Professor Sumit Sarkar passed away on August 13, 2026, on the 79th anniversary of India’s independence. He was a historian of the emancipatory trends within the Indian people’s long struggle against colonial rule. For generations of students, researchers, and democratic activists, he was proof, sustained across five decades, that rigorous historical inquiry and the lived practice of socialist values were indivisible. He never wrote from the sheltered detachment of an ivory tower. He stood on Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) picket lines, walked with striking industrial workers, and defended civil liberties whenever the state encroached upon democratic spaces, treating these struggles not as interruptions to his scholarship, but as organic expressions of it.
His intellectual journey began with a refusal of comfortable orthodoxies. The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (1973) transformed the study of anti-colonial resistance by looking past unified nationalist mythologies to the complex social base underneath. The same critical instinct marked his early essays on the Bengal Renaissance, where he probed the colonial and elitist limits of 19th-century liberal reformism—an iconoclastic departure from the positions of his father, Susobhan Chandra Sarkar, the towering Marxist historian. His father’s response was characteristically magnanimous: without telling his son, he published a rejoinder defending alternative readings of history, affirming that socialism was a broad road for many travellers.
That independence defined his expanding historiographical vision. When Modern India, 1885–1947 appeared in 1983, it rejected two dominant orthodoxies at once – the Cambridge School’s cynical reduction of anti-colonial politics to elite factional rivalry, and the uncritical adulation of Congress leadership in mainstream nationalist histories. Sarkar was fair to his interlocutors, acknowledging that Cambridge historians had pioneered the use of private papers and local social contexts, even as he maintained that their indifference to popular anti-colonial struggle remained a fatal blind spot.
Modern India wove elite political manoeuvres together with autonomous peasant, tribal, and working-class movements, analysing Gandhian nationalism without cynicism or reverence. Three decades later in his work Modern Times (2015), Sarkar executed a major move beyond the traditional political-nationalist narrative, recasting modern South Asian history through a comprehensive integration of environmental history, ecological frontiers, agrarian transformations, and the cultural life of the subaltern.
His engagement with caste demonstrated this methodological boldness at its best. Sarkar introduced caste into his postgraduate teaching at Delhi University from 1974 onward, reading Phule, Ambedkar, and Periyar alongside social fiction—a curricular intervention unprecedented for Indian universities at the time. Long before the post-Mandal churning of the 1990s made caste unavoidable in academia, Sarkar had laid the groundwork. His analysis of caste was also distinct from existing paradigms. Where Cambridge historians treated caste as the currency of elite patronage, and the orthodox Left dismissed it as a divisive diversion from class, Sarkar rejected both alongside structural-functionalist anthropology. He insisted on caste as historically dynamic, shaped by agrarian price cycles and material conditions, and driven by autonomous assertions among Bengal’s Namasudras, Mahishyas, and Rajbansis.
Social history remained his most steadfast commitment, deepened through his friendship with E.P. Thompson and Dorothy Thompson. An early member of the Subaltern Studies collective, Sarkar was among the first from within to raise a principled objection when the project took a culturalist and postmodern turn. In ‘The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies’ (1997), he argued that decoupling subalternity from material conditions and class relations blunted social history's radical edge. His landmark essay ‘Kaliyuga, Chakri, and Bhakti’ (1992) demonstrated the alternative: grounding Ramakrishna’s appeal among Calcutta’s clerical underclass in the material anxieties of colonial chakri rather than textual discourse alone. In ‘The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur’ (1989), he turned to Carlo Ginzburg’s micro-historical method, uncovering an obscure village murder to illuminate subterranean currents that escaped conventional historical categories.
Labour history held an equally enduring attachment for him, tracing back to his 1973 study of early strikes. Later in life, he wrote a characteristically illuminating essay (2004) and returned to this field with evident joy, celebrating the work of a younger generation of labour historians who had expanded the discipline.
For thirty years, from 1974 to 2004, Sarkar taught in the Department of History at Delhi University, treating the seminar room as an egalitarian space of collective discovery where he listened to students from marginalised backgrounds with genuine humility. Yet his scholarly commitments were never insulated within university walls. When majoritarian communalism gathered force in the late 1980s and 1990s, he brought that same exacting historical craft directly into the democratic public sphere. His co-authored tract Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags (1993) and his prescient essay ‘Fascism of the Sangh Parivar’ (1993) offered structural, evidence-based dissections of the Hindu Right decades before its political ascendancy became impossible to ignore.
He was teacher and mentor first to those who sat in his classroom, but his reach extended far wider. In the preface to his final collection, Essays of a Lifetime (2019), he wrote that historians of his generation had enjoyed the fast-vanishing luxury of writing history answering to no agenda but their own, wishing that same freedom to future generations.
We bid him farewell with deep grief, and hope to carry his work forward.
Prabhu Mohapatra is (retired) Professor of History, Delhi University.
Shahana Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of History, Kirori Mal College, Delhi University