I am still unable to overcome the sad news of professor Biswamoy Pati's tragic death, as he is still very alive in my memory. Our association was for over 20 years. Meeting him and participating in lively discussions with him, one of his favourite activities, was enriching.

I was impressed by his cheerfulness and humour and by the sincerity of his scholarly approach not only as a social analyst but also as a social activist.

A major concern of his research was to provide visibility to those social groups that are marginalised in the colonial and postcolonial periods and by contemporary mainstream historiography. Some of the titles of his numerous publications and projects encompass his wide-ranging social engagement by means of scholarly research: Resisting Domination. Peasants, Tribals and the National Movement in Orissa 1920-50, (his PhD research paper published in 1993); and more recently Survival, Contests and Interrogation: The Diversities of Popular Tribal Resistance in Colonial Orissa (2010); Adivasis in Colonial India; Survival, Resistance and Negotiation (2011); Legitimacy, Power and Subversion: Colonial Orissa, c.1800-1940 (2012).

As an excellent depiction of the position of Biswamoy Pati's bottom-up research agenda and of its significance for contemporary research I may quote at some length from one of his articles that I had the pleasure to edit in 2010. In his contribution - "The Diverse Implications of Legitimacy" - to an international conference at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg on Ritual Dynamics he perceived: "What is normally not taken into account by historians is the way the common people re-worked some of these [ritual] practices to not only undermine the ruling classes but even challenge and attempt to subvert their dominance... Many scholars tend to assume that features like rituals are one-dimensional and emanated 'from above'.

As a result, they are immune to the way the common people invented their own rituals - or counter-rituals - to undermine, de-legitimise and even to subvert the exploitative order."

Biswamoy Pati may not have been a member of the once influential School of Subaltern Historians. But he was undoubtedly an internationally acknowledged influential "subaltern scholar" in his own distinct way. Throughout my research on Odisha, his bottom-up approach to the study of early state formation and Hinduisation influenced me and many of my colleagues in India and Europe.

And it may not be a mere coincidence that only two weeks before his untimely death I referred at a conference on Hindu kingship at Paris to him in connection with the rise of tribal deities to tutelary deities (kuladevatas) of former feudatory states of Odisha.

(The writer is professor emeritus, Chair of Asian History, University of Kiel, Germany)