I am among those who happened to know Dr Sanjay Kumar Biswas even before he came to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. I was in Kolkata—Calcutta of those days—for some personal work in the National Library for more than a fortnight, and Sanjay’s brother Siddhartha used to be there preparing for his GATE examination. One fine morning, he spoke to me and asked if I knew Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. Of course, I had known him for about six or seven years by then, and I told him so. In fact, I used to stay with his family whenever I went to Kolkata, as I do even now. But now it is with his daughter Aditi, whom Sanjay used to know very intimately.

On the evening of the day that Siddhartha spoke to me about Debiprasad and Sanjay in the library, Sanjay arrived at Debiprasad’s place, which was not very far from his own house, and we spent more than two hours talking about a hundred things—one of which was that he would soon be going to Bangalore to join the Institute. Margaret, too, was with him that day, and she was leaving for Bangalore with Sanjay. I mentioned to Sanjay, at Debiprasad’s suggestion, a few names of persons he could get into touch with at the Institute: Professor M. A. Sethu Rao, Dr A. K. N. Reddy, and Dr A. R. Vasudeva Murthy. Sanjay already had an acquaintance in Bangalore and at the Indian Institute of Science, as Professor Debiprasad Sengupta was at the Institute. Sanjay and Margaret had met Dr Sengupta in Liverpool when they were still at Birmingham. In fact, Sengupta was a friend of Sanjay’s cousins. During that meeting in Liverpool, it was Sengupta who suggested to Sanjay that he should try to join the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

The Bangalore Study Circle and Collaborative Work

Professor Sethu Rao and others were among the first few acquaintances for Sanjay after he joined the Institute, besides Sengupta, whom he happened to know from his Birmingham days. We met for a lengthy discussion on umpteen things the very next day after I returned from Kolkata. There was a study circle which used to meet regularly every week at Debiprasad’s place in Kolkata, which was what had brought about Sanjay’s meeting with Debiprasad initially. So, the mercurial Sanjay wanted to start a similar study circle right away in Bangalore, which we did in no time. Sanjay and Margaret were regular participants while I was the convener. The very first talk at the circle was by Sanjay on Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Many of those who were present at the meeting that day remember the clarity of Sanjay’s presentation and the impression that the talk and the subsequent discussion left on them.

Our acquaintance, which matured through the study circle to begin with, lasted until the day of his passing away at a ridiculously young age for someone who was as dynamic as Sanjay was. His departure was a shock, but unfortunately, I was not in Bangalore at the time even to join the funeral procession. Almost two months had passed without meeting him, and there were to be no more meetings with him. I could only meet Margaret, Shammo, and Kristi on my return. The 28th of April 2013 thus turned out to be a day of disaster for me.

Three years earlier, I had interviewed him elaborately for our Kannada monthly, Hosathu, of which he had been a keen supporter right from its inception. Some of my colleagues were also there during the interview. He had contributed numerous articles to the monthly during its thirteen years of existence before his demise, and we may well reproduce some of them in the years to come in memory of Sanjay in the same journal. The one on J. C. Bose, for example, remains a classic. I really don’t know how many lectures he delivered on J. C. Bose in Bangalore under the auspices of different organisations and institutions. Dr B. S. Shylaja, Director of the Planetarium, even now recalls one such lecture that she attended. Not only did Sanjay himself write for the monthly, but he also got others from the Institute to write for us occasionally. It was through his mediation that we could interview the likes of Dr C. N. R. Rao, Dr Roddam Narasimha, Dr P. Balaram, and others from the Institute for our monthly. Earlier, I had the privilege of working with him as co-editor of two anthologies of essays by Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya subsequent to the latter’s demise. I had collected them myself from among his hitherto unpublished papers. The volumes were Musings on Ideology and Some Thoughts on Marxism. Need it be said that the ideology of Marxism was partly what made Sanjay who he was and what he was?

