Sumit Sarkar, the historian who looked from the margins

In Essays of a Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns, Sumit Sarkar writes: “As the shining promise at the dawn of Independence began to dim by the late 1960s and early ’70s, and as a new wave of popular struggles began in various forms against the post-colonial ruling classes, I felt it was more important to explore the historical limits of mainstream nationalism”. Sarkar, who died on Thursday, did not focus just on nationalist icons. He explored the textures of the lives of farmers, workers, lower caste and class communities. Sarkar entered academia when modern Indian history was still largely framed through the binary of colonial oppression versus Indian resistance. From his first major work, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, he demonstrated how ordinary people could be both hierarchical and democratic, communal and nationalist. This commitment to history from below found its most eloquent expression in Modern India, the textbook that helped make him one of the founding figures of Subaltern Studies. Sarkar would eventually distance himself from the group as it increasingly turned towards cultural theory. The historian, he believed, had to take the challenge of communalism head-on. Sarkar the historian was inseparable from the public intellectual who refused to submit to doctrine. The teacher, whose classes in Delhi University brought alive the possibilities of Marxist social history, would return the Rabindra Puraskar in protest against West Bengal’s Left Front government’s treatment of the Nandigram protest. As history textbooks continue to be “streamlined” and “rationalised”, Sarkar’s words in Essays of a Lifetime resonate: “So far, we Indian historians have written the histories that we wanted to write, following no agenda but our own. That seems to be a fast-vanishing luxury.”