ASHA: Blast From The Past

Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947. New Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2014 edition. ISBN 978-93-325-3574-9. 441 pp.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

With the passing of Professor Sumit Sarkar (b. 1939) on 13 August 2026, India has lost one of the tallest historians of modern India. There will appropriately be assessments of his entire scholarly career: of The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, Writing Social History, his essays on nationalism, popular politics and religious identities, his early engagement with Subaltern Studies and his subsequent disagreements with some of its directions. Yet for several generations of students and teachers, there is one book through which Sumit Sarkar first entered their intellectual lives: Modern India, 1885–1947. I pay my tribute to him through this review.

It is difficult to think of many works of Indian history that have shaped so many historians before they became historians.

Published originally in the early 1980s, Modern India was ostensibly a general history of the last six decades of British rule. Sarkar himself described it much more modestly than its subsequent influence would warrant. The book, he explained, had two purposes: to synthesise the enormous body of specialised research that had accumulated on the political, social and economic history of modern India, and simultaneously to explore the possibilities of a “history from below”, moving away from the conventional concentration upon the activities, ideas and manoeuvres of political leaders.

Those two objectives transformed what could have been another textbook into something altogether different.

A Textbook That Was Never Merely a Textbook

Students approaching Modern India for the first time could be forgiven for finding it intimidating. Sarkar did not simplify history by removing its difficulties. He compressed an extraordinary quantity of research, argument, statistics and historiographical controversy into a narrative of remarkable density.

The structure of the book itself announces its difference. Political history is continually interrupted and enriched by the colonial economy, the drain of wealth, deindustrialisation, the commercialisation of agriculture, land relations, capitalist development, caste and communal consciousness, labour, business groups, peasants, tribal movements and the social roots of the intelligentsia. The Swadeshi movement is accompanied by labour unrest and the samitis; Non-Cooperation by its social composition and regional variations; Civil Disobedience by business attitudes, peasant movements and “pressures from below”; Quit India by its social composition and sharply differing regional trajectories. The final years bring together the INA trials and the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny with Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar and Telangana.

This organisation was itself an argument about what constituted history.

Before Sarkar, the history of Indian nationalism could still quite easily be narrated as the history of the Indian National Congress: Moderate politics, Extremism, Gandhi, Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience, constitutional negotiations, Quit India, Mountbatten and Independence. Sarkar retained all of these. He did not replace political history with social history. What he did was more important: he altered the relationship between them.

Gandhi remained indispensable, but so did the peasant who interpreted Gandhi in ways Gandhi himself might not have approved. Congress resolutions mattered, but so did rumours in villages. Political leaders mattered, but workers, tribals, tenants, zamindars, businessmen, students, lower-middle-class activists and anonymous crowds acquired historical agency.

This was a profound pedagogical revolution.

Bringing the People into Modern Indian History

Perhaps the most consequential heading in the entire book appears near the beginning of Chapter Three: “Towards a ‘History from Below‘”.

Sarkar begins from a striking historiographical problem. Historians knew a great deal about the Western-educated intelligentsia but comparatively little about the historical experience and changing consciousness of peasants, agricultural labourers, artisans, industrial workers and other social groups. The consequence, he argued, was that the history of nationalism tended to become history written “from the top downwards”. He therefore imagined a history in which the rebellion of Birsa Munda could receive attention before the disputes between Moderates and Extremists.

Today such an approach may appear almost self-evident. It was not self-evident when Sarkar was writing.

His achievement becomes clearer if we recognise that Modern India appeared at a remarkable historiographical moment. Marxist history had already redirected attention towards colonial exploitation, class formation and material structures. The Cambridge School had challenged nationalist narratives through its analyses of locality, faction, patronage and elite competition. Subaltern Studies was just beginning its enormously influential intervention.

Sarkar engaged with all of these without becoming imprisoned within any one of them.

He could appreciate the Cambridge historians’ excavation of local politics while rejecting their tendency to reduce nationalism to competition, patronage and individual ambition. He could employ Marxist categories while criticising mechanistic class analysis. He could recognise the achievement of nationalist historiography while refusing its tendency towards the celebration of great leaders. And he could turn towards popular autonomy without pretending that “the people” constituted a homogeneous revolutionary subject.

That intellectual independence is one reason the book has aged so remarkably well.

Sarkar was unusually candid about his own standpoint. No historian, he wrote, could be free of bias; unconscious or concealed bias was more dangerous than acknowledged assumptions. He therefore stated his premises openly: colonial exploitation and resistance to it were central; Indian society contained profound internal tensions; class remained important but had to be handled flexibly; and conventional nationalist, communalist, Cambridge and even some Marxist historiographies shared, despite their differences, an excessive preoccupation with elites.

It was an extraordinary lesson for students: historical objectivity does not require pretending that the historian has no standpoint. It requires making one’s assumptions visible and submitting them to evidence.

Leaders and Masses

One of Sarkar’s most enduring contributions was his treatment of the relationship between nationalist leadership and popular initiative.

Consider Non-Cooperation. Sarkar refuses to describe it simply as a movement launched by Gandhi and obeyed by millions. He argues that it must be understood simultaneously at three levels: the all-India movement shaped by Congress leadership, the participation of distinct social classes and groups, and, perhaps most importantly, the regional and local variations.

That three-level method became enormously influential.

It allowed historians to ask questions that transformed research. What did swaraj mean to a peasant? Did a tribal community understand forest satyagraha in the same way as the Congress Working Committee? What happened when a national slogan entered a village? Were peasants merely mobilised by elite politicians, or did they appropriate nationalist language for their own struggles over rent, land, forests, wages and social dignity?

Sarkar repeatedly encountered moments when popular politics escaped elite control. In Bengal during Non-Cooperation, official reports themselves recorded movements moving “beyond the control of the leaders”. Villagers refused taxes and rents, entered forests and created their own institutions of “Swaraj”. Sarkar emphasised that some of the most striking examples occurred precisely in districts seldom visited by major nationalist leaders.

Yet he never romanticised spontaneity.

Popular movements could be courageous, creative and autonomous; they could also be fragmented, caste-bound, communal, locally limited or politically contradictory. National leadership could restrain radical possibilities, but it could also provide organisation, language and an all-India framework to dispersed grievances.

The tension between leadership and popular initiative therefore became not an inconvenience to be eliminated but the very substance of historical explanation.

Gandhi After Sarkar

The Gandhi who emerges from Modern India is consequently much more interesting than either the Mahatma of nationalist hagiography or the bourgeois manipulator of crude Marxist caricature.

Sarkar understood Gandhi’s extraordinary ability to discover symbols capable of connecting politics with everyday existence. Salt is perhaps the finest example. It transformed the abstraction of swaraj into something universally intelligible, particularly to the rural poor. Yet almost immediately, local pressures pushed beyond the carefully constructed Gandhian programme. Villagers along the route of the Dandi March demanded revenue refusal, something Gandhi accepted only reluctantly.

Thus the nationalist movement was neither simply commanded from above nor spontaneously generated from below. It emerged through negotiation, appropriation, misunderstanding, discipline, resistance and interaction between the two.

For generations of researchers, that insight opened entire fields of enquiry.

Region Matters

Another enduring lesson of Modern India was that there was no single Indian experience of nationalism.

Sarkar continually breaks the all-India narrative into regional histories. Non-Cooperation had different social foundations in Bengal, Bihar, Punjab, Awadh, Andhra and Kerala. Civil Disobedience could not be understood simply through Dandi. Quit India looked entirely different depending upon whether one stood in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Midnapur, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Punjab, Kerala or the North-West Frontier Province.

His discussion of 1942 is exemplary. Sarkar contrasts the relative quiet of Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province with the formidable mass rebellions in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Midnapur, Orissa and Maharashtra-Karnataka, and seeks explanations in agrarian structure, communal politics, wartime employment, political organisation and earlier histories of mobilisation.

This insistence upon regional variation helped reshape the research agenda of modern Indian history. The national movement could no longer adequately be studied from Delhi, Bombay or Calcutta alone. District archives, vernacular newspapers, police reports, oral memories and local records became indispensable.

The “nation” had to be reconstructed from its regions.

Neither Celebration nor Denunciation

One reason students repeatedly return to Sarkar is that his history refuses easy moral comfort.

Colonialism is not neutralised. Sarkar’s analysis begins from the structural reality of imperial domination and exploitation. Yet nationalism is not sanctified merely because it opposed colonialism.

