In a previous post, I explained how Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee- the father of the founder of India (and West Bengal's) ruling party- helped found the Postgrad Dept of Physics at Calcutta University. Almost immediately it produced three world-class scientists- Bose (of Boson fame), Saha (cosmic rays) & Nobel laureate CV Raman.
As Vice Chancellor, Sir Ashutosh had also founded the first Department of History in India and personally funded a Professorship in Ancient Indian History & Culture, in 1913.
Initially, there were 'increasing returns' to historical scholarship and thus the 'golden age' of Indian historiography coincided with the rise and increasing success of the Independence movement. In the field of archaeology, the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization raised interest in history to a peak in the early Thirties. This is reflected in the prison writings of Jawaharlal Nehru. However, after Independence, interest in history decreased. Diminishing returns had set in. Still, there was interest in the historical development of the property regime for agricultural land for two reasons
1) the American obsession with land reform as being vital to prevent a Communist revolution
2) the Communist obsession with classifying economic regimes so as to justify a revolution as the only way to break with 'feudalism' or 'bourgeois capitalism' or some such abstraction.
In this context, the historian, Susobhan Sarkar- who wrote the manifesto for the Communist Party of India- has some significance in that he bridged the gap between the older Brahmo bhadralok culture, as exemplified by Santiniketan, and the newer Bolshevik ideas gaining traction in the Thirties. Sarkar had done a second degree at Jesus College in the mid Twenties. It is said he came to the attention of Communist recruiters there. Since Sarkar was teaching European history- a subject of little interest to Indians- he had no direct political impact on his students despite being a conscientious and even quite able pedagogue. Sarkar did yield to the narcissism of his class and glorified its nugatory accomplishments to the best of his slender ability. However, because the Communists did come to power (after he had retired) but before died (in 1982) Sarkar was vindicated by history- at least for three decades.
Not so his son Sumit Sarkar who died a few days ago. He had lived to see the complete rout of Communism in West Bengal and, more sadly, the triumph of the BJP in Calcutta itself.
The always ridiculous Ram Guha writes in Scroll
Historian Sumit Sarkar took his scholarship beyond the confines of the academy
He took it to the crapper.
He was was one of several prabasi Bengali intellectuals who helped make Delhi University the foremost academic institution in all of South Asia.
What made Delhi important was the fact that power- and then money- became more and more concentrated there. Sadly, since smart people don't study History, History Departments are bound to be populated by stupid nonentities.
In a late essay reflecting on his intellectual journey over the decades,
it was a journeu from shit to shit
Sumit Sarkar remarked: “So far, we Indian historians have written the histories that we wanted to write,
If you wanted your book to sell (i.e. be put on the reading list) you had to write politically correct shite- e.g. Modi is Hitler!
following no agenda but our own. That seems to be a fast-vanishing luxury.”
Guys who made their money in Merchant Banking, are now earning big bucks with nationalist history books. In other words, things have come full circle back to the time of the nationalist Hindu historians at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
In a long and very productive life, Sarkar – who was born in Calcutta in 1939 and died in Delhi earlier this month – had to confront three historical agendas imposed by others.
There was only one agenda. Write boring shite about how horrible Hindoooos are.
The first was a dogmatic Marxism which viewed the past through a narrow economistic lens,
as opposed to the dog-shit lens of the Subaltern Group
and was very influential in Sarkar’s hometown
which Marxists had turned into a yet bigger shit-hole.
(his father, also a historian, was a member of the Communist Party of India).
There was a time when Commies thought History Professors worth recruiting. After Independence, the CPI was prepared to launch Ranajit Guha (whom they believed to be close to the KGB) in the Trade Union movement. Sadly, he was useless and thus was left to moulder as a historian. It must be said, Calcutta University refused to give him a PhD for his illiterate shite.
