Sumit Sarkar

Modern India, 1885-1947

The Swadeshi Movement In Bengal-1903-1908 Is A Study In Depth Of The Five Crowded Years From The Announcement Of The Partition Plan To The Alipore Bomb Case. The Author Has Chosen As His Main Theme The Effects Of The Nationalist Intelligentsia During These Years To Break Out Of Elitist Confines Through The Development Of New Techniques Of Struggle And Mass Communication And The Ultimate Failure Of Such Attempts, Which, Along With Intensified Repression, Led To The Heroic Blind Alley Of Revolutionary Terrorism. The Shifts Within Nationalism In Political Objectives, Methods And Social And Cultural Ideals Are Analysed And Sought To Be Explained In Terms Of A Novel Classification Of Trends Within The Swadeshi Movement.

The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908

The political context in which historians of India find themselves today, says Sumit Sarkar, is dominated by the advance of the Hindu Right and globalized forms of capitalism, while the historian's intellectual context is dominated by the marginalization of all varieties of Marxism and an academic shift to cultural studies and postmodern critique. In Beyond Nationalist Frames, one of India's foremost contemporary historians offers his view of how the craft of history should be practiced in this complex conjuncture. In studies of colonial time-keeping, Rabindranath Tagore's fiction, and pre-Independence Bengal, Sarkar explores new approaches to the writing of history. Essays on contemporary politics consider the implications of the "Hindu Bomb," the rewriting of national history textbooks by Hindu fundamentalists, and the issue of conversion to Christianity. Scholars in all the fields touched by recent developments in South Asian historiography—anthropology, feminist theory, comparative literature, cultural studies—will find this a stimulating and provocative collection of essays, as will anyone interested in Indian politics.

Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History

Beyond Nationalist Frames

A distillation of the historians finest writings on modern Indian historical themes. For the past forty years or more, the most influential, respected, and popular scholar of modern Indian history has been Sumit Sarkar. When his first monograph, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 19031908, appeared in 1973 it soon became obvious that the book represented a paradigm shift within its genre. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it when the work was republished in 2010: Very few monographs, if any, have ever rivalled the meticulous research and the thick description that characterized this book, or the lucidity of its exposition and the persuasive power of its overall argument. Ten years later, Sarkar published Modern India 18851947, a textbook for advanced students and teachers. Its synthesis and critique of everything significant that had been written about the period was seen as monumental, lucid, and the fashioning of a new way of looking at colonialism and nationalism. Sarkar, however, changed the face not only of modern Indian history monographs and textbooks, he also radically altered the capacity of the historical essay. As Beethoven stretched the sonata form beyond earlier conceivable limits, Sarkar can be said to have expanded the academic essay. In his hands, the shorter form becomes in miniature both monograph and textbook. The present collection, which reproduces many of Sarkars finest writings, shows an intellectually scintillating, skeptical-Marxist mind at its sharpest.  here we see Sarkar grappling with his intellectual heritage, negotiating his own location within the new Marxist nationalist history of the period. Working within its frame, he pushes at the boundaries, disturbing neat classificatory schemes, resisting false historical comparisons, problematizing categories, and questioning linear narratives. The desire to explore contrary experiences and contradictory pictures is part of his process of questioning.  Neeladri Bhattacharya

Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns

Essays of a Lifetime

For Sumit Sarkar

Issues in Modern Indian History

Tanika Sarkar

Contributed articles on social reforms and status of women in 19th and 20th century India.

Sumit Sarkar

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