Congress could mobilise millions and simultaneously contain them. Capitalists could support nationalism while fearing labour militancy. Rich peasants and poorer cultivators could participate in the same movement for different reasons. Caste mobilisation could challenge hierarchy while creating new exclusions. Religious identities could coexist with nationalism but could also harden into communal politics.

Even Independence appears as both triumph and tragedy.

The movement had accomplished what once appeared impossible: the entry of masses into political life and the destruction of the permanence claimed by the Raj. Yet Partition, communal violence and the survival of major structures of colonial administration complicated any triumphalist ending. Sarkar’s opening chapter therefore describes the transition between 1885 and 1947 as immense but “grievously incomplete”.

That phrase captures something essential about his historical imagination.

History was made through contradictions.

The Extraordinary Ending: 1945–47

The final chapter perhaps best demonstrates Sarkar’s method.

A conventional narrative of the transfer of power would naturally concentrate upon Wavell, Attlee, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah, the Cabinet Mission and Mountbatten. Sarkar discusses them all. But beside constitutional negotiation he places the INA agitation, the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, strikes, Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar and Telangana.

His formulation is crucial: the decisions of British and Indian leaders cannot be understood without the “counterpoint” of pressures from below. Popular mobilisation helped make continued British rule untenable; fear of uncontrolled popular radicalism simultaneously encouraged Congress leaders towards negotiation and compromise; and the limitations of popular anti-imperialist mobilisation helped determine the settlement eventually reached in August 1947.

In a few sentences, the distinction between political history and social history collapses.

Negotiations at the top become unintelligible without movements below.

That was Sumit Sarkar’s craft at its finest.

How Modern India Shaped Historians

The influence of this book cannot be measured merely through citations.

Its deeper impact lies in the questions generations of historians learned to ask after reading it.

A student who read Sarkar seriously could no longer be satisfied by knowing what happened. One had to ask: Who participated? From which social groups? Why did the movement succeed in one district and fail in another? What happened to a political slogan when it travelled from the Congress platform to the village? What were the economic circumstances behind mobilisation? Who benefited? Who remained outside? Where did caste intersect with class? How did religious identity acquire political meaning? When did leaders lead, and when were they themselves being pushed by movements they only partially controlled?

Perhaps even more importantly, Sarkar taught students to distrust neatness.

Historical movements do not proceed according to textbook categories. The “Moderate”, “Extremist”, “Gandhian”, “Communist”, “peasant”, “bourgeois”, “communal” and “nationalist” inhabit overlapping historical worlds. People move between categories. Political meanings change according to place and circumstance.

Once one had learned to read history this way, it was difficult to return to a chronicle of governors-general, Congress sessions and constitutional Acts.

Beyond the Specialists: A Book Read Across the Historical Profession

There is another measure of the extraordinary reach of Modern India: it was never read only by specialists in modern Indian history.

Alongside the major works of Bipan Chandra and, for a somewhat later generation, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Sarkar’s Modern India became one of those rare books that crossed the artificial chronological boundaries within which university departments often organise the Indian past. Ancient historians read it. Medievalists read it. Archaeologists read it. Scholars whose own research ended centuries before 1885 nevertheless kept returning to it.

I can say this personally. Although my own specialisation has been medieval India, this is one of the books on modern Indian history that I have read, returned to, and learned from repeatedly, much as I have from the major works of Bipan Chandra and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. One did not need to be a specialist in colonial India to recognise what Sarkar was doing. The book offered lessons in historical method that travelled far beyond its chronological limits: how structures and events should be connected; how political history must be anchored in social and economic realities; how elite sources can be read for evidence of popular action; how regional variation complicates generalisation; and, above all, how the historian must continuously ask who is missing from an apparently complete narrative.

That is perhaps one of the clearest signs of a truly important historical work. It changes the habits not only of scholars working on its own period but also of historians working on entirely different centuries.

A medieval historian reading Sarkar could begin asking differently about peasants beneath the Mughal revenue system, artisans beneath courtly descriptions, local society beneath chronicles of emperors, and regional experience beneath the apparently uniform institutions of an empire. An ancient historian might similarly be reminded that dynasties and inscriptions cannot exhaust the social history of a civilisation. In this sense, Modern India taught a methodological lesson that was never confined to modern India at all.

A Book That Shaped Lives

There is another history of Modern India that will probably never be adequately documented.

It is the history of the book in classrooms, university libraries, hostels and teachers’ studies across India.

Copies were underlined until entire pages became marked. Margins accumulated questions, exclamation marks and disagreements. Students preparing for examinations discovered that what appeared to be a textbook demanded the concentration normally reserved for a monograph. Teachers returned to particular passages year after year and discovered another argument concealed within Sarkar’s compressed prose.

Some readers became historians.

Some became teachers.

And those teachers placed the book before another generation.

That is how scholarship shapes lives.

Sarkar himself acknowledged this relationship beautifully. In the preface he thanked the students of his modern Indian history classes upon whom he had tested his ideas for years, adding that their questions and criticisms had been indispensable in helping him refine his formulations.

The acknowledgement tells us something important about the origins of the book. Modern India was not simply written and then taken into the classroom. It grew partly out of the classroom itself.

Perhaps that is why it has lived there for so long.

A Book to Argue With

No great historical work survives because every proposition in it remains correct.

Much has happened in modern Indian historiography since Modern India appeared. Subaltern Studies developed in directions Sarkar himself subsequently criticised. Gender history transformed our understanding of nationalism and domesticity. Dalit and caste histories raised questions inadequately addressed by older class-centred frameworks. Studies of Adivasi politics, environmental history, religious identities, print culture, everyday life and global and transnational connections have greatly expanded the field.

Parts of Modern India inevitably belong to the historiographical moment in which it was written.

But that does not diminish the book’s greatness. It establishes it.

A classic is not a book that ends debate. A classic is a book after which debate cannot return to where it was before.

By that measure Modern India, 1885–1947 is unquestionably a classic.

Students may disagree with Sarkar’s Marxism. They may question particular class formulations, interpretations of Gandhi, assessments of bourgeois politics or explanations of communalism. Sarkar himself would surely have preferred disagreement grounded in evidence to ritualistic reverence.

What cannot easily be escaped are the questions he placed before us.

Where are the people?

What is happening beneath the resolutions of political organisations?

What is the relationship between material circumstances and political consciousness?

How does an all-India movement change as it enters different regions?

How do ordinary people appropriate the language created by leaders?

And what happens when those people begin making history on their own terms?

The Historian’s Afterlife

On 13 August 2026, Sumit Sarkar left this world. But historians have a peculiar afterlife.

They survive not simply in books bearing their names but in the questions other people ask because they once read them.

Somewhere a student encountering modern Indian history for the first time will open Modern India, 1885–1947. Perhaps she will initially search for Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Civil Disobedience or Quit India. But if she continues reading, she will encounter peasants, workers, tribals, students, women and men in provincial towns, village activists, businessmen, zamindars, tenants and anonymous crowds. She will discover that nationalism was simultaneously an idea, an organisation, a social coalition and millions of individual experiences. She may begin wondering why the history she previously knew contained so few of these people.

At that moment Sumit Sarkar will have done it again.

He will have produced another historian.

That may ultimately be the deepest measure of the achievement of this book. It did not merely tell generations of Indians what happened between 1885 and 1947. It taught them how to think historically.

And books that teach us how to think do not die with their authors.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

At a time when serious attempts are being made to distort India’s past, compressing six centuries into an indistinguishable age of Hindu-Muslim strife; when the Mughals are either invisibilised or reduced to demonic carnivores; when Vikram Sampath’s works normalise the self-professed ‘Veer’ Savarkar as a genuine nationalist; when Sanjeev Sanyal rewrites early history on the basis of later period sources; and when non-professionals presume to instruct historians on how their discipline should be practised, one is compelled to ask: Do we still need an Irfan Habib?

The answer is emphatically yes. But not because Habib must always be right, or because his interpretations should be treated as final. We need him because his scholarship represents the primacy of evidence, mastery of sources, intellectual rigour, secular explanation and the courage to resist politically convenient myths.

Historical revision is not objectionable; history advances through it. Habib himself challenged earlier interpretations. His The Agrarian System of Mughal India transformed a history dominated by emperors by asking different questions: Who produced the empire’s wealth? How was surplus appropriated? What relationships existed between peasants, zamindars and the state? This shifted attention from the ruler’s religion to society’s structure. Once the peasant and artisan entered the picture, the inadequacy of explaining six centuries through communal antagonism became obvious.