The second was the interlinked trend of post-modernism and post-colonialism which
have turned into Jason Arday style Grievance Studies. At least Arday had the grace to top himself.
viewed history as fragmented and culturally relative, and focused on texts and discourses rather than the lived experiences of people in the past.
The lived experience of people then and now is that low IQ professors are as boring and useless as shit.
The third was the religious majoritarianism of the sangh parivar, which glorified Hindus and demonised Muslims,
Islam doesn't demonise kaffirs at all. It gives them kisses and cuddles.
and despite – or perhaps because of – its Manichaeism gained ideological and political ascendancy in the 1990s and beyond.
The job of the Hindu 'intellectual' is to say 'Hindooos are fucking horrible, mate. Take it from me. I'm a particularly high caste one myself'.
‘Pomo-poco’ thought
Sarkar refused to succumb to the seductions of “pomo-poco” thought, for he saw – more clearly than his fellow members of the Subaltern Studies school – how it underplayed the economy, social conflict, and lower-caste deprivation.
These shitheads thought there was such a thing as 'elite historiography'. The truth was History professors are ill-paid drudges. The Backward and 'untouchable' caste leaders were becoming Chief Ministers (or, in the case of Modi, Prime Minister) and it was their versions of history which would become normative.
His rejection of Hindutva was absolute,
So what? Both Delhi and Calcutta are now ruled by Hindutvadis. Sumit's 'rejection' was futile. Guha, at least, still lives in a Congress run State.
based both on its misreadings of the past and its dangerous consequences for democracy and pluralism in the present.
Modi is the dangerous consequence. Did you know, he hasn't even been to Durham University- forget Oxford or Cambridge!
His relationship with Marxism, however, was more complex.
He was prepared to suck it off but what it wanted was a titty-wank. It turned a deaf ear to Sumit's pleas for Relationship Counselling.
He moved away early from its economic determinism, recognising that in India caste and gender were axes of inequality as significant as class.
Fuck that. Money is the only relevant axis. Go to IIT & IIM & you may become a billionaire. Do history and everybody thinks you have shit for brains.
His prose was free of Marxist jargon, and (as far as I know) he never joined a communist party.
None wanted him.
Yet he did not entirely disavow the Marxism of his youth either. He continued to see it as a philosophy of emancipation, which – whatever its perversions in countries like the Soviet Union – still stood, broadly, on the side of equality and justice.
After Deng took power, Chinese Communism became worthy of emulation. Sumit turned against the Left Front just when it looked as though it was prepared to go down that road.
Sarkar’s first book was The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, published in 1973.
Everybody already knew all there was to know about it. To be frank, Tagore had done a good job burying that shite.
A richly crafted political and social history, it used primary sources in English and Bengali to examine the Swadeshi upsurge against a backdrop of rising Hindu-Muslim tensions
it fuelled those tensions- as Tagore kept pointing out.
and the partition of the province.
Tagore warned the Hindus that they would be massacred in the East. Ultimately, the Hindus insisted on partition.
A counterpart of this focused, immersive regional study is the wide-ranging essay collection, Writing Social History (published in 1997).
Social History is better written on Social Media when you are drunk off your head.
Here, critical assessments of the bhadralok icons, Ramakrishna and Vidyasagar, share space with essays on Calcutta, on caste in the making of political ideologies, and on historiographical traditions the author admired or else deplored.
Nirad Chaudhuri, who failed his MA around the time Sumit's father was gathering up the glittering prizes, did a better job. But the bhadralok didn't greatly matter even to themselves. What did was emigration.
Both these books are well worth reading and re-reading.
read them aloud in a Bengali accent. They are fucking hilarious.
But Sarkar’s most important book was undoubtedly Modern India: 1885-1947, a magisterial account of the last decades of colonial rule and of the emergence of mass nationalism.
It was not magisterial. It was partisan. The fact is Hinduism played the biggest role as far as Hindus were concerned.
