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.