That lesson is urgently relevant. We increasingly encounter representations in which Alauddin Khalji, Babur, Akbar and Aurangzeb become a single category: Muslim rulers confronting an eternal Hindu India. Political rivalries, caste, class and commercial interests are subordinated to religion. Yet Rajputs fought Rajputs and allied with Mughals. Mughal princes fought one another with Hindus and Muslims on every side. Marathas served the Mughal state as well as fought it. Muslim rulers fought other Muslim rulers with ferocity inexplicable through communal categories.

None of this requires sanitising the medieval past. Temples were destroyed. Discrimination existed. Habib’s writings hardly present Mughal India as idyllic. But that is precisely the point: History requires neither glorification nor demonisation, it requires explanation.

Today, the Mughal is transformed from a historical subject into a political metaphor, the permanent foreigner, the destroyer. Once caricature replaces analysis, the purpose is no longer to understand the empire but to manufacture an adversary for the present.

The same problem appears in modern history. Savarkar deserves serious study. His revolutionary career and conception of Hindutva are important. But his transformation into the self-evident Veer Savarkar raises another problem. Recovery is legitimate; rehabilitation must remain answerable to the complete record. A historian cannot decide beforehand that the subject is a national hero and then arrange inconvenient evidence around that conclusion.

Similarly, Sanjeev Sanyal and other non-professionals have entered the popular arena. His ‘Stitched Ship Project’ “created a 5th Century ship” based on 17th century sources!

The distinction that matters is not between professional and non-professional. It is between history and assertion. Historical method demands asking who produced a source, when and why, whether independent evidence corroborates it, and whether our interpretation survives contrary evidence. Learning Persian, Sanskrit or Arabic is not academic gatekeeping; it is elementary discipline. Yet we inhabit a culture in which years of such expertise count for less than the confidence of a television assertion.

This brings us to a deeper question: What is the job of a historian? Is it merely to narrate stories of the past, or to guide us to a better future? Sympathisers of extreme rightist forces, eager to break the communal fabric, suggest that historians should remain aloof from prevailing politics, lower their gaze, retreat into an imagined mythical past, and let politicians break the country. This is a convenient demand. It asks the historian to abdicate their most essential duty: to hold a mirror to the present by illuminating the past.

A historian cannot remain aloof. The very act of choosing what to study, what questions to ask, and what evidence to privilege is inherently political. But the historian’s politics must be the politics of truth, not of partisanship. Their duty is not to serve any faction but to serve evidence. They must guide us by showing that the past is complex, that communities were never monolithic, that conflict and coexistence were always intertwined. When politicians peddle a binary, mythical past to fracture society, the historian’s silence is complicity. Speaking truth to power is not activism; it is professional integrity.

Habib’s opposition to communal historiography has never depended upon defending one community against another. Communal history, whether Hindu or Muslim, imagines religious communities as homogeneous entities moving unchanged through centuries. Habib’s historical materialism challenged this by revealing the competing interests of classes, castes and regions that repeatedly crossed religious boundaries. His secularism emerged not merely from political conviction but from historical method.

This becomes particularly important in our emerging post-history world. History has never been more visible, with medieval rulers appearing in election speeches, monuments becoming controversies, studios debating centuries-old battles. The past is everywhere. But historical thinking is increasingly absent. We are in danger of producing a society saturated with the past but indifferent to history. This is post-intellectualism: expertise is suspect, complexity is evasion. The specialist who says “the evidence is complicated” appears weaker than the propagandist who announces “the truth is simple.” But the historian’s truth is often complicated. Akbar could order massacres and later proclaim sulh-i kul. Aurangzeb could destroy particular temples and patronise others. Rajputs could resist Mughal armies and become pillars of the Mughal ruling class. None fits the binary world of communal mythology.

So, do we still need an Irfan Habib? Perhaps more urgently today than in 1963. Not because we require another orthodoxy. We need him because we need historians who will insist that the past cannot be bullied into saying what the present wants to hear. We need historians willing to tell governments that evidence cannot be changed by notification; religious communities that faith cannot determine historical fact; political movements that mythology cannot substitute for documentation; and fellow historians that ideological sympathy cannot rescue a proposition unsupported by sources.

There are many today who wish him and his work forgotten. They seek to invisibilise scholars like him, just as they must forget the medieval period itself. Such people exist even within the institution he considered home turf, the very institution known throughout the world by his name. His work remains inconvenient to those who manufacture a mythical past, for it insists on complexity where they demand simplicity, on evidence where they offer assertion. The attempt to erase him mirrors the attempt to erase the very centuries he illuminated.

At ninety-five, the question is not simply whether India still needs Irfan Habib. It is whether India can continue to produce historians prepared to practise history with that degree of rigour and courage. For the real danger is not that one interpretation may defeat another. It is that history itself may be displaced by myth-making. And if that happens, the politician will have broken the country while the historian lowered their gaze. We need historians who will look up, speak out, and guide us, not to a mythical past, but to a future built on an honest reckoning with what truly was.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

On 12 August 2026, Professor Irfan Habib completes ninety-five years. This is an extraordinary milestone in the life of a historian who has profoundly influenced the study of India’s past. Equally important has been his defence of history as a critical and secular discipline. For more than seven decades, his presence has been felt in classrooms and seminar rooms, in the Indian History Congress, and in controversies over textbooks and historical monuments. He has also been at the centre of some of the most important intellectual and political battles concerning the interpretation of India’s past.

To describe Irfan Habib merely as an eminent historian of medieval India would therefore be inadequate. He is certainly one of the foremost historians produced by independent India, but he has also been a teacher, institution-builder, public intellectual and, throughout his life, a fighter. Scholarship and public commitment have never inhabited separate compartments in his intellectual world.

Born on 12 August 1931, Irfan Habib grew up in an unusual intellectual environment. His father, Professor Mohammad Habib, was himself among the pioneering historians of medieval India and a major figure at Aligarh Muslim University. The younger Habib consequently encountered history not merely as a university discipline. It was part of a wider conversation about colonialism, nationalism, society and the making of modern India. Yet he did not simply inherit his father’s historical concerns. He developed an approach and a body of scholarship distinctly his own.

Aligarh Muslim University became the principal arena of his academic life. There he taught generations of students and played a decisive role in establishing the Department of History and its Centre of Advanced Study (which now does not exist since March 2023, in spite of claims) that it emerged under him as one of India’s leading centres of historical research. Together with scholars such as Mohammad Athar Ali, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Satish Chandra and, subsequently, Ahsan Jan Qaisar, Shireen Moosvi and a host of others, he contributed to a fundamental reorientation in the study of medieval India.

The importance of this intellectual transformation is sometimes obscured by the label ‘Aligarh School‘. What was actually involved was a profound change in the questions historians asked. Earlier histories had largely been structured around dynasties, battles, rulers and court politics. The new historiography shifted attention towards the structures beneath the throne: peasants and zamindars, land revenue and agrarian relations, social classes, towns and markets, money and trade, technology and crafts, the nobility and the mechanisms through which the state appropriated and distributed the agricultural surplus.

History ceased to be simply an account of what Akbar, Jahangir, Shahjahan or Aurangzeb did. It became an enquiry into the society over which they ruled.

Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, first published in 1963, was a landmark in this transformation. Based upon a formidable command of Persian chronicles, administrative texts, revenue terminology, European accounts and other contemporary evidence, the book attempted nothing less than a reconstruction of the economic and social foundations of the Mughal Empire. It examined the peasantry, zamindars, revenue administration, agrarian surplus and the relationship between political authority and rural society.

Individual propositions advanced in the book have naturally been debated, modified and challenged over the succeeding six decades. That is precisely what happens to an important work of history. Its enduring achievement is that many of the questions it asked became unavoidable. Anyone seriously studying Mughal agrarian relations has, in one way or another, had to engage with Irfan Habib.

His intellectual range, however, has always been much wider than Mughal agrarian history. His writings have encompassed historical geography, cartography, technology, monetary systems, urbanisation, trade, social formations, the Indian economy, colonialism, nationalism and historiography. His Atlas of the Mughal Empire and Atlas of Ancient India, remain a remarkable exercise in combining textual scholarship with historical geography and cartographic reconstruction. His collected essays demonstrate an intellectual curiosity extending across large stretches of Indian history.

At the heart of all this work lies an uncompromising commitment to evidence.

Habib has never concealed his Marxism. But the Marxism visible in his best historical scholarship is not a substitute for empirical investigation. Theory supplies questions and categories; it does not relieve the historian of the obligation to establish facts. Anyone who has heard him discuss a paper knows how quickly an imposing theoretical proposition can be brought down to earth by a deceptively simple question: What is your evidence?

