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.
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