Academic Eminence and Intellectual Influences

Everyone knows that Sanjay studied at IIT Kharagpur, completed his Master’s at Strathclyde in Scotland, and earned his Ph.D. from Birmingham. What many do not know is that he was closely associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain during his days in the UK, and that he was on intimate terms with George Thomson and his wife in Birmingham. Thomson was a redoubtable scholar in ancient Greek studies and a Marxist of very high repute. He had been asked to quit Cambridge after about two decades of teaching and research there because of his Marxism, so they say. In fact, Thomson had served as an informal guide to Debiprasad when he was working on his treatise on Lokayata at the British Museum in London. Sanjay was fortunate to know both of them and to learn from both of them.

After he joined the Indian Institute of Science—to which I was a frequent visitor for many years because of Sanjay—I used to rag him, saying that as a researcher in Tribology, his real place was among the tribes somewhere and not at a cozy centre like the Institute. But he was Dean of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Institute and guided many Ph.D. students, including several college teachers. I am told that some of his papers published in internationally reputed research journals are of exceptionally high quality and are frequently cited by other researchers. But I hardly ever remembered that he was a scholar of that stature while dealing with him. He was just Sanjay to me, as I was just GR to him.

When I met Shammo, Sanjay’s son, in May, he recalled the days when he used to come over to my place to be taught Sanskrit, and I told him that Sanjay was my eternal potential student of Sanskrit. He always set a date for starting the learning process under me, but that date never arrived. Yet, the number of hours we spent together discussing a variety of issues off and on is indeed legion. He even published some articles of mine in the monthly Science Bulletin that he had been editing during the early part of his career in Bangalore.

Social Activism and Science for the Masses

During those early days in the 1980s, he developed contacts with a few schools to facilitate extra science teaching by a small group of scientists from the Institute who had volunteered for the task. Once a week, we used to visit four or five different schools that had agreed to utilise the services of these volunteering scientists. The programme worked for only a year, but later he began gathering students from his neighbourhood at his home for what could be termed science workshops. When he was living in the L.I.C. Colony in Rajajinagar, he organized evening literacy classes in a slum close to his home. Volunteers came from the Bank and L.I.C. Trade Unions to teach the adults there. Sanjay would virtually act as an ordinary volunteer in organising such programmes that were dear to his heart. An engineer and professor of his stature holding banners on the streets of Bangalore while marching in one procession or another must be a phenomenon hard to witness these days.

During the last five or six years of his life, he was constantly on the move throughout the country, organising chapters of the All India Progressive Forum. The forum brought out a number of monographs on topics related to water, electoral reforms, energy sources, environment, health, primary education, and so on, authored by reputed academicians and activists from different parts of the country. Indigenous growth and indigenous research were ideals he cherished deeply and sincerely. “People-oriented” was his watchword at all times on all matters.

He made an attempt in the sphere of health with the active cooperation of the Institute and its Director, Dr P. Balaram, during his last few years. His conviction was that contemporary research and its results ought to be of immediate utility to the people at large—otherwise, what is the use of research, he would ask. A partial solution to this, according to him, was for different departments of the Institute to undertake people-oriented research and apply its findings in a hospital run by the Institute itself. How far the project will be implemented in the days to come will be watched with eagerness by the public. One of Sanjay’s own research projects concerned possible reductions in fuel consumption in vehicles and machinery.

Not much is known to the outside world about Sanjay’s work on various committees of the Government of India, especially in the Defence Department. Naturally, he did not talk about that much with others. “Science and Technology for the Masses” and “Science and Technology for Self-Reliance” were two mottos for which he scrupulously and assiduously worked.

A lot more could be said about Sanjay’s passion for peace, tolerance, and cooperation in several spheres of activity. To sum it all up, one might say that he had many irons in the fire and that he was an adept at stoking all of them properly and deftly. There were a few ups and downs in his life, some of them of his own making, but he coped with them all in his characteristic fashion without making much fuss. “Here was a man!” as they said about Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.