A Persian word, a revenue figure, the date of a document, the location of a village, the provenance of an inscription or the precise statement of a contemporary chronicler matters. The larger interpretation must ultimately withstand the scrutiny of the smaller fact. This insistence upon evidence connects the scholar to the public intellectual.

A Secularism That Was Never Selective

Irfan Habib’s secularism has never consisted simply of opposition to one particular kind of communalism. He has been adamantly opposed to all brands of communalism. This is fundamental to understanding both his scholarship and his public life.

It is relatively easy to condemn the communalism of one’s opponents. The more difficult test is whether one is prepared to confront communalism within one’s own immediate social and institutional surroundings. Habib repeatedly passed that test.

In Aligarh, he was often as forceful in confronting Muslim communalists, sectarian politics and conservative forces as he would later become in opposing the ideological appropriation of history by Hindutva. He never accepted the proposition that minority status could make communalism intellectually defensible. Nor did opposition to majoritarian communalism require silence about obscurantism or communal politics among Muslims. This brought him into bitter confrontations within Aligarh itself.

The episode of his suspension from Aligarh Muslim University in 1981 needs to be understood within this larger history of struggle. The immediate circumstances had their institutional complexities, but the episode also revealed something fundamental about Habib. He could be extraordinarily stubborn when he believed that academic freedom, secular values, democratic principles or the character of the university was at stake. Personal consequences rarely persuaded him to soften a position that he regarded as a matter of principle.

One might put it differently: Irfan Habib could be persuaded by evidence, but not intimidated by authority. That quality has sometimes made him a difficult adversary and occasionally, perhaps, a difficult colleague. But it is also one of the reasons his intellectual career possesses such remarkable consistency.

Leading the Indian History Congress from the Front

Nowhere has this combination of scholarship and public commitment been more visible than in his long association with the Indian History Congress.

For Habib, the Congress was never simply an organisation that assembled once a year so that historians could read papers and return home. It represented something larger: the collective responsibility of professional historians to defend the integrity of their discipline. At critical moments, he expected historians to speak.

When Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency in 1975, Habib was unwilling to accept the proposition that historians should remain indifferent to the suppression of democratic freedoms. His resistance to authoritarianism is worth remembering today precisely because it demonstrates that his criticism has never depended simply upon which political party happened to occupy power.

The same determination became increasingly visible as communal interpretations of Indian history gained political strength. When organisations associated with Hindutva sought to represent the medieval centuries primarily as an unending civilisational struggle between Hindus and Muslims, Habib was among those who challenged the historical foundations of that narrative.

He repeatedly helped the Indian History Congress take positions when silence would have been more comfortable. Whether the issue involved textbooks, historical monuments, communal interpretations of the past or institutional autonomy, he believed that professional historians had a responsibility to intervene when claims masquerading as history entered public life.

He led from the front. That phrase is particularly appropriate because he did not merely encourage others to take positions. He put his own scholarship, reputation and considerable argumentative energies behind them.

Babri Masjid and the Battle over Evidence

The Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute became perhaps the greatest public test of this conception of the historian’s responsibility.

By the late twentieth century, assertions about the history of the site at Ayodhya had moved from religious belief into mass politics and eventually into the judicial arena. Habib recognised early that historians could not answer politically charged claims by simply declaring themselves above politics. If claims were being made about what had or had not existed at a particular place in the past, those claims had to be examined through historical and archaeological evidence. He therefore became deeply involved in the scholarly examination of the evidence surrounding the Babri Masjid.

His contribution was important not simply because he took a position but because he helped insist upon the rules by which historical claims should be tested. Texts had to be dated. Archaeological evidence had to be contextualised. Inscriptions had to be authenticated. Later traditions could not automatically be projected backwards. Assertions repeated frequently enough did not thereby become historical facts.

When the dispute reached the courts, including the prolonged proceedings before the Allahabad High Court, the historical case required scholars capable of navigating Persian sources, chronicles, archaeology, inscriptions, historical geography and the enormous accumulation of claims and counterclaims that had gathered around Ayodhya. Habib’s role in building and defending that historical argument was formidable.

Without his scholarship, intellectual energy and determination, the historical case presented in relation to the Babri Masjid might have been considerably weaker. He understood that once history itself had been summoned as a witness, professional historians could not abandon the courtroom of public opinion, or the actual courts, to mythology presented as historical fact.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 was consequently not simply the destruction of a monument for him and many of his colleagues. It represented a profound challenge to secular politics, constitutional values and the professional historian’s insistence that the past cannot be altered by mobilisation in the present.

Yet there is an important symmetry that must not be forgotten. The Irfan Habib who confronted Hindutva over Ayodhya was the same Irfan Habib who confronted Muslim communalists in Aligarh. There was no contradiction between these battles. They arose from precisely the same principle.

Majoritarian communalism and minority communalism do not possess equal political power and may have very different consequences, but neither can provide an acceptable framework for historical enquiry. Habib’s secularism has therefore never meant balancing one communal narrative against another. It has meant rejecting the communal construction of history itself.

History as a Public Responsibility

This explains why Habib has so often entered controversies that another scholar might have preferred to avoid.

He has opposed attempts to rewrite textbooks according to political requirements. He has challenged the transformation of mythology into history. He has spoken against attacks upon secular institutions and repeatedly defended the autonomy of historical scholarship. Governments have changed. Political circumstances have changed. The ideological forces against which he has argued have changed.

The underlying principles have not.

This is perhaps the most striking continuity in his public life. He could oppose authoritarian tendencies under a Congress government during the Emergency and subsequently confront the far more systematic communal rewriting of history associated with the Hindu Right. At Aligarh, meanwhile, he could turn with equal intellectual aggression upon those Muslim communalists who sought to use religion or community as a shield against criticism.

His position was never that the historian should be politically neutral in the sense of remaining silent before falsehood. Rather, the historian must be intellectually independent. Governments, religious communities, political parties and ideological movements cannot be permitted to determine in advance what the past is supposed to have been. The evidence must decide.

The Teacher

There is, however, another Irfan Habib familiar to generations of students at Aligarh.

He is the formidable figure sitting in the front row of a seminar, listening carefully until an unsupported assertion, doubtful date or questionable interpretation produces the raised hand. A speaker may have constructed an elaborate argument, only to discover that Professor Habib wants to know the source for a single sentence upon which the entire construction depends.

For young researchers this could be intimidating. It could also be extraordinarily educational. His criticism has always carried an implicit lesson: do not make a claim for which you cannot produce evidence.

Yet alongside the fierce debater has existed a remarkably generous teacher. Generations of researchers have experienced his willingness to suggest a source, locate an obscure reference, explain a difficult Persian expression, comment upon an argument or point towards evidence that the student had overlooked. His intellectual generosity has never required intellectual indulgence. Indeed, taking a student’s work seriously has often meant criticising it seriously.

To be corrected by Irfan Habib has itself been part of the education of several generations of Indian historians.

An Intellectual Legacy

Perhaps his greatest contribution cannot therefore be measured simply by counting books, articles, lectures or controversies. It lies in the questions he taught historians to ask.

Who actually produced the wealth of the Mughal Empire? How was the agricultural surplus appropriated? What was the relationship between peasant, zamindar and state? How were commodities produced and exchanged? What technologies were available? What did money mean in an overwhelmingly agrarian economy? How should social classes be understood in pre-colonial India? How did the nobility reproduce itself? How were towns connected to the countryside? And how can documents produced by states and elites be made to reveal something about people who rarely wrote histories themselves?

Such questions transformed the study of medieval India.

But Habib’s life poses another question, one extending beyond medieval history: What should a historian do when the past itself becomes a political battleground? His answer has been given through nearly three-quarters of a century of scholarship and public engagement. The historian cannot surrender evidence to mythology, communal passion or political authority. There are moments when remaining silent is itself an intellectual choice. Habib has seldom chosen silence.

He has consequently been admired, criticised, attacked and fiercely disagreed with. That is hardly surprising. A scholar who enters major public controversies cannot expect universal approval. Nor would Habib himself, one suspects, regard universal approval as particularly desirable. Intellectual life advances through disagreement, provided that disagreement remains answerable to evidence.

At ninety-five, Professor Irfan Habib represents an extraordinary continuity in Indian intellectual history. His lifetime stretches from the final phase of colonial rule through Independence and the building of the Republic, the great expansion of Indian universities, the emergence of new schools of social and economic history, the Emergency, the rise of communal politics, the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the present battles over the meaning of India’s past.

Through these enormous transformations, one characteristic has remained remarkably constant: his willingness to argue, to dissent and, when necessary, to fight.

