BIPAN Chandra, one of India’s leading historians and an uncompromising defender of secularism and the scientific spirit, passed away in the early hours of August 30, 2014. His death was widely reported both in the newspapers and the electronic media, where there were also a spate of obituaries and commemorative commentaries. This is how, indeed, it should have been because Bipan Chandra’s death has been a great loss not only to the academic community but to the thinking part of our nation.