Sumit Sarkar

Sumit Sarkar (Bengali: সুমিত সরকার) (born 1939) is an Indian historian of modern India.

Background

He belongs to one of Bengal's most enlightened and progressive Brahmo families. His father was Professor Susobhan Chandra Sarkar, a Head of Department of History at Presidency College, Calcutta and the founder Head of Department of the Department of History, [(Jadavpur University)]. His elder sister was Sipra Sarkar, a very well known Professor of History at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. His maternal uncle was Professor Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, India's first planner. His maternal grandfather was Subodh Chandra Mahalanobis, a Professor and Head of Department of Physiology at Presidency College, Calcutta. He is married to fellow historian Tanika Sarkar, who is a Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Education and career

He studied at St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Presidency College, Calcutta where he obtained a First Class First in B.A. (Honours) in History, and at the University of Calcutta where he obtained a First Class First in M.A. in History and later, a Ph.D. in the same subject under the supervision of Professor Suren Sen. He was a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He taught for many years as a lecturer at the University of Calcutta, and later as a reader at the University of Burdwan. Until recently, he was Professor of History at the University of Delhi, where he began teaching career in 1976.

He was one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective. In some of his later writings he has sought to combine an empirical study of themes in late-colonial Indian history with an intervention in current debates about the extent and nature of western colonial domination. He entitled one of his essays "Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies", criticizing the turn to Foucauldian studies of power-knowledge that left behind many of the empiricist and Marxist efforts of the first two volumes of Subaltern Studies. He writes that the socialist inspiration behind the early volumes led to a greater impact in India itself, while the later volumes focus on western discourse, reified the subaltern-colonizer divide and then rose in prominence in western academia.

Awards

He was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar literary award by the West Bengal government in 2004. He returned the award in 2007 in protest against the expulsion of farmers from their land.

Controversy

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 dominated by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The publication of the volume was eventually allowed by the Government of India once the Congress came to power after the general election of 2004.

Publications

• Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1946, (New Delhi, 2007)
• Beyond Nationalist Frames: Post-Modernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History, (Delhi, 2002)
• Writing Social History, (Delhi, 1998)
• Modern India: 1885-1947, (Basingstoke, 1989)
• The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908, (New Delhi, 1973)

External links

• http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1815/18150930.htm
• http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1809/18090880.htm
• "Delhi Historians Group's Publication "Communalization of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy", A report in 2002, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.