Mainstream WeeklyI have always thought of myself as an accidental student of history. While learning its alphabet, I found myself struggling with seemingly simple questions: What is history? How is it written? Why does one write it? Whose account becomes history, and whose remains outside its pages?
These questions gradually became more concrete. We know about the king, but what about the people he ruled? If the prince is there, where is the peasant? Where are women? Where are workers, artisans and those ordinary people whose names rarely enter the archive? How did they live? What were their aspirations, challenges and struggles?
It was while asking such questions that I came across Sumit Sarkar’s scholarship, which went beyond conventional narratives of kings, clans, conquests, dynasties, wars and empire-building. Sarkar introduced me to another way of looking at the past, one that drew attention to social relations, culture, community and everyday life. History then becomes not only an account of those who exercised power, but also an enquiry into those who lived under it, negotiated with it, resisted it and, sometimes without entering its official records, helped shape its course.
I was never formally a student of Professor Sumit Sarkar and have no classroom memories of him to recount. I came to know his work through his books. His writings helped me find perspectives on questions I had long been grappling with and, more importantly, taught me to ask new questions of history.
Nationalism beyond Its Leaders
This was particularly important in trying to understand the Indian national movement. Much of its familiar narrative inevitably revolves around a relatively small number of major political figures, their ideas, ideologies, decisions, differences, actions and, at times, inactions. Their importance is undeniable. But concentrating on political leadership leaves another set of questions insufficiently answered.
What were thousands of ordinary people across India’s towns, villages and regions doing? Why did they enter nationalist politics? What did swaraj mean to a peasant, worker, Dalit, woman or young person far removed from the recognised centres of political leadership? Did their understanding of freedom necessarily coincide with that of those who spoke in the name of the nation?
Sarkar’s The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 was important precisely because it complicated a story that could otherwise be told principally as one of nationalist awakening, boycott, swadeshi enterprise and resistance to colonialism. He did not deny these dimensions. He asked what happened when nationalist politics entered a differentiated society.
A boycott could signify patriotic sacrifice for one group while imposing economic costs on another. Religious symbols might mobilise some while distancing others. The language of national unity did not make social differences disappear. Nationalist aspiration and social contradiction could inhabit the same historical moment.
This was something I found particularly valuable in Sarkar’s approach. One could recognise the historical importance of a movement and still ask deeper questions about its limitations and contradictions.
His Modern India, 1885–1947 became a standard text for generations of students of modern Indian history, but it was never merely a chronological survey. It widened the enquiry by bringing peasant and labour struggles, Adivasi resistance, regional politics and popular participation into a narrative otherwise easily dominated by Congress politics and national leaders. In doing so, Sarkar opened up the history of nationalism to the experiences and agency of different classes and social groups, asking not only how nationalism was articulated by its leaders, but how it was understood, experienced and acted upon by people on the ground.
The question consequently changes. It is no longer only what Gandhi, Nehru, Azad, Patel, Bose or the Congress intended. It is also what happened when nationalist politics entered a village, factory, caste association or local conflict. People did not necessarily enter national movements as empty vessels waiting to receive political ideas from above. They brought grievances, memories, interests and aspirations of their own.
Beyond Historiographical Boundaries
In my view, Sarkar cannot be neatly fitted into any one historiographical box, whether Marxist, Subaltern or social historian. Each description captures something important about his work, but none is sufficient on its own. A Marxist framework remained an important intellectual resource, particularly in his concern with class, material conditions and relations of power. His engagement with Subaltern Studies sharpened questions of popular agency and the place of those left outside elite-centred histories. Yet his historical field repeatedly crossed the boundaries of these classifications. Questions of class led into questions of caste. Political mobilisation could not always be separated from religion and community. Nationalism and social reform could not be fully understood without attending to gender and the unequal relations of everyday life.
Nor would I describe Sarkar retrospectively as an ‘intersectional historian’. Intersectionality emerged from a different intellectual and political genealogy. Yet there is an intersectional quality to some of the questions his histories allow us to ask. A person subordinated under colonial rule could still enjoy caste, class or gender privilege. A movement resisting imperial domination could reproduce inequalities within itself. A community oppressed in relation to the colonial state could contain its own hierarchies between landlord and labourer, dominant and subordinate castes and men and women.
What matters here is less the label than the historical method. Sarkar’s work cautions against allowing one category, whether class, nation, community or the subaltern, to become so encompassing that it hides inequalities within it. People could be subordinate in one relationship and privileged in another. They could exercise agency while still being constrained by larger structures of power. The historian’s task is not to force these complexities into a single explanatory framework, but to understand what each reveals and what each leaves out.
