Essays of a Lifetime

Sumit Sarkar

Description

For the past forty years or more, the most influential, respected, and popular scholar of modern Indian history has been Sumit Sarkar. When his first monograph, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908, appeared in 1973 it soon became obvious that the book represented a paradigm shift within its genre. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it when the work was republished in 2010: "Very few monographs, if any, have ever rivalled the meticulous research and the thick description that characterized this book, or the lucidity of its exposition and the persuasive power of its overall argument."

Ten years later, Sarkar published Modern India 1885–1947, a textbook for advanced students and teachers. Its synthesis and critique of everything significant that had been written about the period was seen as monumental, lucid, and the fashioning of a new way of looking at colonialism and nationalism.

Sarkar, however, changed the face not only of modern Indian history monographs and textbooks, he also radically altered the capacity of the historical essay. As Beethoven stretched the sonata form beyond earlier conceivable limits, Sarkar can be said to have expanded the academic essay. In his hands, the shorter form becomes in miniature both monograph and textbook.

The present collection, which reproduces many of Sarkar's finest writings, shows an intellectually scintillating, skeptical-Marxist mind at its sharpest.
Preface and Acknowledgements

Part I. Bhakti and Samaj: Social Reform and Religious Modernity

1. Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past

2. The Complexities of “Young Bengal”

3. The Pattern and Structure of Early Nationalist Activity in Bengal

4. The Radicalism of Intellectuals: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Bengal

5. One or Many Histories? Identity Formations in Late-Colonial Bengal

6. Kaliyuga, Chakri, and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times

7. Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society

8. The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early-Twentieth-Century Bengal

Part II. Nationalists and Subalterns

9. Nationalism: Ideology and Mobilisation

10. The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-Cooperation, c. 1905–1922

11. Primitive Rebellion and Modern Nationalism: Forest Satyagraha in the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements

12. The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism: Civil Disobedience and the Gandhi–Irwin Pact 1930–1931

13. Popular Movements and National Leadership 1945–1947

14. The Return of Labour to South Asian History

Part III. Tributes

15. Thinking about P.C. Joshi

16. Edward Thompson

17. In Memory of Eric Hobsbawm

Sujets

• History of Asia

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 27 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438474335
• Langue: English

Extrait

ESSAYS OF A LIFETIME
SUNY series in Hindu Studies
WENDY DONIGER, EDITOR
SUMIT SARKAR

Essays of a Lifetime
Reformers • Nationalists • Subalterns
Essays of a Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns by Sumit Sarkar was first published by Permanent Black D-28 Oxford Apts, 11 IP Extension, Delhi 110092 INDIA, for the territory of SOUTH ASIA.
Not for sale in South Asia
Cover design by Anuradha Roy
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 Sumit Sarkar
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sarkar, Sumit- author.
Title: Essays of a lifetime : reformers - nationalists - subalterns / Sumit Sarkar.
Other titles: Selections.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in Hindu studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027697| ISBN 9781438474311 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474335 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: India--History--British occupation, 1765-1947. | Nationalism--India. | Social change--India. | Bengal (India)--History--British occupation, 1765-1947.
Classification: LCC DS463 .S2722 2019 | DDC 954.03/5--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027697
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements
I. BHAKTI AND SAMAJ: SOCIAL REFORM AND RELIGIOUS MODERNITY
1. Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past
2. The Complexities of “Young Bengal”
3. The Pattern and Structure of Early Nationalist Activity in Bengal
4. The Radicalism of Intellectuals: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Bengal
5. One or Many Histories? Identity Formations in Late-Colonial Bengal
6. Kaliyuga, Chakri, and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times
7. Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society
8. The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early-Twentieth-Century Bengal
II. NATIONALISTS AND SUBALTERNS
9. Nationalism: Ideology and Mobilisation
10. The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy: Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-Cooperation, c. 1905–1922
11. Primitive Rebellion and Modern Nationalism: Forest Satyagraha in the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements
12. The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism: Civil Disobedience and the Gandhi–Irwin Pact 1930–1931
13. Popular Movements and National Leadership 1945–1947
14. The Return of Labour to South Asian History
III. TRIBUTES
15. Thinking about P.C. Joshi
16. Edward Thompson
17. In Memory of Eric Hobsbawm
Preface and Acknowledgements

