OBITUARY: Anil Bhatti – A Tribute from a Student

It is difficult to express the deep sense of loss that Anil Bhatti’s passing means for German Studies and the larger intellectual world to which he introduced us as students. In a memorial meeting held at the Centre of German Studies in JNU, I reflected in a personal mode on how he opened the doors of the discipline of German Studies to that larger intellectual world that was JNU in the seventies. A seemingly narrow field fenced off by its linguistic borders became a creative way of connecting with and thinking about that world and, of course, about how to change it. New challenges emerged in the period that followed and Anil Bhatti looked for ways to confront them intellectually. As someone who listened to his ideas as he developed them over the course of almost half a century, I was not immediately conscious of the specific context that motivated them nor of the underlying logic that connected them to each other. Looking back at them from the imbroglios of our current times, that logic and its acute relevance today stand out in sharp relief.