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.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 