Sumit Sarkar, who passed away on August 13 at the age of 87, was one of the most influential historians of modern India. Born in 1939 into a Brahmo family in Bengal and the son of distinguished historian Susobhan Sarkar, he was educated at Presidency College and the University of Calcutta. After teaching at the University of Calcutta and the University of Burdwan, he joined the University of Delhi, where he served as Professor of History from 1974 until his retirement in 2004.
It is difficult today to envisage the teaching and study of modern Indian history without Sumit Sarkar. He transformed the study of nationalism by moving beyond elite-centred narratives and examining the roles of peasants, workers, women, Adivasis and other marginalised groups. His death is a major loss to Indian academia and to the defence of scientific temper, secular democracy and intellectual independence in historiography.
Sarkar belonged to the tradition of radical social history and was deeply influenced by Marxist analysis of class, imperialism and uneven development, as well as E. P. Thompson’s emphasis on lived experience and the making of social classes. Yet he was never a doctrinaire Marxist. He rejected mechanical stage theories and teleological narratives and insisted that class could not be studied in isolation from caste, gender, religious identities, cultural practices and forms of consciousness.
His scholarship combined painstaking archival research with scepticism towards ready-made frameworks—colonial, nationalist, orthodox Marxist or culturalist. He was particularly concerned with how economic structures, political institutions, social relations and popular action interacted. His method could broadly be described as a critical, non-dogmatic history from below.
His first major monograph, "The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908", published in 1973, was a landmark. Examining the anti-partition movement, Sarkar refused to portray it simply as a unified nationalist awakening. He analysed moderate constitutionalism, boycott, national education, revolutionary terrorism, labour unrest and the activities of political organisations, while giving serious attention to workers, students, women and ordinary townspeople alongside leaders such as Surendranath Banerjea and Aurobindo Ghose.
The book demonstrated how regional and social history could illuminate nationalism without turning it into either celebration or cynicism. Its archival depth and methodological clarity established Sarkar as a major historian of modern India.
His textbook "Modern India 1885–1947", first published in the early 1980s, became widely used by generations of students. It combined political narrative with analysis of imperial structures, the colonial economy, peasant and labour struggles and the changing forms of nationalist organisation. In "Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s", he returned to the period with greater emphasis on environment, economy and culture, exploring forests, irrigation, agrarian relations, urbanisation, public culture and the arts.
"Writing Social History" (1997), which earned him the Rabindra Puraskar, displayed the breadth of his intellectual interests. The essays ranged across Thompsonian historical methods, colonial Calcutta, the intellectual and cultural life of Bengal, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Ramakrishna and the relationship between caste, nationalism and Hindutva. The collection demonstrated his characteristic combination of empirical investigation and conceptual openness.
Sarkar’s engagement with the Subaltern Studies project further reflected his intellectual independence. He participated in its early phase, when the collective sought to restore the agency of peasants, workers, Adivasis and other subordinated groups to histories dominated by colonial, nationalist and orthodox Marxist interpretations. But he later became a strong critic of its direction. In "The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies", later included in "Writing Social History", he argued that sections of the project had moved away from concrete social analysis towards cultural representation and an increasingly abstract conception of colonial power and knowledge.
His interpretation of the nationalist movement was equally distinctive. Sarkar challenged the notion of the Indian National Congress as a homogeneous organisation steadily guiding India towards independence. He presented it instead as a platform containing competing political tendencies and subject to pressures from below. Workers, peasants, tribal communities and Dalits were not merely passive recipients of nationalist leadership; their struggles influenced the movement’s direction and shaped the decisions of its leaders. His emphasis on “pressure from below” became an important contribution to the historiography of Indian nationalism.
His studies of Gandhi likewise explored the social sources of his appeal and the differing responses to Gandhian politics across regions. His work on Swadeshi went beyond the boycott of British goods to examine national education, samitis, labour unrest, Hindu-Muslim relations and revolutionary terrorism.
For Sarkar, history was also a discipline of questioning. As a teacher at Delhi University for three decades, he encouraged students to distrust easy conclusions. He might construct a particular interpretation during a lecture and then deliberately dismantle it, demonstrating that historical inquiry rarely offers a final word. He wanted students to think independently rather than merely memorise facts or reproduce established interpretations.
His intellectual independence also found expression in public life. Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, his involvement in "Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags" reflected his opposition to communalism. At the same time, he was critical of the organised Left, including its handling of the Singur and Nandigram conflicts. He believed historians had an ethical responsibility to confront power regardless of its political colour.
His return of the Rabindra Puraskar in 2007, awarded for "Writing Social History", in protest against the West Bengal Left Front government’s handling of land acquisition and peasant resistance in Nandigram, was a striking example of this principle. For Sarkar, intellectual honesty could not be separated from moral courage.
Sumit Sarkar leaves behind a distinguished body of scholarship and, equally importantly, a method of historical inquiry. He taught generations of students to question received narratives, scrutinise evidence, recover the experiences of ordinary people and resist intellectual conformity. His enduring contribution was the conviction that history must remain both empirically rigorous and independent of power.
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*Freelance journalist
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