In a late essay reflecting on his intellectual journey over the decades, Sumit Sarkar remarked: “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.”

In a long and very productive life, Sarkar – who was born in Calcutta in 1939 and died in Delhi earlier this month – had to confront three historical agendas imposed by others. The first was a dogmatic Marxism which viewed the past through a narrow economistic lens, and was very influential in Sarkar’s hometown (his father, also a historian, was a member of the Communist Party of India).

The second was the interlinked trend of post-modernism and post-colonialism which viewed history as fragmented and culturally relative, and focused on texts and discourses rather than the lived experiences of people in the past.

The third was the religious majoritarianism of the sangh parivar, which glorified Hindus and demonised Muslims, and despite – or perhaps because of – its Manichaeism gained ideological and political ascendancy in the 1990s and beyond.

Sarkar refused to succumb to the seductions of “pomo-poco” thought, for he saw – more clearly than his fellow members of the Subaltern Studies school – how it underplayed the economy, social conflict, and lower-caste deprivation. His rejection of Hindutva was absolute, based both on its misreadings of the past and its dangerous consequences for democracy and pluralism in the present.

His relationship with Marxism, however, was more complex. He moved away early from its economic determinism, recognising that in India caste and gender were axes of inequality as significant as class. His prose was free of Marxist jargon, and (as far as I know) he never joined a communist party.

Yet he did not entirely disavow the Marxism of his youth either. He continued to see it as a philosophy of emancipation, which – whatever its perversions in countries like the Soviet Union – still stood, broadly, on the side of equality and justice.

Sarkar’s first book was The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, published in 1973. A richly crafted political and social history, it used primary sources in English and Bengali to examine the Swadeshi upsurge against a backdrop of rising Hindu-Muslim tensions and the partition of the province.

A counterpart of this focused, immersive regional study is the wide-ranging essay collection, Writing Social History (published........

© Scroll.in