The hardest part of living away from India I find is to receive news of the passing of those one loved because one grieves alone, without the company of others who share your pain and who can recognise your loss. Today (January 6) is the antim ardas (the last prayer) for Professor Jit Pal Singh Uberoi’s soul following on the cremation of his body yesterday.
I sit far away in London from those meaningful events of mourning in Delhi, but offer my own personal antim ardas for Jit, with thanks for having the most profound influence on my intellectual development.
I knew JPS (as he was universally known) for over four decades in a variety of different ways. First, as his daughter Zoe (then Simran) and my sister Krittika learnt classical Russian ballet in the House of Soviet Science and Culture together. Simran’s family was like ours – all of us were present in the audience when our beautiful girls danced in a show and Safina and I bumped into each other frequently as we collected our sisters after class.
But I met JPS properly when I went to study a two-year Masters at the Department of Sociology. Those were arguably the best days at D School – JPS taught alongside Andre Beteille, B.S. Baviskar, A.M. Shah, Veena Das, a young Amitav Ghosh and so many other brilliant professors. The degree we studied had been designed by these pioneers whose vision of an India-trained anthropologist/sociologist was one in which the Sociology of India was understood thoroughly taking in everything from village kinship to labour and trade union dynamics, while being solidly trained in sociological theory, structuralism, symbolism, social inequality and kinship. That training was the bedrock on which we built our future scholarship and made us fearless in our engagement with writing from anywhere in the world. PhD students like Deepak Mehta, Savyasaachi, Khalid, Roma Chatterjee, Harish and others were always around for a chat, counsel and advice. In the second year, a bunch of us mustered courage (encouraged by our seniors) to try and persuade JPS to teach a course on South West Asia (that had been on the books but not been taught for many years). We were successful and it was transformative in how we saw the world.
Jit had written his own PhD thesis after fieldwork in Afghanistan and through a series of brilliant binary contrasts and eye-opening readings, JPS reoriented our thinking about the region (that those living west of the Suez call the Middle East) – and for me personally, allowed for my first encounter with the anthropological literature on Pashtuns/Pukhtuns/Pathans. A few weeks into the course in January 1988, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan (Frontier Gandhi) the leader of the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar movement died. I recall a conversation with JPS vividly – he like our professors, was always available for a chat outside the D School café after lectures – I wanted to write an op-ed piece for the papers pointing out the irony of a ‘martial’ race conducting the longest Gandhian movement in the world. His reply was, ‘Think about the idea some more; you may want to work on this for a longer research project.’ I was impatient but the anecdote he narrated of having seen Gaffar Khan once, flanked by two strapping Pathan men in brilliant red uniforms, stayed with me.
Also read: Remembering Prof. JPS Uberoi as a Scholar, Mentor, and Teacher
I am glad I moved away to Oxford for my PhD where I could work on the Khudai khidmatgars (it had been turned down at D School as logistically impossible to go to NWFP in Pakistan. (‘If it was possible Mukulika, would one of us not have done this by now’ were the exact words of the committee). At Oxford people vividly remembered Amitav Ghosh who, like JPS, had conducted his PhD research outside India in Egypt, and having been taught by both of them I felt I was part of an honourable tradition. But I went back to Delhi frequently (as I continue to do) and made it a point to see Jit on every visit to discuss ideas and writing. He was my most important interlocutor and helped develop ideas on the non-violence of the Muslim Khudai Khidmatgars in profound ways but also on pretty much everything else. It was a much better relationship than to have been his PhD student – I got the best without dealing with the worst! And it also allowed me to admire and interact with him on terms that British universities had taught me to – with deep respect, no fear and a great deal of affection. ‘Congratulations on your tour de force’ on an offprint he gifted me was a rare compliment.
My first job at UCL allowed me to call him ‘Jit’. We were now colleagues and he was chuffed that I was at the university he had studied in. It was then that I heard his personal observations of studying engineering, living in England and about his move to Manchester. His own deep scholarship on Europe and personal experience, gave me an intellectual confidence of living and engaging with my adopted country as nothing else did.
In 1996 Jit and Patricia attended my wedding to Julian. Jit observed: ‘In my generation, we mostly took brides from abroad, in yours we give our daughters too.’ And he was present too for my daughter’s onnoprashon as Safina his daughter and my dearest friend was now Aria’s godmother. In December 2022, I saw Jit in person for the last time. He and Patricia now lived in the apartment opposite my parents’ flat at Sah Vikas. I had just been on the Bharat Jodo Yatra and on the first morning back I walked over with a cup of tea to theirs to chat. My parents had passed away, but here were two people who heard the stories and asked after Aria and Jules as they used to. The stories of the Yatra provoked memories of nation-building and institution-building that Jit had been so committed to and our conversations meandered as they always did between profound thought, questions and laughter.
On this day, as the last prayers for Jit are said, I can only write my own antim ardas for Jit from the solitude of my desk. I cannot be with friends and colleagues who loved and admired Jit as I did, but I have a huge trove of memories of the time spent with this most remarkable man. Jit striding into D School every morning in his black turban that he readopted in 1984 riots, attending my first political demonstration with Jit at Ramlila maidan, Jit reading in Ratan Tata Library at the same desk every day after his retirement, Jit pointing out the use of sunlight for sanitation in Shahajanabad, having dinner with Jit in London, Jit’s face lighting up at Karim’s as Craig Calhoun, then Director of LSE said hello to him with the charming ‘Max told me to grow up and be like you’ (they were both students of Max Gluckman), Jit narrating detailed gossip of the Manchester School on Zoom calls during the pandemic while I completed my last book, Jit telling us about his fieldwork in Afghanistan as it was yesterday, Jit laughing as Patricia and Julian sang the Australian anthem at the birthday parties of Safina’s husband Lukas and Aria, Jit giving me a hug and kissing both cheeks the last time I saw him.
Jit, thank you for your scholarship, your provocations, your affection and your belief in me in carrying forward your legacy of political anthropology. I have met many brilliant people over the years but you have been the most important and most original of them all. Your students loved you much and continue to do – as we all said in the annual birthday Zoom calls on 5th September – and many will remain inspired and inspire future generations with what we learnt from you. May your soul rest forever in peace.
Mukulika Banerjee teaches anthropology at LSE and her most recent book is Cultivating Democracy (2021).
