Sumit Sarkar (born 1939) is an Indian historian of modern
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
. He is the author of ''Swadeshi Movement''.
Early life, education and career
He was born to
Susobhan Sarkar. His maternal uncle was
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS (29 June 1893– 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the fir ...
.
He completed his BA (Honours) in history at
Presidency College, Calcutta
Presidency University, Kolkata (formerly known as Presidency College, Kolkata) is a second major public state aided research university located in College Street, Kolkata. Considered as one of best colleges when Presidency College was affili ...
and MA and Ph.D. in the same subject at the
University of Calcutta
The University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University; CU) is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate State university (India), state university in India, located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Considered ...
. He taught for many years as a
lecturer
Lecturer is an List of academic ranks, academic rank within many universities, though the meaning of the term varies somewhat from country to country. It generally denotes an academic expert who is hired to teach on a full- or part-time basis. T ...
at the University of Calcutta, and later as a
reader
A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to:
Computing and technology
* Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader
* Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application
* A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...
at the
University of Burdwan
The University of Burdwan (also known as Burdwan University or B. U.) is a public university in Purba Bardhaman, West Bengal, India. It was established by the West Bengal Government as a teaching and affiliating university on 15 June 1960 with ...
. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at
Wolfson College, Oxford
Wolfson College () is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Located in north Oxford along the River Cherwell, Wolfson is an all-graduate college with around sixty governing body fellows, in addition to both research and ...
. He was
professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
of history at the
University of Delhi
Delhi University (DU), formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and is recognized as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) ...
.
Awards
He was awarded the
Rabindra Puraskar
The Rabindra Puraskar (also Rabindra Smriti Puraskar) is the highest honorary literary award given in the Indian state of West Bengal. This award is named after the famous Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and is administered by the Government of W ...
literary award for his book Writing Social History by the
West Bengal
West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fourt ...
government in 2004. He returned the award in 2007 in protest against
the expulsion of farmers from their land.
Controversy
He 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
The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is a captive body of the Ministry of Education, Government of India established by an Administrative Order. The body has provided financial assistance to historians and scholars through fellowshi ...
(ICHR), publication of which was blocked in 2000 by the ICHR under the influence of then Indian government administered by the
Bharatiya Janata Party
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP; ; ) is a political party in India, and one of the two major Indian political parties alongside the Indian National Congress. Since 2014, it has been the ruling political party in India under Narendra Modi ...
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.
Publications
* ''Modern Times''(Ranikhet, 2014)
*''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)
*''Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right'', (with Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta,
Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen; Orient Longman, 1993). .
*''Modern India: 1885-1947'', (Basingstoke, 1989)
*''The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908'', (New Delhi, 1973)
References
External links
The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies"Delhi Historians Group's Publication "Communalization of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy", A report in 2002, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sarkar, Sumit
1939 births
Bengali Hindus
Bengali-language writers
20th-century Bengalis
Presidency University, Kolkata alumni
University of Calcutta alumni
University of Calcutta faculty
University of Burdwan faculty
Delhi University faculty
Jawaharlal Nehru University faculty
Bengali historians
Brahmos
Fellows of Wolfson College, Oxford
Historians of South Asia
Historians of colonialism
20th-century Indian historians
Living people
Indian Marxist historians
Indian political writers
Writers about Hindu nationalism
Indian lecturers
Indian male writers
20th-century Indian writers
20th-century Indian male writers
Indian writers
Indian historians
Indian scholars
20th-century Indian scholars
Scholars from West Bengal
English-language writers from India
People from Kolkata district