History as constant exploration: Sumit Sarkar through five books

Historian Sumit Sarkar transformed the study of modern India by connecting social history to multiple changes in politics, economics & culture, while engaging deeply with the challenges of the present

Sumit (without suffix, prefix, surname — that is what he liked) published Modern Times seven years after an accident that left him nearly dead and impaired in many ways. He wrote that it was impossible to update his classic Modern India. Too much new research plus his own unexpected transformations made it impossible to do so. He had to write a new volume altogether. To refuse to revise a classic is an obvious mark of integrity and the resilience it demands. More interesting is what it enabled him to do and its illumination of the intellectual life of a historian who has changed the way we look at history itself. 

 

The sub-text of Modern Times is a strong dissatisfaction with what may be broadly called the cultural turn in historical writing. The famous expression of this discontent was his critique of the shift in subaltern studies — an academic movement that put the marginalised at the centre of history-writing — from popular movements to cultural structures shaped by colonial knowledge. But this criticism generated a larger project of expanding the scope of historical research to understand culture in its changing inter-relationships with the economy and material conditions of life. In this, Sumit was enabled (and, I hasten to say, not shaped) by thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, E P Thompson and Raymond Williams.  

Modern Times acknowledges the trajectory of centralisation that the Empire generated. But Sumit constantly underlines the shifts in the nature of colonial power, including its racism that moves from cultural to biological difference. He also underlines the paradoxical effect of colonial power in provoking new kinds of resistance as well as the ambiguous — if not deleterious — impact of what we may today call “development”, such as the introduction of the railways.  

 

Significantly, Sumit spends nearly a third of Modern Times on the city and its cultural productions, ranging from its changes in layout and experience of the city, the ever-rising and ever-new middle class, to its museums, literature, cinema, art and so on. But then he spends yet another third of the book on the economy. Besides going over the colonial stranglehold over the commanding heights of the economy, a great part of this section looks at the social character of Indian industry. While showing the well-organised character of the Indian bazaar (that produces the Birlas and Ispahanis who influence Gandhi and Jinnah, respectively) as well as the humble village peddlers, Sumit goes on to explicate the important debates on the nature of labour: To what extent did they carry the culture of rural hierarchies with them to the city; or were these hierarchies structured by the very nature of organised business enterprises that was dependent on petty production and unorganised labour? 

The contrast with Modern India is instructive. Shaped by “history from below”, both colonial dispensation and the economic are given short shrift in this volume. Instead, the focus is on a revised notion of political history in which tribals, peasants, including lower caste groups and other subaltern sections are the critical actors. The great contribution of this volume is its comprehensive picture of political events since 1885, with the subalterns as the anchor of its story. Interestingly, Sumit’s plan was to write a second volume of Modern Times focussing on political events. We can only speculate how his understanding of this area would have exceeded the scope of Modern India. 

Sumit’s capacity to synthesise cutting edge research into textbooks is probably unmatched globally, especially if one takes into account his ability to make the reader share in the excitement of discovering fresh research. While Sumit articulates his reservations about Edward Said and Michel Foucault, he, at the same time, absorbs the ways in which they have extended historical research. But he works with their insights in his own way. Foucault may have encouraged historians to look beyond the State, and the massive extension of themes in Modern Times testifies to this. At the same time, all these themes are not just wedded to a single thematic such as power/knowledge, but appear as multiple — although mutually informing — stories of the same period of time. It is plural history at its best. 

Many of these facets are evident in his original research and thinking, of which there are many examples. A particularly revealing case is the theme of Time that he takes up in his Writing Social History. Using a buried scandal in an obscure village as the central event, Sumit explores a cluster of issues that is generated by the myth of the Kali Yug (Dark Ages). The latter offers salvation from a world turned upside down by the emerging power of women and the Shudras. Sumit uses this myth to examine the prolific productions of print that reinterpreted the myth to regard the ‘disorderly woman’ as the modern wife while articulating a resentment of the domination by colonial power and its regime of clerical work regulated by clock-time. Sumit explores a new subject that lives in an oscillating mood between activist projects and that of passivity or childlike play, all involving retirement from urban life and its responsibilities. It is through this new subjectivity that Sumit extends his analysis to the upper bhadralok world — a term for the genteel Bengali — associated with the influential spiritual Guru, Ramakrishna Paramhansa. I should add that Sumit in his later period — possibly impacted by both the narrative turn and interest in print culture in historical writing — explores multiple narratives of which the work on popular lower caste tracts in Beyond Nationalist Frames is an excellent example. 

Sumit’s most renowned, pioneering work is, of course, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908. Although covering just five years, it’s an epic. Sumit broke apart the idea that the nationalist movement was shaped by only a few leaders engaged in a debate between extremists and moderates. Instead, he extended the story horizontally, showing how the middle-class leadership was divided into four ways of thinking and action: The liberal moderates, the practitioners of boycott and passive resistance, constructive swadeshi (stressing self-dependence, supported by Tagore) and revolutionary terrorism. But he also took a vertical direction by underlining the importance of the peasantry, especially the rural Muslims, who were alienated by the then unthinking Hindu bias and symbolism of the movement itself. 

Possibly, Sumit’s exposure to the destructive power of even the unthinking Hindu biases made him prescient about the rise of a Hindu nationalism in the present. He read present-day Hindu nationalism as a targeted, controlled, political and social programme, different from the spontaneous communal energies of the Swadeshi period. It wasn’t just riots and violence that were at stake. With — maybe partly through — the dissenting voice of the poet Rabindranath Tagore in Swadeshi times, Sumit grasped the implications of Hindu nationalism in subjugating both minorities, and the marginal and the poor to the rule of the powerful. Sumit was never intellectually dismissive of the Hindutva project. He took it with deadly seriousness for he grasped the challenge it posed to the aspirations and ideals of the anti-imperialist movement that generated multiple imaginings of freedom and ways to attain it. It was this story, with all its possibilities as well as its messy, difficult problems, that needed to be preserved and expanded if the present had to be defended with its democratic ideals.  

But Sumit did not simply instrumentalise the past to meet present challenges. For him, the present enabled a constant dynamic and ever-expanding understanding of the past. 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. 

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The writer is a former student of Sumit Sarkar. He taught political thought at Delhi University and JNU, and was one of the co-authors, along with Sarkar, of Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags