Sumit Sarkar
Indian historian of modern India (1939–2026)
- 2 min read
- 3 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Nation state, Secularism and 2004 Indian general election
Life and career
Sarkar was born in 1939 into a Brahmo family to Susobhan Sarkar. His uncle Rupankar Sarkar was a famous ornithologist. His maternal uncle was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.
He completed his BA (Honours) in History at Presidency College, Calcutta and MA and Ph.D. in the same subject at the University of Calcutta. He taught for many years as a lecturer at the University of Calcutta, and later as a reader at the University of Burdwan. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. He was professor of history at the University of Delhi between 1974 and 2004.
Sarkar died on 13 August 2026, at the age of 87.
Sign in to keep reading
2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Awards
Sarkar was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar literary award for his book Writing Social History by the West Bengal government in 2004. He returned the award in 2007 in protest against the expulsion of farmers from their land by the erstwhile state government ran by the CPI(M) led Left Front (West Bengal).
Controversy
Sarkar was one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective, but later distanced himself from the project. He noted that arguments made in the later issues of the journal as well as in books by Partha Chatterjee blanketly criticized Enlightenment, the nation-state and secularism lined up with indigenist critiques that were at home with the Hindu right. In his view this error was traceable to a basic confusion in the early project that posed an absolute separation between the elite and subaltern domains.
He contributed a volume to the Towards Freedom project of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), publication of which was blocked in 2000 by the ICHR under the influence of then Indian government administered by the Bharatiya Janata Party as alleged by Sarkar. The publication of the volume was eventually allowed by the Government of India once the Congress party came to power after the general election of 2004.