Homage to Thorner

It is given to few to sow new seeds in their field of academic specialization and to even fewer to do so beyond the narrow confines of the groves of academe. Daniel Thorner was one of them. He’ did this with the generosity of effortless fecundity, perhaps with a fine careless­ness and no thoughts to the profits of harvesting scattered pieces in the shape of such volumes as lesser academics pro­duce. Thus, in the form of unpublished notes from which his students profited, in essays published in anthologies, in occasional pieces published in news­papers, and in papers buried in the pro­ceedings of eminently forgettable semi­nars and conferences, Thorner’s writings were scattered. A collection of such writings, many of them not easily acces­sible, has been long overdue. The Sameeksha Trust is to be congratulated that at last, six years after Thorner’s death such a collection has been put together. After all, a publication programme was as much a part of the Trust Deed of Sameeksha, as the sponsorship of the Economic and Political Weekly.