Those of us who have studied under him, worked with him, argued with him, been corrected by him, or learnt the historian’s craft by reading his works know that such an intellectual legacy cannot adequately be contained within a bibliography. A great teacher survives not simply through his publications but through the questions he leaves behind, through habits of enquiry transmitted to successive generations and even through the disagreements he provokes.

On 12 August 2026, therefore, as Professor Irfan Habib celebrates his ninety-fifth birthday, we celebrate far more than the longevity of one of India’s most distinguished historians.

We celebrate the scholar who helped transform our understanding of Mughal India; the teacher who taught generations to ask for evidence; the Marxist who insisted that theory must submit itself to empirical scrutiny; the secularist who refused to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable brands of communalism; the public intellectual who opposed authoritarianism when it came from the Congress and communalism when it came from the Hindu Right; the Aligarh academic who was equally unafraid of Muslim communalists in his own backyard; and the historian who repeatedly led the Indian History Congress from the front when the integrity of the discipline was under attack.

Above all, we celebrate a fighter.

Governments have come and gone. Political orthodoxies have changed. New varieties of communalism and historical mythology have arisen. Academic fashions too have changed. Irfan Habib has continued to ask the same stubborn question: Where is the evidence?

At ninety-five, that question, and the courage required to keep asking it, may be among his greatest gifts to Indian history.

Happy 95th birthday, Professor Irfan Habib.

Review: Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina: A Novel. New York: Beaufort Books, 2008. 372 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8253-0518-4.

Historical fiction occupies an uneasy space between documented history and literary imagination. The best examples illuminate the past without claiming to replace it; the weakest blur the line between evidence and invention until readers can no longer distinguish one from the other. Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina belongs to the former category only in part. It is an engaging novel, vividly written and emotionally compelling, but it also raises important historiographical questions about the representation of one of the most influential women in Islamic history, ʿĀʾishah bint Abī Bakr. I read it first years back when a copy of this book was gifted to me by my late brother in law, Late Professor Rizwan Husain, who retired from the Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University. However, I found time to re-read it now after my own retirement and, here is my review of the book.

Long before it appeared in print in 2008, The Jewel of Medina became an international controversy. Random House withdrew the novel before publication after concerns that it might provoke violent reactions, although it was eventually published by Beaufort Books. Ironically, much of the outrage came from people who had never read the work itself. Once the controversy subsides, however, the novel deserves to be judged on literary and historical grounds.

Jones makes her intentions clear from the outset. She explicitly describes the work as fiction and notes that while historical figures are retained, the dialogue and much of the narrative are products of the author’s imagination. The publisher likewise presents the book as the story of Aishah, who ‘must rely on her wits, her courage, and even her sword’ to establish herself within the emerging Muslim community, portraying it simultaneously as ‘a love story, a history lesson, and a coming-of-age tale’. This declaration is important. Jones never claims to have written a biography. She has written a historical novel, and it should first be evaluated as such.

As literature, The Jewel of Medina succeeds remarkably well. Jones recreates seventh-century Arabia with considerable narrative energy. The landscapes of Mecca and Medina, caravan routes, tribal rivalries and domestic life are rendered in language that is accessible without becoming simplistic. Her prose is cinematic, and her descriptions frequently immerse the reader in the atmosphere of the Hijaz.

The novel begins dramatically with the Affair of the Slander (ḥadīth al-ifk), placing the reader immediately inside Aishah’s emotional world as accusations concerning her return with Ṣafwān ibn al-Muʿaṭṭal spread through Medina. Jones transforms the incident into a psychological drama in which suspicion, fear, jealousy and political intrigue unfold simultaneously. The opening is effective precisely because it begins not with theology but with crisis.

Throughout the narrative Jones presents Aishah as intelligent, outspoken, adventurous and fiercely independent. In the Author’s Note, she describes her heroine as ‘an outspoken… influential political advisor… warrior… religious scholar’, emphasising her determination to shape her own destiny. This portrait undoubtedly appeals to modern readers. Yet it also reveals the novel’s central limitation.

Jones’s Aishah is, in many respects, a distinctly twenty-first-century woman inhabiting a seventh-century world. Her concerns, emotional vocabulary and understanding of individual freedom often resemble those of a modern feminist protagonist more than those emerging naturally from the earliest Arabic sources. The historical Aishah was certainly remarkable, but she lived within a social, political and religious universe profoundly different from our own. Jones sometimes allows contemporary values to reshape that universe rather than permitting the historical context to define her heroine.

The contrast becomes especially clear when one reads the novel alongside the most important scholarly studies of Aishah. Nabia Abbott’s classic Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed (1942) remains the foundational biographical reconstruction, grounded in careful sifting of early Arabic sources. Denise Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past (1994) offers a sophisticated analysis of how medieval Muslim historians constructed Aishah’s legacy for their own purposes. And Sayyid Murtada ‘Askari’s The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam (published in Arabic in the 1960s and translated into Persian and English) represents a sharply critical Shi’i perspective, arguing that many traditions attributed to Aishah were fabricated to serve political ends.

Abbott, a pioneering scholar of Islamic studies and the first woman professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, brought remarkable methodological rigour to her work. Her purpose differs fundamentally from Jones’s. She argues that Aishah deserves study not merely because she was Muhammad’s favourite wife, but because after his death she remained an influential figure in the political and intellectual life of the early Muslim community for almost half a century. Her concern is historical reconstruction rather than literary recreation. More importantly, Abbott explains her method with exemplary clarity. She recognises that the early Islamic traditions contain sectarian interpolation, political propaganda and legendary accretions, but insists that critical historical scholarship enables the careful historian to distinguish ‘the true from the false and the probable from the improbable’. This methodological discipline underlies her entire biography.

Spellberg’s work, published more than fifty years after Abbott’s, takes a different approach. Where Abbott sought to recover the historical Aishah, Spellberg examines how medieval Muslim scholars, almost exclusively men, shaped Aishah’s memory to serve evolving communal identities. As Spellberg writes in her introduction, ‘it is about the construction and presentation of ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr’s historical persona by a select group of medieval Muslim men who shaped the memory and meaning of her life for their fellow believers. It is their story not hers, for she is the object not the subject of their written remembrance and evocation.’ Spellberg demonstrates that Aishah’s legacy became a battleground for Sunni and Shiʿi definitions of legitimate authority, proper female behaviour, and communal identity. Her analysis reveals that the ‘real’ Aishah is ultimately unrecoverable; what we have instead is a series of layered interpretations, each reflecting the concerns of its own time.

‘Askari’s work represents a distinctly Shi’i scholarly tradition, one that approaches Aishah’s traditions with profound scepticism. He argues that many of the traditions attributed to her, especially those praising Abu Bakr and ‘Umar or justifying the order of the caliphate, were fabrications designed to legitimise the early caliphs at the expense of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib. ‘Askari’s method involves tracing the chains of transmission (isnād) of Aishah’s traditions and subjecting them to rigorous historical criticism. His conclusion is stark: Aishah’s historical persona, as preserved in Sunni sources, is a construct shaped by political expediency and sectarian polemic. While his work is avowedly partisan, it represents an important counterpoint to the Sunni scholarly tradition and reminds us that Aishah’s legacy has never been a neutral subject of historical inquiry.

Jones proceeds differently from all three scholars. Where Abbott pauses before uncertain evidence, Spellberg scrutinises the motives of medieval narrators, and ‘Askari rejects entire bodies of tradition as fabricated, Jones fills the gaps with imagination. Such imaginative reconstruction is entirely legitimate in fiction, but readers unfamiliar with early Islamic history may mistake invention for historical probability.

The difference appears vividly in their treatment of Aishah’s childhood. Jones depicts her as a rebellious tomboy, racing through Mecca with a wooden sword, longing for unrestricted freedom and already resisting the constraints imposed upon girls. Abbott’s reconstruction is based closely upon the classical Arabic traditions. She likewise portrays Aishah as lively and energetic, but emphasises her delight in dolls, games and childhood companions. She carefully reproduces traditions describing Muhammad watching her play, joining children’s games, allowing her to observe public entertainments, and defending her childish pleasures even against Abu Bakr’s objections. Abbott’s Aishah is unmistakably a child of seventh-century Arabia; Jones’s often resembles a modern adolescent struggling against patriarchy.

Spellberg adds yet another dimension to this comparison. She demonstrates that Aishah’s childhood, like every other aspect of her life, was subject to selective memory and reinterpretation. The traditions that emphasise her youth at marriage, for instance, served to underscore her virginity and thus her special status among Muhammad’s wives. But these same traditions also rendered her vulnerable – a young bride whose word could be doubted, whose innocence required divine vindication. Spellberg shows that ‘Aishah’s age is a major preoccupation’ in the early sources, with variations that suggest later sectarian agendas rather than reliable historical reporting.

