Sumit Sarkar’s unfinished argument with history

Sometime in 2000, I lost my copy of Sumit Sarkar’s Modern India in the Hindu College hostel at Delhi University. It was unfortunate. I remember looking for another copy in the library but without any success. I was somehow in a hurry to finish reading it, so I bought a new copy. It was a brown-covered Macmillan copy of the classic. I wasn’t a student of history at the university; his work was there in the interdisciplinary readings. I finished reading the book soon. It has been a matter of wonder for me that Sarkar’s book, which otherwise was a dense and academic study, had engrossed me. 

The reason wasn’t far to seek. You had to just look at the rest of the bookshelf of readings for the same course. Even if some place the book within a broad Marxist corpus on modern Indian history, Sarkar’s work was remarkable in finding its way out of that dogmatic frame. In doing so, he found a subaltern footing in retelling “history from below”, opening up the narrow economistic gaze of Marxism to social and cultural registers, and noting even the ordinariness of agents shaping modern Indian history. In some ways, his work, and the exquisite flow with which he wrote even on a dry academic palimpsest, drew on his understanding and archives to make ideological schools grapple with areas of their intellectual unease. The journey ensured that readers, and particularly students, found moments of scholarly exploration in the book, not mere ideological thesis-proving history.

To see two different ends of the frame, so to speak, one could contrast his broad-based account of the period with a more formulaic Marxist take in Rajni Palme Dutt’s India Today, or even the Marxist-nationalist strand of writings, as seen in Bipan Chandra’s writings. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that Sarkar’s account was adequate for all frames; it wasn’t. It had varying degrees of engagement and sympathy for different agents, forces and actors of the period. The point, however, is that the book didn’t make a case for not considering different frames. 

The wider scale on which Sarkar put his inquiry in Modern India was also an absorbing experience to read. In all fairness, not to be deceived by the year the book sets off, he did not begin his account with the Congress, and then treat everything outside its leadership as peripheral. It chose to move towards a history from below. The ordinary settings, the small registers of people and places find a way into the book. The section bearing that very title comes before the detailed discussion of the foundations of the Congress, and the choice is significant. Readers may recall that, at the time of publication, the tribal movements, the Moplahs, the Deccan Riots, Pabna, no-revenue movements, caste consciousness, communal consciousness, and labour are all put under inquiry before the Congress is examined in detail. 

The point was not simply to recover a few forgotten rebellions. Sarkar wanted to show that popular politics had its own histories and its own sources of energy. This is illustrated in the Rampa rebellion led by Alluri Sitarama Raju, a movement tracing its origins in the grievances over moneylenders, restrictions imposed by forest laws on shifting cultivation and grazing, and the demand for unpaid tribal labour. Raju himself, Sarkar observed, had become a folk hero in Andhra while remaining almost unknown outside the region. The political history of India could no longer be confined to Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and the proceedings of the Congress. 

This approach continued into the period of mass nationalism. Sarkar paid attention to the Eka movement in Oudh, the tribal struggles in the Rampa region, peasant movements, caste organisations and labour unrest. During the Civil Disobedience movement, Chittagong, Peshawar and Sholapur received attention alongside the Salt Satyagraha and the negotiations between Gandhi and the colonial government. The table of contents itself reveals the breadth of this approach: regional variations, Chauri Chaura, tribal and peasant movements, caste movements and the emergence of labour and communism all form part of the history of mass nationalism. 

This history from below also changed the way Sarkar approached the Congress. The party was not presented as a unified national organisation steadily carrying India towards independence. It was a field of competing tendencies and social pressures. Gandhi’s appeal; the relationship between Gandhi, the Khilafat movement, and the Congress; the pressures generated by popular mobilisation; the Swarajist and No-Changer controversy; the rise of Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru; and the growth of the Congress Left all formed part of the story. 

One can also note that Sarkar’s treatment of Gandhi was particularly revealing in this respect. The book goes beyond political pronouncements or Gandhi’s place in the nationalist pantheon. Sarkar was interested in the social sources of his appeal, the role of rumour, the different responses to Gandhian politics in different regions and the manner in which popular movements could acquire a momentum of their own. The relationship between leadership and mass politics therefore remained a central problem. Congress leaders could initiate movements, redirect them and sometimes restrain them, but they could never completely determine what those movements would become once they entered the countryside and the streets.

To an extent, the same sensitivity extended to the social and cultural dimensions of nationalism. Sarkar’s treatment of the Swadeshi movement, for instance, went well beyond the familiar account of the boycott of British goods. He discussed national education, samitis, labour unrest, Hindu-Muslim relations and the emergence of revolutionary terrorism. Elsewhere he examined the social roots of the intelligentsia, Hindu reform and revival, developments in Indian Islam, patriotic literature and nationalist economic thought. His account of nationalism therefore had a cultural history running through it, even though the underlying concern with economic and social structures never disappeared. 