The preface has the author stating his two aims: first, “a synthesis of the massive data unearthed in recent years by the flood of monographs on specific problems in political, social and economic history”;
Sadly, they were all shite. Why? History is adversely selective of imbecility.
and second, the possibilities of a “history from below”
i.e. from educationally backward castes. They were mobilized in the name of religion. Indeed, they still are. That's why the BJP has just won Bengal.
as a counterpart to nationalist historiography and its concentration on “the activities, ideals, or factional manoeuvres of leaders”.
Who only kept their position as leaders if, for caste or religious reasons, they had a mass following.
These twin ambitions are splendidly realised. This is a genuinely all-India history, with illustrative examples from across the subcontinent. Equal attention is paid to tribal and peasant movements as to initiatives by the major nationalist party, the Congress.
Sadly, they were all equally irrelevant. The Brits made all the decisions. To understand the period, you have to understand the British masses. The history of the Raj is the history from below of Britain.
The origins of Hindu-Muslim conflict
which is like the origin of Christian-Muslim conflict
and the onset of Independence and Partition are deftly delineated. Forty-three years after its publication, it remains the best single-volume account of the period.
It is also the worst depending on your own biases.
The attention to caste in Modern India shows how heterodox Sarkar’s Marxism had now become.
He, following Churchill, believed that Dalits, Tribals, OBCs, Homosexuals, Muslims, & sexually harassed squirrels should all come together to defeat the evil Brahmins who, as Peter Navarro says, are responsible for all the evil in the world.
Perhaps an even more notable departure from his inherited beliefs was his treatment of the historical figure of Gandhi. Marxist ideologues like RP Dutt and MN Roy saw the Mahatma’s non-violence as a cunning device to wean the masses away from revolutionary action, and his emphasis on communal amity as a distraction from class struggles.
It is sad that Stalin never got a chance to do to them what he did to Chatto.
Sarkar, however, understood the deep ethical component of Gandhi’s politics. He recognised that, for Gandhi, non-violence and satyagraha constituted “a deeply-felt and worked-out philosophy… revealing considerable originality”. In Gandhi’s view, “the search for truth was the goal of human life, and as no one could ever be sure of having attained the ultimate truth, use of violence to enforce one’s own necessarily partial understanding of it was sinful.”
Gandhi believed in re-birth. Spin cotton & refrain from sex in this life & you will be reborn on a paradisal planet where you can live happily for ten billion years.
This assessment comes in Sarkar’s discussion of the 1920s; towards the end of the book, he has a section titled “The Mahatma’s Finest Hour”, on Gandhi’s pilgrimage for peace in Noakhali and the fasts to restore Hindu-Muslim harmony that followed in Calcutta and Delhi.
They didn't work. Still, Sarkar was probably jizzing copiously as he thought of virile Muslims raping and killing Hindus.
As Sarkar writes here, “Gandhi’s unique personal qualities and true greatness was never more evident than in the last months of his life…”
His uselessness was never more evident. It was one thing for Mountbatten to pretend that he himself needed to do nothing because Gandhi's soul force would ensure no excess mortality in Bengal, it is quite another for a professional historian to endorse this myth.
Like the best historians, Sumit Sarkar took his clues from the archives, and was always willing to have his prior conjectures modified or even overthrown by what the primary sources revealed.
They revealed that religion matters. Hindus had good reason to fear the Muslims. That is what drove the politics of the period. But, as the recent election results in Bengal make clear, that's what still drives politics.
His work had an explicitly comparative lens, juxtaposing Indian studies on popular protest against studies by European historians on the same broad theme,
but all historians everywhere are low IQ shitheads. Nothing is gained by juxtaposing shite with shite.
as well as studying regional variations within different parts of India itself. And he was a fine prose stylist, which took his scholarship beyond the confines of the academy.
No. He had a pedestrian style.
These attributes, so rare in combination, are what made Sumit Sarkar an enduringly influential historian.