‘Askari, for his part, argues that the traditions about Aishah’s childhood and marriage are among the most suspect. He notes that Aishah was only a child when she entered the Prophet’s household, yet she is credited with transmitting thousands of traditions about matters she could scarcely have witnessed. For ‘Askari, this discrepancy is evidence that later narrators attributed their own views to Aishah, using her prestigious name to lend authority to their political and theological positions. This is a powerful reminder that even the most seemingly biographical details in the early sources may serve ideological rather than documentary purposes.

The marriage itself illustrates another methodological divergence. Abbott records the traditional reports concerning Aishah’s age without either apology or sensationalism. She notes that the early sources express no surprise at the disparity in age between bride and groom because such arrangements belonged to the social conventions of their own time. Jones, while retaining the traditional chronology, continually interprets the relationship through modern emotional categories. The marriage becomes above all a romance, whereas Abbott situates it within the political, social and familial structures of early Islam.

Indeed, Abbott repeatedly emphasises the political dimensions of marriage alliances in the formative Muslim community. She demonstrates how marriages involving Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and the Prophet strengthened emerging political relationships and consolidated communal leadership. Even the marriage of Ḥafṣah is analysed primarily as a political alliance rather than merely a domestic episode. Jones certainly acknowledges politics, but emotional relationships remain the principal engine of her narrative.

Spellberg extends this political analysis considerably. She argues that Aishah’s marriage was not merely a personal union but a divine arrangement, one that was subsequently deployed to legitimise Abu Bakr’s succession. The traditions in which Gabriel presents Aishah’s likeness to Muhammad, Spellberg shows, served to portray her selection as heavenly ordained, thereby indirectly sanctioning her father’s later political role. But this same divine imprimatur made Aishah a target for Shiʿi polemic, which rejected both her father’s caliphate and her own exalted status.

Perhaps nowhere is the difference more striking than in the treatment of the Affair of the Slander. Jones constructs the episode as an extended psychological novel. Safwan becomes a figure around whom emotional ambiguity revolves. Internal monologues, imagined conversations and romantic tension drive the narrative. Abbott, by contrast, approaches the same episode through the earliest Arabic sources, carefully distinguishing between variant traditions while resisting the temptation to invent motives or emotional states unsupported by the evidence.

Spellberg’s treatment of the same episode reveals its profound sectarian significance. She shows that the accusation of adultery became a prism for Sunni-Shiʿi differences. Sunni Muslims embraced Aishah’s divine vindication as recorded in the Qur’an, celebrating her as al-mubarraʾa, ‘the vindicated’. Shiʿi Muslims, however, rejected this interpretation entirely. Some argued that the relevant Qur’anic verses referred not to Aishah but to Muhammad’s concubine Maryam the Copt; others maintained that Aishah herself had slandered Maryam. As Spellberg observes, ‘Shiʿi Muslims accepted the accusation of adultery made against ʿAʾisha, but not her divine exoneration from the charges.’ This meant that Aishah’s reputation remained permanently vulnerable. She could be termed by Shiʿi sources both an adulteress and a liar – accusations that struck not only at her personally but at the entire Sunni edifice of communal memory and authority.

‘Askari’s treatment of the same episode is even more critical. He points to what he sees as inconsistencies and anachronisms in the traditional account, arguing that the story of the slander was embellished over time to serve partisan ends. He notes that the narrative relies entirely on Aishah’s own testimony, a testimony that, in his view, is inherently suspect given her later political alignment with those who opposed ‘Ali. For ‘Askari, the Affair of the Slander is not a story of divine vindication but a carefully constructed piece of propaganda designed to establish Aishah’s innocence and, by extension, the legitimacy of her father’s caliphate.

Jones is nevertheless careful to acknowledge historical uncertainty. She reminds readers that many aspects of early Islamic history remain disputed, including Aishah’s age and later sectarian evaluations of her relationship with Muhammad. This admission is commendable. Yet she frequently converts historical uncertainty into literary licence. Where the evidence is silent, the novel often substitutes psychological plausibility for documentary support.

The novel is also deeply influenced by modern feminist interpretation. Its concluding pages argue explicitly that Muhammad intended women to enjoy greater freedom, but that subsequent generations of men deprived them of those rights. Aishah herself becomes the voice through whom this argument is expressed. This is an intellectually respectable interpretative position and reflects one current within contemporary Islamic feminist scholarship. However, it remains precisely that: an interpretation. Early Islamic history is considerably more complex than the novel sometimes suggests. The development of Islamic law, political authority and gender relations cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of prophetic liberation followed by male suppression.

Spellberg’s work is particularly valuable here because it shows how Aishah’s legacy was used by medieval scholars to define proper female behaviour, often in ways that restricted women’s public roles. She demonstrates that both Sunni and Shiʿi authors, despite their profound disagreements about Aishah’s character, converged on a shared conclusion: her participation in the first civil war demonstrated the dangers of female political involvement. As one tradition cited by Spellberg has it, ‘Men perish if they obey women.’ The historical Aishah, whatever her own motivations, became a cautionary tale. Spellberg writes that ‘the manipulation of ʿAʾisha’s example provided a platform for debate about her role in politics. Although Sunni and Shiʿi authors disagreed about the essential nature of ʿAʾisha’s persona, they found significant similarities in the derivative, negative rules which her singular example implied for all Muslim women in the matter of political participation.’

‘Askari would go further. He argues that Aishah’s political involvement was not merely misguided but actively destructive, a product of her jealousy, ambition and hatred of ‘Ali. His account of Aishah’s role in the rebellion against ‘Uthman and the Battle of the Camel is unremittingly hostile. He portrays her as a scheming intriguer who manipulated events to serve her own interests and those of her family. While this interpretation is clearly partisan, it reflects a tradition of Shi’i scholarship that has deeply influenced how many Muslims understand Aishah’s legacy.

Nor does Jones sufficiently convey Aishah’s extraordinary intellectual legacy. Historical tradition remembers her not only as the Prophet’s beloved wife but also as one of the foremost transmitters of hadith, an important legal authority, a participant in the first civil war, an adviser to successive caliphs, and one of the principal architects of early Islamic memory. Abbott consistently foregrounds these dimensions of her career, whereas Jones, understandably for a novelist, gives greater prominence to romance and domestic emotion.

Spellberg’s analysis of Aishah’s role in hadith transmission is especially illuminating. She observes that Aishah is credited with transmitting thousands of traditions, far more than any other woman in early Islam. Yet Spellberg also emphasises that ‘Aishah could not control her final contribution to the communal record of the Islamic community. Aishah might be the first link in many oral chains of authority, but no tradition ever rested on her word alone. Her memory and observations were at the mercy of those who came after her.’ This insight is crucial: the historical Aishah, however remarkable, was ultimately shaped by male scholars who selected, preserved and interpreted her words according to their own priorities.

This is not to diminish the literary achievement of The Jewel of Medina. On the contrary, the novel deserves praise for introducing a broad readership to one of Islam’s most remarkable women. Its prose is graceful, its pacing assured and its central character unforgettable. Jones succeeds in making Aishah emotionally accessible in ways that academic biographies rarely attempt. Yet precisely because the novel is so persuasive, it should not be mistaken for biography.

Readers seeking to understand the historical Aishah should accompany Jones with Nabia Abbott’s Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed, Denise Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past, and Sayyid Murtada ‘Askari’s The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam. They should also consult the early Arabic sources: Ibn Saʿd’s Ṭabaqāt al-Kubrā, al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh, al-Dhahabī’s Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, Ibn Ḥajar’s Al-Iṣābah, and al-Zarkashī’s Al-Ijābah. These works reveal an Aishah who was not only beloved, but intellectually formidable, politically influential and indispensable to understanding the formative decades of Islamic civilisation.

Ultimately, The Jewel of Medina succeeds best when read as historical imagination rather than historical reconstruction. Sherry Jones has written an engaging and often moving novel that restores Aishah to the centre of a popular narrative. Nabia Abbott, by contrast, reminds us that the real Aishah needs little embellishment. Denise Spellberg shows that even that ‘real’ Aishah is ultimately a product of interpretation, a palimpsest of competing voices, each seeking to claim her for their own vision of the past. And ‘Askari demonstrates that the contest over Aishah’s legacy continues to this day, with profound implications for how Muslims understand their own history. The historical woman, recovered patiently from the complex and sometimes contradictory Arabic sources, remains every bit as fascinating as the fictional heroine. Indeed, if anything, history presents us with a figure whose achievements surpass even the most accomplished literary invention.

