partition question. I responded extensively to his work leading up to Spirals of Contention, and would get equally extended answers to the questions posed. I had also tended to see this intense engagement as a digression in his intellectual trajectory, and even ventured once to remind him of his impending work on pre-modern China as a means to extend and complicate the India/Europe comparisons he had drawn. For once he was elusive. In the CIS interview referred to earlier, he speaks of an absence of an intellectual community to debate the China contrast. But there was something more to the sheer pointedness of the Partition question. There is a wonderful phrase in the historian Greg Denings semi-autobiograpical Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self: in

life as in work, the gamble is b eing yourself. Saberwal was perhaps being so. I knew of the illness that had afflicted him, but never quite summoned up the courage to look him up personally. My last conversation with him was in early June 2008. Having gone through a deeply personal tragedy myself, I had to speak to him. I called him up, but could not quite speak much. There was something overwhelming both of us; Saberwals illness had taken root, but he had a sense of the loss I had suffered, and I could not quite string my words together. The situation proved too strong for me to cope with, because after that transient conversation I found that I had started to cry. I never got back to Saberwal, although he has always been there in the recesses of my mind. By sheer blissful coincidence (or ironic twist, if you will) I had dedicated a forthcoming piece of mine to him with the following words: This essay is for Professor Satish Saberwal, who I know is unwell but havent quite summoned up the courage to call on him. I fervently hope that he will read it or have it read to him. I will have to r eframe those words now.

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