Social Scientist completed forty years of publication in the year 2012. To mark the occasion, collections of essays on specific topics, culled from past issues of the journal, are being published – under a series titled ‘From the Pages of Social Scientist’. The present book, Tributes, is a collection of obituary articles published in the journal from 1983 to 2013.
The list of omissions is striking. There are, for instance, no obituaries on intellectual stalwarts of the Left political movement like B.T. Ranadive, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Sundarayya and M. Basavapunnaiah. And the coverage of the lives of artists and creative writers has been generally very poor. The former set of omissions could be because potential authors thought that the task itself was quite daunting; the latter set of omissions could be because the number of persons capable of writing insightfully about such creative personalities was limited. The tributes collected in this book are also of very uneven lengths, scope and quality. Some, as in the case of Susobhan Sarkar, Ravinder Kumar and Kitty Menon, are long and wide-ranging, while others, even for persons of great importance for the Left, are extremely brief. Nonetheless, the volume, for all its omissions and oddities, celebrates the contributions of some of the most remarkable men and women who have shaped the life of this nation, or helped the formation of the Left intellectual tradition.
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