Works Consulted:

• Abbott, Nabia. Aishah: The Beloved of Mohammed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942. The classic, foundational Western biography that seeks to reconstruct the historical ʿĀʾishah through a careful critical analysis of early Arabic sources.
• Spellberg, Denise A. Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. A seminal work that does not attempt a biography but instead analyzes how medieval Muslim scholars (primarily men) constructed and debated ʿĀʾishah’s legacy for their own political and sectarian purposes.
• ʿAskari, Sayyid Murtada. The Role of Aishah in the History of Islam. Vol. 1. Translated by ʿAla ad-Din Pazargadi. A critical Shiʿi scholarly work that subjects the traditions attributed to ʿĀʾishah to rigorous historical criticism, arguing that many were fabricated to serve political ends.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Najmul Hoda, for those unacquainted, is an Indian Police Service officer, an Urdu writer and scholar, and a man of many parts. He is also, it appears, the latest authority on what historians should and should not do. Who better to instruct the discipline on its proper limits than a policeman who once wrote that Indian Muslims must “rewrite their victim mindset”? After all, if you want to understand the complexities of historical evidence and public duty, who better than a serving IPS officer who moonlights as a literary critic?

Hoda’s thoughtful review of Shaan Kashyap’s Who Owns the Past? raises questions that go considerably beyond the merits of a single book. At its heart lies an argument about the place of the professional historian in the Indian republic. Should historians confine themselves to archives, classrooms and scholarly journals, leaving disputes over the past to politicians, religious organisations and the courts? Or does historical expertise carry with it a responsibility to intervene when assertions about the past are employed to legitimise political action in the present?

The review appears attracted to the first proposition, or at least to a considerably more restrained conception of the historian’s public role. That is where one must disagree.

The Politics Has Already Occurred

There is, to begin with, something misleading in the apparently even-handed proposition that historians became “political actors” once they entered controversies concerning textbooks, communalism or Ayodhya. The observation is formally correct but historically inadequate. It removes from consideration the circumstances that compelled historians to intervene in the first place.

When a political movement makes a claim about the past, mobilises people around that claim and seeks to transform the material landscape on its basis, the historian cannot be accused of politicising history merely because he or she asks whether the historical claim is supported by evidence. The politics has already occurred. The historian has entered a field that politics has invaded.

What a relief it must be to live in a world where politics and history never mix until irresponsible historians barge in with their inconvenient questions. Hoda offers us this comforting vision: a republic where scholars would have remained noble, untouched creatures of the archive, if only they hadn’t developed the unfortunate habit of opening their mouths whenever someone started demolishing mosques or rewriting textbooks.

Let us pause to salute the extraordinary self-restraint Hoda seems to admire. There stand our professional historians, surrounded by political movements making apocalyptic claims about the sixteenth century, politicians thundering about medieval temple destructions, crowds gathering with pickaxes, and what do our historians do? They have the audacity to ask: “Where is the evidence?” The sheer cheek of it.

The Category Mistake That Wasn’t

The centrepiece of Hoda’s argument, borrowed from Majid Hayat Siddiqi, is that historians made a “category mistake” by entering political controversies as historians rather than as ordinary citizens. Because, you see, historical evidence is always mediated by interpretation. Therefore, historians have no more authority to speak on the past than, say, a politician who has never read a primary source or a television anchor who has never seen an archive.

This is ingenious reasoning. By this logic, a cardiologist should not be consulted about a heart attack because medical diagnosis is also mediated by interpretation. A structural engineer should stay quiet when a building collapses because load-bearing calculations are, after all, a matter of professional consensus. And an archaeologist who has spent decades excavating a site should presumably defer to a priest who has spent decades reading scripture, because both are simply offering interpretations.

The false modesty here is breathtaking. It masquerades as intellectual humility – oh, we historians are so limited, so constrained by our methods, so unable to speak with certainty – while actually serving a deeply conservative purpose: silence the experts so that anyone with a microphone and a grievance can claim equal authority over the past.

Ayodhya: The Historian’s Original Sin

Consider Ayodhya. A political movement spends years claiming that a sixteenth-century mosque was built on the ruins of a temple marking Rama’s birthplace. It mobilises millions around this claim. It organises a rath yatra across the country. It finally demolishes the structure with the complicity of state authorities.

And according to the logic Hoda finds persuasive, the historian’s error was to say: “Let us examine the evidence.”

Not the demolition. Not the mobilisation. Not the violence. The historian’s intervention.

This is what passes for sophisticated critique in certain circles. The historian who asks for inscriptions, for archaeological strata, for contemporary chronicles, for documentary evidence, is the one who has “politicised” history. Never mind that the entire dispute was already political. Never mind that faith had already been weaponised. The crime is not the weaponisation; the crime is the refusal to accept that faith, once weaponised, can no longer be questioned.

One almost expects the next step: that historians should apologise for existing.

The False Equivalence of Textbook Interventions

The review’s treatment of textbook controversies is equally instructive. Hoda approves of Kashyap’s discovery that textbook controversies didn’t begin with the BJP in 1977. Indeed, Kerala had them earlier. Christians objected to representations of Jesus. Sikhs protested about the Gurus. Everybody, it turns out, demanded textbook changes.

The conclusion Hoda seems to draw? Everyone is equally guilty. Everyone politicised history. Therefore, no one is really guilty. It’s all just politics, all the way down. How wonderfully symmetrical. How satisfyingly balanced.

Notice what this argument does not do. It does not ask whether some interventions were more systematic than others. It does not ask whether some governments imposed changes through institutional pressure while others responded to grassroots mobilisation. It does not ask whether some demands were based on evidence while others were based on faith. It does not ask whether some changes affected one state textbook while others sought to transform the national curriculum.

No, no. That would be fussy. That would be looking for distinctions where none are required. The point, apparently, is to achieve a kind of moral equivalence by chronological proximity. If everyone has attempted to influence textbooks at some point, then no one can claim the higher ground.

It is a marvellous argument. It is also, to borrow a phrase, a category mistake. But let us not get pedantic.

The Disappearing Institution

And then there is the AMU episode. Irfan Habib complains about criminalisation and academic decline. He is assaulted. He is suspended before any inquiry. Intellectuals defend him. The review, following Kashyap, suggests that Habib won the battle but AMU lost the war, because the defence of the historian allegedly distracted attention from the institution’s problems.

One struggles to find words adequate to the absurdity of this logic.

So the intellectuals who defended a scholar from physical assault and administrative victimisation are now to be blamed for not simultaneously solving the structural problems of a university? They were expected, presumably, to mobilise for Habib’s safety and also reform AMU’s admissions policy, regulate its hostels, address its governance crisis, and perhaps settle its funding disputes, all in the same press release.

It is the most demanding critique of intellectual activism ever formulated. If you defend a colleague from a beating, you have apparently forfeited the right to discuss institutional reform. If you sign a petition, you cannot also write a paper on university governance. If you fight for academic freedom, you are somehow preventing the institution from recovering.

One imagines the ideal historian under this dispensation: someone who, upon learning of a colleague’s assault, would say, “Yes, but have we considered the administrative challenges of the institution as a whole?” and then go back to the archive, satisfied that neutrality had been preserved.

The Myth of the Contaminated Field

Underlying all this is a curious nostalgia for a time when history was pure, uncontaminated by politics, when historians simply wrote their monographs and nobody bothered them about the past. The tragedy, according to this view, is that secular historians allowed themselves to become associated with the state, and now everyone suspects them of being part of the establishment.

How odd. How very odd.

Because what actually happened was that a colonial historiography – deeply communal in its structures, explicitly hierarchical in its assumptions – was challenged by historians who believed that evidence, method, and critical inquiry could produce a more adequate understanding of India’s past. They did not simply parrot a state ideology. They produced scholarship that was genuinely new: economic histories of Mughal India, social histories of early India, analyses of colonialism that did not simply reproduce nationalist pieties, studies of caste and class that went beyond dynastic chronicles.

And the response? The response is that they became too powerful, too influential, too … monopolistic. As if intellectual influence were something to be dismantled rather than earned. As if the answer to powerful scholarship were not better scholarship but the dissolution of the very idea that some scholarship is better than others.

The False Heroism of the Withdrawn

The oddest part of the review’s argument is its implicit heroisation of the historian who does not intervene.

