ABSTRACT
A prophecy? Fond hope? Or despair? The oft-cited statement made by Rammanohar Lohia that ‘People will surely listen to me, but after I am dead’ lends itself to all these readings. It is equally plausible to read this as a statement not about the future but about his relationship with his own time. Lohia’s birth centenary year is a good occasion to take this suspicion seriously and go back to his ideas to see if they make more sense today than they did in his own time. This is what the present essay does. It does so by asking a straightforward question: What is living and what is dead in Lohia? Or what, if anything, in Lohia’s political practice and ideas is relevant to, and valuable for, our times? Or which aspects of his legacy are not very helpful in attempts to reshape a new world? An understanding of whether Lohia was ahead of his time requires us to assess how he relates to our time. This simple notion is less obvious and common than it might seem.
