Sumit Sarkar and the History That Refused to Bow

No fort stands in his name.

No city, road, airport, flyover, stadium, scholarship scam, or freshly painted traffic island announces Sumit Sarkar to the public. India has an energetic memorial department for power. We rename railway stations, install statues, rearrange signboards, fight over dead kings, and occasionally behave as though history itself were a municipal plaque that the correct minister could unscrew at night.

A teacher leaves less convenient evidence.

A sentence remembered after thirty years. A question that spoils a comfortable prejudice. A student who enters the classroom carrying caste, hierarchy, nationalism, family certainty, and the usual ancestral luggage, then comes out with one dangerous new suspicion: perhaps the world is not arranged as naturally as the powerful claim.

The historian Sumit Sarkar died in New Delhi on 13 August 2026. He was eighty-seven. He leaves no monument that can be garlanded before the cameras and forgotten after lunch. He leaves books, arguments, disagreements, and generations of students whose minds no longer sit quite straight in the approved chair.

That is a more troublesome form of immortality.

Ravish Kumar’s farewell begins from this problem of remembrance. Sarkar built no fort and has no road named after him, so how should he be remembered? Ravish answers not as an official biographer but as a former student. He recalls young people arriving at Delhi University from the caste-bound and feudal worlds of Bihar and elsewhere, then encountering teachers who behaved democratically inside the classroom. Sarkar did not enlarge himself until the students became insects. He came down to their level, treated them as thinking adults, and left them feeling, almost absurdly, that they were the professors while the famous historian quietly gathered his books like another student.

That small reversal tells us more than a ceremonial obituary full of posts held, committees chaired, and adjectives polished until they resemble brass utensils before a wedding.

Sarkar’s scholarship performed the same movement as his teaching. It came down from the podium.

His early classic, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, did not treat nationalism as a procession of famous men moving nobly across a painted backdrop. It examined organisations, pamphlets, songs, class interests, popular participation, and the fractures that heroic narration likes to hide under the carpet. Why did a movement that spoke for Bengal fail to gather all of Bengal? How did Hindu symbols shape mobilisation while also helping to estrange many Muslim peasants? What did the public make of the language offered by its leaders? The nation was not one clean voice. It was a crowded field of unequal people, partial solidarities, missed openings, and consequences.

This was history with the furniture moved away from the great man’s chair.

The same instinct made Modern India, 1885–1947 far more than a book students carried towards examinations. It brought strikes, peasant struggles, the naval ratings’ revolt, Tebhaga, Telangana, class pressure, communal mobilisation, and movements beyond the Congress high command into the account of freedom. It did not remove Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, or the other national leaders. It returned them to scale.

This distinction matters. History from below should not become history with the top sawn off and thrown into the Hooghly. Sarkar’s gift was relational vision: leader and crowd, idea and material condition, culture and economy, promise and pressure. The point was not to replace one cardboard hero with another cardboard category labelled “the people”. The point was to see the movement between them.

He helped shape the early Subaltern Studies project and then became one of its most formidable critics. This, too, deserves respect. India is full of people who join a school of thought and thereafter guard it like an inherited sweet shop, swearing that the syrup remains perfect while flies form a research collective on top. Sarkar did not confuse intellectual consistency with lifetime party membership. When later subaltern and postcolonial writing seemed to him to drift from social history towards culture and discourse abstracted from material relations, he said so.

A school was not a religion. His name on an early attendance register did not oblige him to worship its later syllabus.

The Prasar Bharati Archives conversation below catches this independence in motion. The occasion is Writing Social History. Sarkar discusses Marxism after the collapse of the Soviet world, the attractions and limits of postmodern thought, Foucault, Edward Said, E. P. Thompson, colonial modernity, the Bengali middle classes, Ramakrishna, communalism, and the dangers of turning huge historical formations into obedient binary blocks.

Watch the manner as much as the argument.

He qualifies. He separates one thinker from another. He accepts what a framework illuminates and asks what it makes invisible. He refuses the lazy choice between an old economic determinism in which culture is merely a reflection and a newer culturalism in which economy, institution, class, and political strategy evaporate like spilled tea in May.

In our time, public speech rewards the man who can compress a century into forty-five seconds, attach a flag, add thunder, and place his own astonished face in the thumbnail. Sarkar pauses. He distinguishes. He says, in effect, that “complexity” is not a decorative word one applies after making a mess; it is the obligation to locate tensions without abandoning explanation.

This now sounds almost revolutionary.