Here is a discipline that has produced some of the most consequential intellectuals of modern India. Historians who shaped the understanding of the republic. Historians who testified before courts. Historians who were summoned by governments. Historians whose arguments were debated in newspapers, in political rallies, in legislative assemblies.

And we are asked to believe that their greatest virtue would have been a dignified silence.

Consider what that silence would have meant in Ayodhya. Consider what it would have meant in the textbook controversies. Consider what it would have meant when the Constitution’s vision of a secular republic was being challenged by claims about an ancient Hindu civilisation, a Muslim despotism, and an essentially communal Indian past.

The historians who spoke did not always win. They were sometimes wrong. They sometimes overreached. Their scholarship has been revised, corrected, and in some cases superseded. That is how knowledge progresses.

But to suggest that their error lay in speaking at all, that is not a critique. It is a counsel of despair.

The Unbearable Lightness of Neutrality

At the end of the review, Hoda endorses the proposition that history is not an inheritance but an argument. It is a fine sentiment. Everyone can agree on it. It allows everyone to feel virtuous without committing to anything.

But the proposition is incomplete. An argument implies a method. An argument implies standards. An argument implies that some participants have actually done the work of examining evidence while others have simply asserted their beliefs.

To say that history is an argument is not to say that every argument is history. That distinction is not mere pedantry. It is the entire point of the discipline.

The historian who enters public debate is not claiming ownership of the past. The historian is claiming that the past can be known, if imperfectly, through the application of method and the examination of evidence. That is a modest claim. It is also an indispensable one.

In a republic where the past is increasingly invoked to justify every political project, where historical claims are repeated until they acquire the force of fact, where monuments are destroyed and textbooks are rewritten without reference to evidence, the historian who remains silent is not being neutral. The historian who remains silent is being complicit.

The Sad and Hilarious Spectacle

And yet, the truly remarkable spectacle is not Hoda’s review itself, but the reverence with which some historians are sharing it. Yes, you read that correctly. Professional historians, people who have spent decades in archives, who have built careers on the careful evaluation of evidence, are circulating this critique as if it were a revelation. As if an IPS officer lecturing historians on their “category mistakes” were some profound new insight, rather than a deeply ironic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

It is, quite frankly, both sad and hilarious. Sad, because it reveals a peculiar insecurity within the profession, a willingness to genuflect before any critic, no matter how ill-equipped, who confirms their own self-doubt about public intervention. Hilarious, because the very historians who spent the Ayodhya years insisting on the primacy of evidence are now sharing a review that suggests they should have stayed silent. One imagines them nodding sagely at Hoda’s argument, perhaps murmuring, “Yes, yes, we should have just let the demolition happen. Much more dignified.”

The logic, if it can be called that, is breathtaking. Hoda, following the book’s author, suggests that the error of the Ayodhya historians was to believe that historical evidence could settle a political dispute. The fact that the dispute was already political, that the evidence was being mobilised by one side to justify the destruction of a mosque, apparently does not matter. The crime is not the weaponisation of history; the crime is the refusal to accept that weaponised faith cannot be questioned. It is a prescription for professional suicide dressed up as intellectual humility.

One can only marvel at the spectacle of some historians falling over themselves to endorse a critique that essentially tells them to shut up and leave the past to the politicians, the priests, and the policemen. Perhaps they find it refreshing. Perhaps they are simply tired. But the rest of us, who still believe that evidence matters, that expertise has a place in public life, and that silence in the face of falsehood is not neutrality but complicity, can only watch in disbelief.

The Historian’s Duty

The historian has no right to own the past. But the historian does have a duty to defend the procedures by which we know it.

And in a republic increasingly crowded with those who claim certainty about history without submitting themselves to the discipline of historical evidence, that duty has rarely been more important. The next time a monument is demolished or a textbook is rewritten, we will know whom to thank for the historians’ newfound commitment to restraint.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The enthusiasm with which much of India’s Hindutva ecosystem celebrates Israel’s assault upon Gaza cannot be explained by strategic partnership alone. It springs from ideological recognition: in the militarised ethnonationalism of the Israeli state, the Hindu Right sees an image of the country it wishes India to become. Israel offers a model of a religiously defined nation-state that combines electoral democracy for the dominant community with occupation and political exclusion for others. Gaza fascinates because it appears to show what a state can do once it has designated an entire population a security problem.

This admiration has translated into tangible policy. India has become the world’s top importer of Israeli weaponry, with Israeli drones and missiles reportedly deployed in operations against Pakistan. But the emulation goes deeper than arms. The Indian government has purchased ‘Blue Wolf‘ tracking software from Israel, a surveillance tool originally deployed in the West Bank to monitor Palestinians, and has reportedly installed it in Kashmir to track and control local voices. Israeli surveillance systems from companies like Cognyte and Septier have been installed on subsea cable landing stations across India, allowing security agencies to access the personal data and communications of 1.4 billion citizens. The Pegasus spyware scandal further revealed how Israeli technology was allegedly used to hack the phones of Indian journalists, opposition leaders and activists.

The occupation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel’s settler-colonial project in the West Bank, with both states applying brutal methods in occupied territories. Indian officials and academics have publicly stated that the Israeli ‘model’ should be replicated in Kashmir. This ideological kinship is reflected in policy: India has abandoned its earlier support for Palestine, abstaining from UN votes calling for investigations into Israeli atrocities and saying almost nothing about the genocide in Gaza. At home, the government has demolished hundreds of Muslim family homes in campaigns that human rights groups have likened to Zionist tactics, using bulldozers as weapons of collective punishment. The Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens exemplify this ideological shift toward an ethnic state, systematically marginalising religious minorities.

The ideological affinity rests on a shared narrative of permanent siege, where a numerical majority imagines itself as a besieged minority, with victimhood mobilised to immunise contemporary power from moral scrutiny. In this political imagination, Gaza is a demonstration that a modern state need not apologise for using overwhelming force; the blockade becomes an example of population management, and the destruction of homes becomes counter-terrorism. The phrase “Israel-style response” conveys freedom from legal inhibition and humanitarian concern – the fantasy of a state that strikes first and treats criticism as collaboration with terrorism. Hindutva admirers of Israel repeat a simple script: Hamas attacked on 7 October 2023, so Israel possesses an unlimited right to continue destroying Gaza. Everything before that date – occupation, blockade, settlement expansion and the deliberate fragmentation of Palestinian politics – is erased.

The scale of Gaza’s destruction is now undeniable: residential districts, hospitals, schools and water systems have been reduced to rubble, with the Palestinian death toll above 70,000 by mid-2026. In September 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide; in June 2026, it stated that authorities continued to commit such crimes. Yet sections of Indian social media respond to each new image of death with celebration or denial. Gaza has become another vocabulary through which Indian Muslims are abused; anti-Muslim hate-speech incidents invoking the conflict rose sharply, with Palestinians and Indian Muslims merged into a single imagined enemy. Israeli flags appeared in anti-Muslim demonstrations, and calls for the destruction of Gaza were accompanied by warnings that Indian Muslims might face a similar future. The foreign war became a stage for domestic intimidation.

The attraction to Israel extends from the bomb to the database, admiring not only the capacity to destroy an enemy but to classify, monitor and immobilise one. This alignment represents a profound departure from India’s anti-colonial inheritance. India voted against the partition of Palestine in 1947, recognised the PLO in 1974 and supported Palestinian self-determination within its opposition to colonialism. Hindutva has reversed that moral lens, identifying not with the colonised but with the technologically superior occupying power. At the centre of both ideologies lies demographic anxiety – the fear of losing control makes birth rates and citizenship matters of national security. Both promise democracy while insisting the state must permanently belong to one community.

The Hindutva supporter loves Israel instrumentally, as the enemy of the enemy. The Palestinian becomes a substitute Indian Muslim; Gaza becomes an imaginary Kashmir. This is not solidarity with Israelis as human beings but with an apparatus of domination – the wall, the missile and the checkpoint. India can maintain relations with Israel while condemning occupation and collective punishment, but strategic cooperation does not require moral surrender. What India cannot do without diminishing itself is exchange its anti-colonial inheritance for applause from an embassy. For a temporary sense of military masculinity, it risks sacrificing moral authority accumulated across generations.

When the slogans have disappeared and the triumphant videos have been deleted, the record will remain: the names of the dead, the destroyed hospitals, the displaced children, and the people thousands of kilometres away who cheered. They were warned by international courts, by UN investigators, by Israeli dissidents. But the Zionist dream had given Hindutva a picture of its desired future, and it was too intoxicated by the spectacle of domination to notice that it was applauding not security, not patriotism, not civilisation, but the destruction of all three.