Sumit Sarkar was born in 1939. He is one of the most important historians who study modern India. He is a Marxist historian, which means he uses ideas from Marxism to understand history. He wrote several books, including Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (1973), Modern India (1989), and Writing Social History (1998). He was one of the first people to help start the Subaltern Studies Group. He also gave important opinions about the group's work.

Early life, education and career

He was born into a Mahishya family to Susobhan Sarkar. His uncle on his mother's side was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History from Presidency College, Calcutta, and later obtained a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in the same subject from the University of Calcutta. He worked as a lecturer at the University of Calcutta for many years and later held the position of reader at the University of Burdwan. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. He served as a professor of history at the University of Delhi from 1974 to 2004.

Works

Sarkar's importance in the study of South Asian history is because he helped people understand the Swadeshi movement better.

Awards

In 2004, he received the Rabindra Puraskar literary award for his book Writing Social History from the West Bengal government. In 2007, he returned the award to protest against the forced removal of farmers from their land by the previous state government, which was led by the CPI(M)-led Left Front (West Bengal).

Controversy

He was one of the original members of the Subaltern Studies Collective, but later stopped working with the group. He pointed out that later journal articles and books by Partha Chatterjee criticized Enlightenment, the nation-state, and secularism in a way that matched ideas supported by some Hindu right groups. He believed this mistake came from an early confusion that incorrectly separated the elite and subaltern groups.

He wrote a book for the Towards Freedom project by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). The ICHR stopped publishing the book in 2000, according to Sarkar, because of pressure from the Indian government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party. The book was finally published in 2004 after the Congress party won the general election and took power.

Publications

• Modern Times (Ranikhet, 2014)
• Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1946 (New Delhi, 2007)
• A Critique of Colonial India (Papyrus, 2000)
• 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 (by Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen; Orient Longman, 1993). ISBN 0863113834
• Modern India: 1885-1947 (Basingstoke, 1989)
• The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (New Delhi, 1973)
• Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader (co-edited with Tanika Sarkar; Indiana University Press, 2008)
• Women and Social Reform in Modern India (co-edited with Tanika Sarkar; Ranikhet, 2011)
• Caste in Modern India (co-edited with Tanika Sarkar; Ranikhet, 2015)
• Essays Of A Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns (Ranikhet, 2017)
• Uncollected Writings (compiled by Tanika Sarkar and with an introduction by Ravi Ahuja; Ranikhet, 2025)