Chitta Ranjan Das, “Chittabhai” to his many readers and admirers, stands as an exemplary case of the truly “organic intellectual”. This is for many reasons: his prolific output in many genres of writing including sociology, education, fiction and poetry; his remaining rooted throughout his life in his native Odisha (Orissa), and his persistence in writing mainly in the Oriya language (although in English too), knowing full well that this would in a sense cut him off from a larger national and certainly international audience, but with the laudable intention of communicating with (and learning from) his local community in which he was so deeply embedded. In this respect he always reminds me of the distinguished Kenyan novelist and writer Thiong’o wa Ngugi, who although a fluent and accomplished writer of fiction and criticism in English, eventually settled on the course of writing not only in Swahili, but even more specifically in his native Kikuyu, equally well aware that this would “limit” his audience (although of course he continues to be translated into the “metropolitan” languages). Both Das and Thiong’o were very aware of what we might call “the politics of language”—that a given language is not simply a neutral mode of expression, easily translatable into any other language, but the embodiment of the deep structures of a culture, including its cosmology, ecology and emotions, or what Raymond Williams memorably characterized as “the structure of feeling”. Furthermore, in the cases of all three of these writers—Das, Thiong’o and Williams, writing in very different cultural contexts (although at a similar time), rather than banishing it to the periphery of social analysis the subject of aesthetics, all locate it at the centre, and see the subject of criticism as not merely an (often over theoretical) adjunct to literature, but as a major contributor to social and cultural (and hence political) critique. This essay accordingly is not a detailed analysis of any specific work of Das’, but rather an appreciation that places him in a larger context and in relation to other and on-going conversations in which his voice ought to be heard.