Professor S. Raju is retiring from the School of Social Sciences (SSS), Mahatma Gandhi University on 31 March 2022, after nearly three decades of service as a teacher and researcher. I knew Raju so closely before he joined MGU in the early 1990s. He was my batchmate at the University of Kerala. The Department of Political Science and the Department of Economics were (and still are) housed on the same academic premises in the Kariavattom Campus. Most of us used to interact with teachers and students of the Economics Department and notable among them were Prof M. Kunhaman, Prof Radhakrishanan, Prof Ramachandran Nair, Prof Gopinathan, Prof Uma Devi, and many others. KN Harilal, S. Raju, Sajan, Shyla Unnithan et al. were in the same batch. Raju later went to CDS and, then JNU, for his research. I met him quite a few times in JNU also.

Raju was fortunate to have worked under great minds in both CDS and JNU, as well as in MGU, and it was Professor Rajan Gurukkal who brought him to SSS when he was the Director of the School. I would say, without any hesitation, that SSS has been an institution with unique characteristics, having developed a truly interdisciplinary faculty with substantive scholarship. All of the faculty were so committed to their scholarly work, and that resulted in the growth of the SSS as an institution of national reputation.

Professor Raju never liked being on the hot seat and he’d found his niche with his research passion. When headship of SSS came a few years back, he had to accept it with a lot of discomfitures. Professor Raju used to discuss with me the nitty-gritty of the school governance without any pretence or hesitation. I do not know if I could be of any use to him from that point of view.

I always found his scholarship to be interwoven with human ecology. And the forests and ecology remained the nub of his inquiry. Like some of his colleagues in SSS, Professor Raju was also deeply committed to ‘forest research’ from an interdisciplinary social science angle.

However, unlike many other career-oriented faculties, Raju never pretended himself as “an inexhaustible chamber of academic production.” Whatever things he wrote and published emerged from his deep understanding of the subject, and he never believed in any shallow writing for the sake of writing.

I have sweet memories of having spent days with him on travel, including a couple of Kerala Express journeys from Delhi to Kerala, and I thoroughly enjoyed his wits and wisdom.

The scholar of a rare exception, Professor Raju has tremendous courage and conviction to go forward in life’s most challenging times.

SSS and IUCSSRE will always remember him as a genius of interdisciplinary social sciences, and as a person with the least passion for power and position.

I wish him all the best and look forward to a more productive life with academic writing.