A very special memory, which exemplifies the kind of person that Sumit Sarkar was, bears repeating here. It shows us the multiple ways in which what we believe in can shape perceptions in everyday life and perhaps even alter public discourse.

The time and place was IIM Calcutta, where, maybe in 1999, I was one of three candidates who was called to the campus for the talk, and later interview, for the job of History Professor. My talk went well, I was told, and then it came to the interview. On that panel were many, including Sumit Sarkar and another very senior and highly respected historian. I cannot remember who else was on the panel. Many questions were asked, and I nervously answered them, to the best of my ability.

But then, I was suddenly asked, by that same senior historian, about my marital status, and whether I was hoping for the job to be with my partner. I was stunned, but before I could catch my breath, Sumit Sarkar told the panel that these were not fair or appropriate questions to ask, and the matter ended there.

I did not get that job after all, ranking only number 2 in the list. But I will cherish this memory of someone who stood for the right of women not to be asked questions that would never have been asked of a man.

And I wish I had cultivated the same courage in all the positions that I later came to occupy. I cannot say I have.

Ways of Historical Thinking: Sumit Sarkar, his times and legacies

I did not have the good fortune of being taught by Sumit Sarkar. But like every (conscientious) modern Indian historian, I have indeed been ‘taught’ by him. His classic, Modern India, modestly described as a ‘textbook ’, is perhaps the most well-thumbed of my many books. Here, along with colonial masters and nationalist leaders, peasants, workers and ordinary people sprang from its pages. This was no simple inclusion: it was a conceptual break, altering our understanding of Indian history in profound ways, acknowledging the lives and actions of millions, even their failures, as the true basis on which to understand our past. But political leaders, their actions, and the periodisations familiar to students of history could not be dispensed with altogether. Therefore, the book, despite its emphasis on the novel breakthroughs of a ‘history from below’, was sandwiched ‘between the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the achievement of independence in August 19 47’ since those sixty years ‘witnessed perhaps the greatest transition in our country’s long history’. In one memorable sentence, he signalled the
many unfulfilled promises of Indian nationalism: thus, the Mahatma succeeded in
‘drawing in the masses, while at the same time keeping mass activity strictly pegged down
to certain forms predetermined by the leader.’

Let me not dwell on the gaping hole that Sumit Sarkar’s demise had left among Indian
historians, and focus instead on the riches he has left us. His book, Swadeshi Movement in
Bengal, on Bengal’s (first) partition of 1905, and the nationalist movement that it spawned,
was full of methodological innovations, using plays, novels, newspapers, pamphlets in
addition to the more familiar colonial archive. These materials led him to ask questions
that often led to ambiguous or unsatisfactory answers. Educated unemployment and
rising prices surely fuelled the anger against the Bengal partition. But the pride-inducing
victory of a little ‘eastern’ nation, Japan, over a powerful ‘western’ neighbour, Russia, — the
Russo Japanese war of 1904-5 – also played its part, despite a relative ignorance in India of emerging critiques of imperialism elsewhere.

Sarkar also asked himself: how could a Swadeshi editorial in the Bande Mataram praise, in
the same breath, both the labour movement and the caste system, the latter for having had ‘the true socialistic aim of keeping awake in every class of the society a sense of duty to it’ ?

Or, as he would ask later, what drew upper caste men to revolutionary terrorism in Bengal,
and why has that memory endured longer than those of tribal or lower caste participants?
Sarkar was among the earliest of historians to unpack how ‘Hindu’ nationalism gradually
became ‘common sense’, with consequences up to the present day.

Sarkar’s task was to break out of the economic determinism and narrow positivism that
was the hallmark of Marxist scholarship at the time. But the work remains unsurpassed,
since it upholds the protocols of historical research, the verifiability of evidence, and as he
said, ‘the constant knowledge that my conclusions remain open to revision and change.’

Would a revised Modern India, that more correctly reflects the scholarship of the last four
decades — as many regions, social groups, practices, and events have found their historians – be at all possible in our times?

How were material conditions and cultural forms to be integrated within a structured totality? Sarkar’s companion volume Modern Times brought culture and other histories – of the city for instance, or of print media or caste – to the foreground, to understand the subaltern on her own terms. His Marxism did not come in the way of engaging with what Ranajit Guha has called the oldest (and richest) archive in India: religion. He read religion, but not as a believer; not to denigrate but to connect the celestial world to its earthly presence in meaningful ways.

In fact, Marxism enabled his interest in the nineteenth-century mystic (and rustic) Hindu
thinker Ramakrishna Paramhansa, and the petty-bourgeois, clerical ambience within
which he operated, which gave his philosophy its force and material influence, especially
among the emerging, well read, urban middle class. That contradiction needed to be
explained. Sarkar linked the belated entry of clock-time into India, and the disciplinary
mechanisms it generated, to the slavery of clerical labour, which paved the way for the
reception of Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna’s ‘success’ and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s
‘failures’ were equally processes that he critically examined.

Sarkar showed us the true meaning of engaged scholarship: when India was stunned in
1992 by the shock troops of the BJP and RSS that brought down the Babri Masjid, Sarkar
and his colleagues produced a short but vital book called Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags. It
was the first serious historical reconstruction (based also on sensitive fieldwork) of what
the RSS had become, the most formidable force on the Indian political firmament.
Certainly the young people who have today given us a ray of hope should place this book at
the top of their reading lists.