People thought there might be something to him forty years ago. Then they read him and discovered he was a fucking cretin.
He was in addition an inspirational teacher; as the journalist, Ravish Kumar, who attended Sarkar’s classes, has remarked, his pedagogical approach was “Gandhian and democratic”.
His work was the enema he administered to himself to produce yet more of the stuff.
He himself acknowledged learning much from his students, and perhaps even more from his life’s companion, the distinguished feminist historian, Tanika Sarkar, whose influence is manifest in much of her husband’s later work.
He also learnt much from Billy the Cat- a feline historian who stresses the role of tabby cats in the Freedom Struggle.
The historian whom Sumit Sarkar most admired was EP Thompson, like him a very heterodox Marxist with no party affiliation.
Thompson was writing for his own people. Sumit wasn't. Incidentally, Thompson left the British Communist party after Kruschev's secret speech.
Sarkar once wrote that Thompson’s books as well as “the many discussions, political and historical, with him over the years inspired me as nothing else had ever done before or has since”. I recall how, after EP Thompson died in September 1993,
nobody in the UK noticed. The general feeling was that the working class could kiss my arse. I work in privaate equity.
Sarkar spoke movingly about him at a memorial meeting held at the India International Centre in Delhi. The other speakers were the historians, Partha Sarathi Gupta and Neeladri Bhattacharya, and the literary scholar, Harish Trivedi. They all had known Thompson too, and, like Sarkar, spoke brilliantly on the day.
Did they masturbate while doing so? I hope not.
It remains a matter of abiding regret that no recording of that meeting exists.
So, masturbation did occur.
Sumit Sarkar was one of a number of prabasi Bengali intellectuals who helped make my alma mater, Delhi University, the epicentre of social science and humanities scholarship in India from the 1960s through the 2000s.
There was no such scholarship anywhere in the world. Some kids who went to Uni were able to get into stand-up comedy or acting or novel writing.
Among the others were the economists, Sukhamoy Chakravarty
he had died three years previously.
and Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri, the legal scholar, Lotika Sarkar, the polymathic literary historian, RK Das Gupta, and the sociologist, André Béteille, all of whom are now dead.
like Sukhamoy. But that won't stop them turning up on to commemorate some dead White dude.
Their collective contribution to Delhi University was immense, yet it must also be said that the university gave a great deal to them in return. Had these individuals remained in Calcutta, they may never have emerged as the scholars they eventually became.
ie. they'd have spent their time chatting rather than writing worthless shite.
In their home milieu, their colleagues and students would almost all have been fellow Bengalis. Here, they were exposed as in no other university in India to the staggering social and cultural diversity of our country.
Fuck off. There is no diversity in Delhi. There are bureaucrats and those who want to be bureaucrats and those who have to bribe bureaucrats.
Besides, whereas in Calcutta or indeed in the capital’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, the ideology of Marxism was dominant, the professoriat in Delhi University had many more contending currents, with the non-Marxists and anti-Marxists being as numerous, as articulate, and as admired as the Marxists. The exchange of ideas with intellectuals of diverse orientations from his surely enriched Sarkar’s scholarship.
You have to have ideas before you can exchange them.
What I say about these Bengali scholars also holds true for the Tamils, Maharashtrians, Kannadigas, Odiyas, Biharis, Punjabis and so on who taught in Delhi University.
They were looked down on by the bureaucrats. Some economists did manage to get on to the Planning Commission. But nobody gave a fuck about historians.
Adding to the all-India character of its students and staff were the juxtaposition within a single campus of first-rate undergraduate colleges and outstanding graduate faculties in the sciences, the humanities, law, and even music.
Indian universities declined greatly relative to those in the West. Those who could, emigrated. It must be said, 'Subaltern Studies' & Post-Colonial theory did in fact create a fair number of jobs in the West. Oddly, it was Priyamvada Gopal, an Englis Lit graduate from Delhi, who appears to have made the most money with her worthless books.
