It WAS the late 1970s in Sussex, England. Two historians sat well past midnight, talking. They spoke of Indian peasants, their anger, their quiet rebellions.
One of them later wrote that he sat “practically spellbound”. Ranajit Guha, the founding figure of the ‘Subaltern Studies Collective’, did most of the talking that night. The man who was listening was Sumit Sarkar.
Sarkar, who helped shape an entire era of Indian history writing, died on August 13, 2026, aged 87.
In the cold evenings of England in the late 1970s, a new way of writing Indian history was beginning to take shape in Oxford and elsewhere — one that would come to be known as ‘Subaltern Studies’ in 1982, when the first volume of the series, Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, was published. It was an approach to “history from below”. Most history books had been focused on the big leaders and political parties. But Guha argued that ordinary people, peasants, workers, and tribal communities had their own “autonomous domain” of politics, one that did not simply follow the lead of the nationalist elites. ‘Subaltern Studies’ tried to recover their voices and actions.
Sarkar became one of the key contributors to this collective, alongside historians Shahid Amin, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gautam Bhadra, and David Hardiman. His first book, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908, published in 1973, had already moved the story of Bengal’s anti-colonial revolt away from famous leaders towards workers, peasants, and small artisans — an approach that fed directly into the group’s founding spirit.
It is one of history’s small ironies that the same man would years later become one of the school’s sharpest and most respected critics. By the late 1980s, the project had increasingly turned away from class-based histories towards critiques of Western thought, secularism and Enlightenment values, drawing on Western thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Distancing himself from the group, Sarkar, in his essay, The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies, warned that some of these critiques came dangerously close to the arguments made by the Hindu Right.
Sumit Sarkar was born in 1939 into a Brahmo family in Calcutta, in a home where mornings began with Tagore and evenings ended in arguments about Marx. His father, Sushobhan Sarkar, was a celebrated Marxist historian at Presidency College. His uncle was PC Mahalanobis, the statistician after whom India’s premier statistical institute is named.
For Sarkar, becoming a historian was almost inherited — not chosen. Yet even within that inheritance, he rebelled, writing sharply about the Bengal Renaissance, sharp enough that a senior Communist Party of India (CPI) worker once accused him of betraying his father’s legacy. Interestingly, without telling him, his father responded with a sharp rejoinder, defending him.
Decades later, generations of students learned modern Indian history from Sumit Sarkar’s book Modern India, 1885-1947, first published in 1983. The kind of book that ends up on a shelf with a torn spine and pencil marks on every page. Later he focused on the economy, environment and culture, and Modern Times: India 1880s–1950s was published in 2014.
Sarkar’s moral courage comes out in the later part of his life, as well. In 2004, West Bengal’s Left government granted him the Rabindra Puraskar literary award. But in 2007, after police fired on farmers in Nandigram, Sarkar returned his award and donated the prize money to a relief fund. He argued that while Jallianwala Bagh had happened under colonial rule, Nandigram was in some ways more shocking because the violence had occurred under a Left government in independent India.
In his later years, Sarkar grew fascinated with “microhistory”. He unearthed a forgotten newspaper account from Doyhata, a village in East Bengal, where a ‘lower-caste’ man had murdered another ‘lower-caste’ man before his ‘upper-caste’ guru, later going on to assault ‘upper-caste’ women that same night, in a brutal, isolated tragedy. Sarkar called the contradictions in the news story a kind of “unexpected reversal” that grand history often misses. When questioned by Economic and Political Weekly on this, he replied simply: “All historians are entitled to try and understand their Others.”
Sumit Sarkar leaves behind his wife Tanika Sarkar, and a legacy that lives not only in bookshelves, but also in the minds of students who first understood modern India through his pages. A historian’s death is a different kind of leaving. He does not leave behind just a body of work, but also a work unfinished, one that the next generation must walk into archive rooms to complete. Like evening light streaming through the window of an old house, his impact will linger on the walls long after the room has gone dark.
The writer is chief, research, The Indian Express, Hindi
Sumit Sarkar (1939-2026) 
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