Perhaps this is why Sarkar’s work resists easy classification. He did not abandon one framework only to settle permanently within another. Rather, he drew upon different intellectual traditions to ask questions about the past while remaining willing to question those traditions themselves.
Writing Social History demonstrates this widening field particularly well. Its essays move through labour, caste, religion, social reform and historiography, combining detailed social history with interventions in wider debates about colonialism and historical methods.
Here one sees the influence of E P Thompson, whom Sarkar admired. Thompson’s insistence on historical experience offered a way of retaining material structures without turning human beings into passive carriers of those structures. Historical actors were not simply passive subjects of larger structures. They interpreted their circumstances, made choices and acted upon them, even though the choices available to them were shaped and limited by social, economic and political conditions.
This engagement with gender and social relations also places Sarkar’s scholarship in productive conversation with the work of his wife and intellectual collaborator, Tanika Sarkar, a distinguished historian in her own right. The two also collaborated on Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader, which brought together scholarship and primary material on gender and social reform in colonial India. Their respective scholarship reminds us, in different ways, that political history cannot be separated from the social worlds in which politics acquires meaning.
Subaltern Studies and the Limits of Intellectual Allegiance
Sarkar’s intellectual independence is perhaps most clearly visible in his relationship, particularly in its formative phase, with Subaltern Studies. The project sought to recover dimensions of Indian history neglected by elite-centred historiography and to take seriously the political agency of subordinate groups. There was something compelling in this attempt to write history from below, treating peasants, workers and other subordinate groups as historical actors rather than merely as recipients of elite politics.
Sarkar later became a critic of the direction the project took. This was not a retreat from history from below, but a concern that its growing theoretical turn risked losing sight of the material conditions, social relations and lived experiences of the people whose histories it had originally sought to recover. In ‘The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies’, later collected in Writing Social History, he subjected this changing intellectual direction to sustained criticism.
His disagreement with Subaltern Studies was therefore part of a wider critical approach to historiography. Marxism opened indispensable questions about property, labour and class, but could become reductive; Subaltern historiography recovered forms of popular agency neglected by elite-centred narratives but could itself lose sight of the material and social relations within which that agency operated. Sarkar drew upon these traditions without allowing allegiance to any one of them to foreclose further questions.
Sarkar and the Practice of Critical Inquiry
A public intellectual is judged not only by scholarship, but also by the willingness to subject power, including that exercised by one’s own political side, to critical scrutiny. Sarkar’s sympathies with the Left did not prevent him from opposing a Left government. In 2007, he returned the Rabindra Puraskar in protest against the violence at Nandigram. The same independence informed his historical practice: movements and ideologies had to be judged not only by their stated ideals, but also by their actions and consequences.
For Sarkar, evidence did not speak for itself. Its historical meaning depended on the questions asked of it: who produced it, under what circumstances, what it reveals and what it leaves unsaid. Taking this method seriously also means applying such questions to his own scholarship.
Sarkar sometimes drew on a particular document or local episode to illuminate a larger historical process. Such attention to the particular can reveal what broader narratives miss, but it also raises a methodological question: how far can an episodic instance sustain a general historical argument? The issue is not micro-level evidence itself, but the movement from the particular to the general.
A related question concerns scale. Much of Sarkar’s intensive research was grounded in Bengal. How far can insights drawn from a particular regional archive be extrapolated to the national level? Regions shaped by different social and political configurations may not readily fit a larger narrative constructed from one regional experience.
These questions do not diminish Sarkar’s contribution. They are a way of taking his method seriously: asking what the evidence establishes, what it cannot establish and what other readings remain possible.
Who Is Missing?
Sumit Sarkar (1939-2026) died on 13 August 2026 at the age of 87, leaving behind a body of scholarship that profoundly influenced the study of modern Indian history. The value of that scholarship cannot be captured by a list of books, institutional affiliations or historiographical labels.
For me, its value lies somewhere more elementary. Sarkar did not give me a formula for understanding the past. He taught me to question the story placed before me.
Perhaps among Sarkar’s more enduring lessons for students of history is this: the ambiguities and contradictions of the past should not be reduced simply to make historical explanation easier. To recognise such complexity is not to abandon explanation, but to seek a more layered and nuanced understanding of the different forces, relationships and contexts at work in history.
The appropriate tribute to Sarkar, then, may not be to place him in another pantheon of ‘great historians’, but to continue asking the questions his histories encourage.
I began as an accidental student of history, trying to understand how the past is written. Reading Sarkar taught me to attend not only to what a historical account explains, but also to what it leaves outside its frame. Perhaps the most important questions sometimes begin there: Who is missing from the story?
(Author: Aftab Mohammad is an advocate practising before the Delhi High Court and writes on public policy, governance, history and contemporary issues)