Remembering Sumit Sarkar, the Marxist historian who transformed our understanding of modern India by bringing the subaltern to the centre of history, challenging binaries, and defending secular democratic thought
Satya Narayan Misra
Barring Andre Beteille, the gentle, demure sociologist who passed away last February, no other academic’s death in recent times has been remembered with so much fondness, respect, and outpouring of emotion as that of Prof. Sumit Sarkar, who was called “Sumit” by his numerous students, peers, and seniors.
There has been an avalanche of tributes, mostly from the students he taught in the 1990s and, interestingly, from Ravish Kumar, the journalist who recounts how he travelled from caste-ridden and feudal Bihar to gain a wholesome understanding of democracy as Sumit’s student at Delhi University.
He will be remembered primarily for his iconic and classic textbook Modern India, which he wrote in 1983 and which I bought for Rs 26.50 as a UPSC aspirant. Even after forty-three years of my academic jousting with Sumit, as a counterpoint to the hagiography of Bipin Chandra on the role of the Congress and Gandhi in achieving independence, its musty smell of invaluable ideas, and heavily underlined thought process highlighting the importance of the subaltern in shaping and coaxing political leadership at the top, with counterpoints to achieve independence, still give me goosebumps, as they remain permanently burnished in my mind.
Though a student of economics, my dalliance with modern Indian history as an avocation could not have been more delicious and rewarding, as Sumit’s enduring contribution still remains very relevant in the polarised times that we are traversing.
History from Below
Sumit opened his academic arsenal with a masterly monograph, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (1903–1908), in 1973, where, instead of praising elite leaders, he flagged the failure of the movement to recruit mass Muslim and low-caste support. He brought out the structural limitations and internal contradictions of the early Indian middle class. His classic contribution to the study of the freedom struggle, published a decade later, brought out how, besides Congress resolutions, constitutional negotiations, and the towering presence of Gandhi, the subaltern – peasants, workers, Adivasis, and anonymous crowds – played a definitive role. That was “history from below”. He did not replace leaders with the masses. Rather, he explored the unstable relationship between them. While Gandhi mattered, so did the subaltern groups.
Though he was a fellow Marxist, in his approach to the freedom struggle he was sharply different from Bipin Chandra’s analysis in ‘Freedom Struggle’ written in 1972, where he focused heavily on the INC as the central backbone of the anti-colonial struggle. For Sumit Sarkar, it was a complex interplay of socio-economic structures, where grassroots dynamics operated alongside elite politics. Taking a critical view of the Congress-driven national movement, Sumit highlighted the salience of subaltern movements and the pressures exerted by workers and peasants from below. For him, greater emphasis on the autonomous action of ordinary people must be given due credit, as they pushed the leadership further than it wanted to follow, as in case of suspending the Civil Disobedience movement by Gandhi in 1934.
The Angst Against Communalism
Post-demolition of the Babri Masjid, Sumit, along with Tanika (his wife), Tapan Basu, and Sambuddha Sen, wrote a bitter polemic against the rising tide of the Hindutva movement in a book titled Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags in 1993. It is a penetrating analysis of the Hindutva movement, tracing its origins from a local RSS unit to a multi-headed hydra of menacing proportions. “At the heart of Hindutva lies the myth of a continuous thousand-year struggle of Hindus against Muslims as the structuring principle of Indian society.”
“The myth of Muslim invader and Hindu resistance has also been employed to prove that Hindutva represents the true, native nationalism,” write the authors. They believe that the rise of Hindutva is not accidental but the result of highly organised everyday cultural mobilisation. This book remains essential reading to understand the institutional and contemporary roots of the BJP’s politics of religious polarisation.
From a Marxist historian, Sumit segued into a subaltern scholar and a defender of secular democratic history. Romila Thapar, in her autobiography ‘Just Being’, also shares the same angst about the sordid rise of communalism. She has also pointed out how the two basic theories of Hindutva—the hostility of Hindus and Muslims towards each other and the superiority of the Aryan race – do not stand up to scrutiny, as professional history stands on the bedrock of secularism.
Modern Times
When Sumit was asked to revise his classic Modern India, he refrained from doing so and wrote Modern Times in 2014 instead. It is a deeply analytical historical work that reimagines the trajectory of colonial India through the lenses of economy, environment, and culture. He looks at forest policies that favoured imperial timber extraction while marginalising nomadic and tribal communities. He challenges rigid nationalist orthodoxies regarding deindustrialisation and the drain of wealth, as Dadabhai Naoroji propounded. Instead, he points to regional variations, the rise of industrial capital like the Tatas, and complex trade patterns. Sumit steers clear of simple nationalistic binaries and uncritical post-colonial dogmas. In an earlier book, Beyond Nationalist Frames, written in 2002, Sumit writes that there are two contemporary threats to objective history writing. One is religious nationalism, and the other is the extreme scepticism of postmodern theories.
Abiding Contribution
His Marxism was fundamental to him but never doctrinaire. Class mattered, but never by itself. Caste, religion, gender, and cultural practices could not be consigned to the secondary superstructure, as Marx had contemplated. Economic determinism has serious limitations. Sumit’s exposure to the destructive power of unthinking Hindu biases made him prescient about the rise of Hindu nationalism in the present. Sumit grasped the implications of Hindu nationalism in subjugating both minorities and the marginalised and poor to the rule of the powerful. Just as the past sharpened the sensitivities of the historian to the possibilities and dangers of the present, Sumit remains the exemplar of a dialogic historian. In the academic world, not innocent of vanity, he possessed very little of it. His shy demeanour, twinkling eyes, and gentle sarcasm coexisted with razor-sharp judgement. His enduring contribution is to not take a binary view of history and to keep the subaltern as the anchor of historical understanding.
(Satya Misra teaches Constitutional Law & is deeply involved in Development Studies. Views expressed are personal.)