Sumit Sarkar, in both his writing and his political positions, was unafraid to confront the
official left and its surrender to global capital, as at Nandigram and Singur. He would have
been the first to admit that proletarians have not been the grave diggers of capitalism,
though he welcomed those historians who showed renewed interest in labour and working
class history. I was personally honoured when this remarkable historian included me in
his review of five such books. But more striking was his intellectual openness: his choices
‘provincialised’ Bengal, by acknowledging the worlds and questions that lay well beyond it
– Kanpur, Jamshedpur, KGF, Bombay, the railway works. At a time when ‘everyone’
is a historian, and we are being trained in thinking of history only as ‘pride’ in the past, we will miss complex thinkers like Sumit Sarkar even more, for his passing no doubt signals the end of an era.

(The author is the professor (retd.), Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi)

The post Sumit Sarkar: Engaged scholarship, ways of historical thinking, an enduring legacy appeared first on SabrangIndia.

So it is the historian in me that hopes that the Supreme Court’s decision to deny bail to both Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid as a document will be read ‘against the grain’ perhaps in the not too distant a future. One must today divorce hope from reason in order to this. Such an action is vital to our sanity today.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to be in the Delhi region in late 2019 early 2020, such as myself, were able to witness, if not participate, in one of independent India’s most creative, sustained, non-violent and therefore powerful movements against the Indian state’s intention to restrict definitions of a hard-won citizenship. The movement brought onto the streets, quite literally, large numbers of Muslim women who had rarely participated in public political life, and who sustained their movement for weeks, with little or no overt political support.

This reverberating sound of the National Anthem is the mark of Shaheen Bagh’s love for the country.
India is our nation and we our its citizens.
Come celebrate #JantakaRepublicDay pic.twitter.com/p96NWRngdp

— Shaheen Bagh Official (@Shaheenbaghoff1) January 26, 2020

Is it any wonder that young people were mesmerised by the hopes of that moment, that site, which experimented with new styles and repertoires of protest and communication? Is it any wonder that Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid, given their interest in historical research and their political awareness, were drawn to the movement, like many of their age and background?

Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid were no bomb-throwing revolutionaries. I taught both of them, and they impressed me with their intelligence, diligence and capacity for thinking differently. I did not always agree with the ideas they had. I was often irritated by their style of learning, which bordered on the irreverent. But like most JNU (and CHS) students, they were passionately attached to argument, driven by the elemental hunger to read, write, argue, and speak boldly, sometimes even giddily, of many things that had come into their grasp.

JNU’s mission was to provide that intellectual space where the young could take the risks of thinking, arguing, and arriving at conclusions, even dreams that may remain unrealised. This happened not only in our classrooms, and seminars, but in our canteens, messes, open spaces, and in the wonderful ‘philosophy of the night’ that went on into the wee hours in all our hostels, night after night.

Four years before the anti-CAA/NRC agitation, the media-manipulated vilification of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and its student leaders including Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya Kumar was exposed in detail by Sabrangindia in reports that may be read here

Can we fault Sharjeel, Umar, Natasha, or Devangana for dreaming of a better world than the one our generation had left him? Many students from CHS were similarly gripped by the desire to build a new future. Our students enjoyed and appreciated the chance of framing questions, reading sources, and assessing ideas on their own. Some of these were harebrained, some shot through with brilliance. But CHS/JNU fostered spaces where these, and other contrary, ideas could be tried out, adopted, defeated in argument, or abandoned, without fear of reprisal.

Instead, Sharjeel and Umar have been incarcerated for five-plus- one more years of the most creative, productive years of their lives — all because of words they chose to use in public.

On this 75th year of our Republic, we must commemorate figures like Sharjeel and Umar who are paying a heavy price for their speech acts, ideas. We must never forget, that legions of others, who openly called for violence against other Indians, continue to enjoy their freedoms today, and even occupy public office — because they have the right names, and have the right political patrons.

We have become acutely aware of the contradictions that BR Ambedkar had warned us about. He had known that democracy was just top dressing in India. He knew that violent contradictions would erupt when the social structure of our inherently hierarchical, unjust society, undermined the Republic’s hard-won political freedoms and liberties.

As the insightful literary scholar, Rahamat Tarikere, has pointed out, India has a long history of producing some of the loftiest ideas, whether religious or not, but our social practice has never matched these ideals. What chance of a less inequitable world – I hesitate to use the more decisive ‘just’ and ‘equal’ — when the very people who are capable of dreaming that possibility, our young, are forced into a form of social death?

But I am confident that Sharjeel and Umar will emerge from these trials with all their ideals intact. In fact, I am sure, that even behind those prison walls, they think, read, dream, and survive, perhaps even transforming the oppressive space to which they have been condemned. Here I can do no more than cite the brilliant words of Mahmoud Dervish, the Palestinian poet:

It is possible
It is possible, at least sometimes
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away….

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers
What did you do with the walls?
I gave them back to the rocks.
And what did you do with the ceiling?
I turned it into a saddle.
And your chain?
I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to my dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.
He came back to see me
In the morning,
He shouted at me.
Where did all this water come from?
I brought it from the Nile
And the trees?
From the orchards of Damascus
And the music?
From my heartbeat

The prison guard got mad;
He put an end to my dialogue.
He said he didn’t like my poetry,
And bolted the board of my cell.

But he returned in the evening:
Where did this moon come from?
From the nights of Baghdad.
And the wine?
From the vineyards of Algiers.
And this freedom?
From the chain you tied me with last night,
The prison guard grew so sad…
He begged me to give him back his freedom.

Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar.

Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar.

(This post by the author, Janaki Nair taught at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University until her retirement in 2020 was posted on social media and may be read here.)

Related:

After Five Years in Jail, Bail Still Barred for Two: Supreme Court denies bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in Delhi riots case

Delhi High Court dismisses bail pleas of Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, and others in 2020 Riots Conspiracy Case

Jailed Without Trial: Umar Khalid’s 4-Year Ordeal Ignites Solidarity

The post JNU Teacher to her Jailed Students: ‘Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.