That combination was one of the distinctive features of Sarkar’s way of applying a Marxist lens with a subaltern light of specificity. He was unwilling to explain nationalism simply through economic interests, class relations or the colonial economy. For his historical lens, ideas and symbols mattered; so did religious idioms, and caste and community relations. His study showed that excluding them as mere superstructure didn’t explain things. He applied the wider canvas to argue different points, including why the Congress understood public mood better than the communists during the 1942 movement.

With time, the wider milieu shifted, and the balance became more difficult to maintain as the historiographical climate changed in the 1980s and 1990s. The challenge to economic reductionism had produced enormously valuable work on culture, consciousness, language, identity and colonial discourse. The influence of Foucault and Edward Said, and the expanding work of the Subaltern Studies historians, opened up questions that conventional Marxist historiography had often neglected. Sarkar himself had been part of that intellectual world. He, therefore, had little reason to dismiss the new cultural history. His concern was with the possibility of another kind of reductionism emerging in its place.

It was late in 2005 that I read his work, Writing Social History, published by Oxford University Press in 1997, and found it as important in understanding a later phase of Sarkar's thinking. The book collected essays written largely during the preceding years and engaged directly with the new debates in Indian historiography. But its purpose was not to restore an older economic determinism. Sarkar was trying to retain the insights of social history while questioning some of the directions in which the newer cultural and postcolonial approaches were moving. 

One must say that his essay on the decline of the subaltern in Subaltern Studies makes the point particularly sharply. The early volumes of Subaltern Studies had concentrated heavily on peasants, tribals and workers and had emerged from a broadly Marxian and socialist intellectual milieu. Sarkar’s criticism was that the later project had increasingly moved towards critiques of Western colonial power and knowledge, with greater emphasis on non-Western community consciousness. He didn’t hide his worry about the growing tendency to define communities principally through religious identities. 

The historical irony is striking here. The original Subaltern Studies intervention had sought to rescue ordinary people from histories dominated by elites. Sarkar had considerable sympathy with that project because it shared his own concern with popular agency. Yet a history centred on the subaltern could itself become restrictive when the category of the subaltern acquired too much explanatory power. Peasants, workers, tribals and women were never defined by a single identity. Their lives were shaped simultaneously by class, caste, gender, religion, region, occupation and material circumstances. One identity could become politically important in one situation and recede in another.

Sarkar’s engagement with Edward Said raised a related question. The critique of colonial knowledge had shown how deeply power could enter into the production of knowledge itself. Colonial categories were not innocent descriptions of Indian society. They helped organise the ways in which that society was governed and understood. Sarkar accepted the importance of this insight. His reservation arose when discourse and representation began to displace the social world in which they operated. Colonial knowledge had material consequences, but the material world also shaped the production, reception and use of that knowledge.

His differences with Partha Chatterjee can be understood in this broader context. Chatterjee’s work had made an important intervention by examining nationalism as a cultural and intellectual project and by asking how Indian nationalists responded to the cultural domination of colonial rule. Sarkar, however, was uneasy with approaches that gave excessive autonomy to nationalist discourse, community identities or cultural domains. He wanted those categories brought back into contact with class, caste, gender, economic relations and the actual social processes through which political consciousness developed.

That was also why Sarkar’s later position cannot simply be described as a rejection of the cultural turn. The cultural turn had corrected something that Marxist historiography had genuinely got wrong. Economic structures alone could not explain the meanings people attached to nationalism, religion, caste or political action. Yet the correction could go too far. Culture could not become a substitute for society, just as discourse could not become a substitute for history.

Sarkar’s intellectual trajectory therefore acquires a certain coherence when Modern India is read alongside Writing Social History. In the earlier book, he challenged elite and leader-centred histories by bringing peasants, tribals, workers, caste groups and regional movements into the centre of the story. In the later essays, he questioned some newer approaches when their emphasis on discourse, identity and cultural autonomy seemed to sever those histories from material and social relationships. The underlying impulse remained the same: a suspicion of explanations that make history too neat.

His lasting contribution lies in that tension. Economic structures matter, but they do not exhaust history. Culture matters, but it does not float above material life. Political leaders matter, but they do not manufacture popular politics at will. Ordinary people possess agency, but their agency is exercised within social structures that they did not themselves create. A serious history of modern India has to hold these dimensions together.

That was perhaps the larger intellectual journey from Modern India to Writing Social History. Sarkar first helped expand the historical field by making it impossible to write the story of nationalism entirely from the viewpoint of its celebrated leaders. He later insisted that expanding the field did not mean abandoning the material and social foundations of historical life. The challenge was to understand how economic interests, social relations, political institutions, cultural meanings and popular action interacted. His importance lies as much in that insistence on complexity as in any single interpretation of the nationalist movement. It can’t be said, and perhaps can’t be said for any historian, that he responded to curiosity alone. He responded to his ideas and worldview, but somehow tried to ensure that he wasn’t silo-stuck in his scholarship. 

 
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