Sarkar was a Marxist historian, but the label is useful only if it opens the work rather than closes the file. His Marxism did not excuse him from empirical labour. It required him to ask who owned, who worked, who spoke, who was represented, who was missing, and how a cultural claim travelled through an unequal society. Nor did political commitment mean obedience to whatever carried a Left certificate. The historian’s job was not to become the court painter of his preferred camp.

That independence travelled beyond academic debate.

After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Sarkar joined Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen in writing Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right. It was a short book for an urgent public moment, researched rather than merely shouted. He understood that communalism does not descend from the sky during a riot. It is prepared through organisations, stories, symbols, resentments, institutional habits, and the patient manufacture of an enemy.

He also understood that a historian cannot denounce power in the distant past and become suddenly polite when power is serving tea nearby. In 2007, he returned the Rabindra Puraskar in protest against the Nandigram killings. That act is important not because returning an award automatically proves virtue. Public gestures can become theatre too; India has enough theatre to employ every unemployed god. It matters because the gesture was consistent with the method. Evidence, consequence, and the lives of ordinary people had to count even when the embarrassment fell upon those closer to one’s own political inheritance.

This is what it means for history not to bow.

Not that the historian has no values. The fantasy of the perfectly neutral scholar is often a way of hiding values behind a filing cabinet. Sarkar valued democracy, secularism, equality, freedom of inquiry, and the possibility of collective transformation. He did not conceal that. But a value is not permission to invent evidence. It is a reason to inspect evidence more severely, especially when it flatters you.

In one of his later reflections, Sarkar wrote about four decades of scholarship and worried that Indian historians’ freedom to write without an imposed agenda was becoming a vanishing luxury. The line now feels less like an elderly scholar’s anxiety and more like a weather warning nobody filed because the office was busy revising the map.

The struggle over history in India is not a quarrel about old dust. It is a struggle over who may belong in the present.

Flatten the past into a single Hindu civilisation eternally wounded by outsiders, and today’s Muslim becomes a guest with suspicious paperwork. Turn caste into a minor misunderstanding introduced by foreigners, and the humiliation of millions becomes bad public relations. Reduce freedom to negotiations among great leaders, and workers, peasants, women, Dalits, Adivasis, rebels, dissenters, and ordinary people appear as extras who should be grateful that the camera briefly crossed their faces.

Sarkar kept moving the camera.

The timing of his death, around the anniversary of Indian independence, carries its own sad precision. Ravish’s tribute returns to Sarkar’s account of Gandhi in Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta, and Delhi during the last violent approach to freedom. While political authority was passing into Indian hands, an old man walked through communal ruin, often separated from the leadership that had once revolved around him. Sarkar could recognise Gandhi’s failures, pressures, compromises, and historical limits without becoming blind to the moral courage of those final months.

That ability has become rare. We are now encouraged to choose between worship and demolition. A figure must be stainless or sewage. A book must be scripture or conspiracy. A historian must be nationalist or anti-national, ancient glory department or colonial hangover, television warrior or suspicious professor. Nuance is treated like a weak pulse.

But history without nuance is only propaganda that has learned to use footnotes.

What remains after a historian dies?

The books remain, though books have their own mortality. They go out of print, retreat into university libraries, become photocopies, quotations, examination notes, and ten bullet points narrated by a coaching-channel voice over heroic background music. Concepts that once disturbed a discipline become terms students memorise for four marks. “Subaltern.” “Material conditions.” “Communalism.” “History from below.” The living argument is dried, powdered, packed, and sold as instant scholarship. Just add hot water and a government vacancy.

The students remain too.

That may be the stronger archive. A teacher who treated a frightened young person as an equal alters more than a syllabus. He changes the scale by which authority will later be measured. Ravish Kumar’s remembrance makes this clear: thirty years after the classroom, part of the teacher still lives in the student. Not as obedience. As a democratic reflex.

Perhaps that is the proper memorial for Sumit Sarkar.

Do not turn him into another unanswerable statue. Read him. Argue with him. Notice where his frameworks illuminate and where later research requires correction. Watch the old conversation. Listen to the former student. Then return to the present with the irritating habit of asking what lies beneath the official story.

No road may be named after Sumit Sarkar.

Perhaps a road would be too simple anyway. A road invites us to pass over it. A historian asks us to stop and look down: who laid it, whose house was removed, who owns the shops along it, who may walk safely after dark, which neighbourhood it joins, which one it divides, and whose name disappeared before the minister arrived with the new signboard.

There, beneath the ceremony, history begins again.