T HESE ESSAYS WERE WRITTEN over a period of more than four decades. Some have been included in books that I wrote: A Critique of Colonial India and Writing Social History. Some appeared as articles in other books: Subaltern Studies , for instance. Others were published in journals like Annales , Historical Materialism , and Economic and Political Weekly . In the present collection they have been arranged thematically, not chronologically. As a result there may, within the same section, be striking differences in emphasis, concerns, and even language. All, however, are connected by a common set of preoccupations that I have come back to, time and again, in new ways: social and religious values – old and modern – nationalism, subaltern activism.
A very legitimate question may be asked: Why do I need to bring together essays that have been published earlier? What is perhaps worse is that they are here published unaltered, even though I do not agree any more with many of the points I raised then. In fact, some of them positively embarrass me now, and I can see all could do with considerable revision – which is now beyond my capacity. The most obvious explanation is, of course, that they raised discussions and debates when they first appeared, and most are no longer easily available. Friends have often asked me to make them accessible and my ever-kind publisher has obliged – as always.
But there is, perhaps, a more serious explanation. The essays were written over a long time span, when a lot kept changing in the world of Indian history-writing. This collection, though based on the work of a single historian, may provide a clue to the broad nature of those changes. For that reason, too, it was important to leave them in the form in which they were first written. Let me identify some of the changes. In the early 1970s, some of us Bengali historians were struggling against the weight of a cultural and political inheritance: that of the Bengal Renaissance on the one hand, and of the nationalist movements on the other. Both had enjoyed a long period of unchallenged ascendancy in popular estimation and in Indian historiography – except in very reactionary circles.
Born in a family with generations of modern, liberal socio-religious reformism behind it, and overlaid by a new Leftist content that my father had added, I felt, in a spurt of youthful rebelliousness, that Leftist values and Brahmo liberalism did not sit well together. So, a lot of the essays on social reform probed the limits of the so-called Renaissance heritage quite severely. I now find it interesting that even then I did criticise Rammohun Roy for not doing more about caste – a point that I developed more forcefully in another essay, “The ‘Women’s Question’ in Nineteenth-Century Bengal”. Of course, given the prevailing indifference to issues of social justice of those times, my references were all too brief. “The Women’s Question” was a part of A Critique of Colonial India but has not been included in the present collection. It took issue with renaissance emancipatory claims about gender at a time when gender was not yet central to mainstream history-writing, feminist historians having barely begun their journey.
Along with those of Asok Sen and Barun De, my writings provoked deep shock among Bengali Left liberals who felt – maybe with some justification – that this was iconoclasm of a totally unacceptable kind. A senior C.P.I. activist even blamed me for betraying my father’s views on the Renaissance. Interestingly, without telling me, my father – Susobhan Chandra Sarkar, a towering teacher of history who had written much on the Renaissance himself – published a strong rejoinder rebuking the activist, justifying alternative readings of history, and saying that socialism should be a broad enough road on which many different people may travel together with ease.
This was also a time when “Cambridge School” historians had begun to question and problematise Indian nationalism. With hindsight, I feel that they had a lot to offer, though I still believe that their blindness to popular anti-colonial struggles was a major and strange limitation. But they were practically the first historians to work with archival records and private papers, and they looked closely at local social contexts like caste. At the time, however, we found their cavalier attitude to Indian nationalism highly offensive. Since their writings emanated from a Western – worse, British – academic context, we all too easily slipped into branding them “neo-imperialist”.
Bipan Chandra (professor of history at J.N.U.) and many others reacted against the Cambridge School by looking closely and respectfully at, and identifying profoundly with, the work of great nationalist leaders. I could not make myself go that way, and my article on Gandhian nationalism should make it evident. As the shining promise at the dawn of Independence began to dim by the late 1960s and early ’70s, and as a new wave of popular struggles began in various forms against the post-colonial ruling classes, I felt it was more important to explore the historical limits of mainstream nationalism, especially the class perspective of its leadership. The ongoing Vietnam War, and the residual excitement of May 1968, made quite a lot of us think for some time, independently and in isolation from one another, that the struggles of peasants and workers were more significant for national and social liberation than the leadership provided by the elites.
Already, Ranajit Guha had gathered around him a group of young scholars in England who were thinking on similar lines about how to re-vision Indian history. That was the nucleus of the Subaltern Studies collective, with which I, too, became associated for a while. When I visited Oxford for a year in 1976–7, I met the group, and I still remember the very exciting and stimulating discussions I had with Professor Guha at his Sussex home, where the two of us, once or twice, stayed up all night and I listened to him on the Indian peasantry, practically spellbound.
I was very fortunate to meet and strike up a friendship with E.P. Thompson and Dorothy Thompson that lasted till their death. I remember with enormous gratitude their great warmth and wonderful hospitality whenever my wife and I visited them thereafter. His magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Classes , had reached us, very belatedly, just before I went to Oxford and met