Sumit Sarkar

Sumit Sarkar (born 1939) is an Indian historian of modern India. He is the author of Swadeshi Movement.

Background

His father was Professor Susobhan Chandra Sarkar, a Head of Department of History at Presidency College, Calcutta. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the iconic Indian statistician, was his maternal uncle.

Education and career

He studied at St. Xavier's Collegiate School, Presidency College, Calcutta and at the University of Calcutta. He was a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He taught for many years as a lecturer at the University of Calcutta, and later as a reader at the University of Burdwan. Until recently, he was Professor of History at the University of Delhi, where he began teaching career in 1976.^[1]

He was one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective.^{[citation needed]}

Awards

He was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar literary award by the West Bengal government in 2004. He returned the award in 2007 in protest against the expulsion of farmers from their land.^[2]

Controversy

He contributed a volume to the Towards Freedom project of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), publication of which was blocked in 2000 by the ICHR under the influence of then Indian government dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).^[3] The publication of the volume was eventually allowed by the Government of India once the Congress party came to power after the general election of 2004.^[4]

Publications

• Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1946, (New Delhi, 2007)
• Beyond Nationalist Frames: Post-Modernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History, (Delhi, 2002)
• Writing Social History, (Delhi, 1998)
• Modern India: 1885-1947, (Basingstoke, 1989)
• The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908, (New Delhi, 1973)

References

External links

• http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1815/18150930.htm
• http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1809/18090880.htm
• "Delhi Historians Group's Publication "Communalization of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy", A report in 2002, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.