Professor Sumit Sarkar's Essays of a Lifetime: Modern social history at its best

Raziuddin Aquil

The best of histories are produced in worst of times. Distinguished scholars rise above aggressive political propaganda to publish historical works providing critical insights on what happened in the past – some lessons from which can shape the present. One such historian, the much admired Professor Sumit Sarkar has devoted his life working with just one agenda – scholarly excellence. In doing so, he has questioned received wisdom, pushed disciplinary boundaries, and set high standards of critical historical thinking. His formidable scholarship can be savoured in his recently published book, Essays of a Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns (Permanent Black). Offering Bengal’s modern social history at its best, the book’s blurb highlights: “The present collection, which reproduces many of Sarkar’s finest writings, shows an intellectually scintillating, sceptical-Marxist mind at its sharpest”.

Spread over 640 pages, the book is divided into three sections. The first part comprising eight chapters offers a detailed critique of the contradictory pulls of social reform and religious revival in colonial Bengal. Humiliation of colonial subjugation was to be balanced with glorification of India’s ancient past and attack on the so-called tyranny and oppression of Muslim rule before the British conquest. This meant even the most sincere of reform efforts falling prey to what was subsequently identified as the infamous divide-and-rule policy of the British, besides capitulating to the contradictions between traditional norms and modern transformations. The second set of six chapters further reveals Sarkar’s long engagement with various strands of subaltern activism and nationalist interventions, as the foremost scholar of Swadeshi movement in Bengal with a lapsed association with critical Subaltern Studies scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s. The third section offers rich tributes to eminent scholars and activists P.C. Joshi, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, with Sarkar acknowledging his intellectual debt especially to the latter.  

Some of the themes and issues of crucial import to the history of Bengal and by extension of rest of India may be highlighted here. In a provocative opening chapter in which conclusions are offered upfront, Sarkar points out that Raja Rammohun Roy’s writings and activities signify a break with tradition, but a close investigation of the precise extent and nature of the departure reveals it was constrained by a Hindu-elitist and colonial framework. The much touted Bengal renaissance, therefore, was an intellectual movement of a "false consciousness of pathetic kind", which was bred by colonialism. Beyond laudatory rhetoric, it did not lead to basic social transformation in a progressive direction in Bengal’s development, which, indeed, saw a break from the level-playing field of early modern era to "the full blast of colonial modern exploitation". 

The march to modernity eventually slid into conformity to caste rules to the extent of Rammohun taking a Brahman cook with him to England, wearing sacred threads to the end of his days, hunting for texts glorifying ascetic widowhood even if for the noble intention of countering Sati, and other deeply flawed actions revealing contradictions in theory and practice. In effect, it meant complete abandonment of the older Persianate-Islamic intellectual framework to embrace a neo-Hindu revivalism induced by almost a blind acceptance of colonial subjection. These limits, contradictions, and ambivalence are not taken into consideration in usual celebration of Rammohun as the father of modern India. Yet, it must be recognised that it took nearly a century-long reform-struggle to eventually banish Sati and allow widow-remarriage.

As Sarkar succinctly puts it, the Hindu tradition always combines “a very considerable degree of abstract intellectual freedom with insistence upon rigid social conformity, and Rammohun and the early Brahmos on the whole maintained this dichotomy”. The challenge posed by the contemporaneous Derozians (pupils and friends of early nineteenth-century avant-garde poet and public intellectual Henri Louis Vivian Derozio) through their open rejection of rituals and defiance of caste and religious taboos was alarming. They began with radical new lifestyle and free thinking, and were condemned for “cutting their way through ham and beef, and wading to liberalism through tumblers of bear”. However, as Sarkar shows in his discussion on the complexities of “Young Bengal” movement, the youthful exuberance of modern educated College boys eventually succumbed to the pressures of newly articulated Hindu conservatism of colonial Bengal. 

Within a few decades, Derozian reading groups and societies were seen conforming to the prejudices of the time, with little to show for any radical departure in thinking about religion and philosophy. On the questions of social reform also – the need for education, evils of child-marriage and Kulin polygamy, parental arrangement of marriages, seclusion of women, and ban on widow-remarriage – the Derozians maintained varied positions from ambiguities to “backsliding”. Sarkar has particularly noted, with a tinge of sadness, the attack on the alleged cruelty of precolonial Muslim rule, which was represented as the reason for seclusion of women, whereas the Hindu Shastras were not so conservative, it was held. The colonial rule was celebrated as delivering from Muslim oppression; the haughty, wretched and oppressive Yavanas were being driven out and it was hoped that public jobs will be denied to them once Persian was deprived of its court language status. They also raised a false alarm on the suppression of Bengali language and literature under Muslim rulers, but called for the vernacular to be taught only to the raiyat children in district schools, emphasising on English education to be reserved for rich upper-caste/zamindar kids in schools and colleges. Thus, in many ways, the so-called radicals were not much different from the moderates or even the conservatives, despite all the heavy drinking which made them appear iconoclastic.

In Sarkar’s analysis, the social-reform issues threw up four distinct positions: secular reform of the Vidyasagar brand, agnostic, atheist, steering clear of religious ideologies and working for social engineering, even if piecemeal; Brahmoism, at the height of its influence in 1860s and '70s, declining rapidly thereafter; the positivist circles; and the rising tide of Hindu revival. All of them converged on “all-pervading assumption that British rule had been preceded by centuries of Muslim tyranny and therefore had to be welcomed as a deliverance from an age of darkness”. From Rammohun and the Derozians, to Keshabchandra, Bankimchandra and a host of conservatives and progressives alike suffered from this “ubiquitous syndrome” throughout nineteenth-century Bengal. As Sarkar puts it: “A break had taken place with pre-nineteenth-century Indo-Islamic culture through the displacement of Persian by English, and more generally by the myth of the ‘renaissance’ itself, for awakening has to presuppose a dark age”. This was bound to snowball into a communal conflagration and divide in decades to come, when poor Muslim peasants began to revolt against rich Hindu zamindars (at it happens, using the language of political Islam and jihad).

The interesting "sequence of significant effort and ultimate failure", often returning to status quo ante, though sometimes witnessing lasting shifts as well, has been studied by Sarkar further with reference to the political domain, especially pattern and structure of nationalist activity in Bengal. The "zig-zag pattern of nationalist activity" is examined within the emerging structure of nationalism - "the entire complex of objectives, techniques, socio-cultural ideals and values, organisational forms, communication media, and social composition which together make up the texture of a movement". All things considered, "the history of the Indian national movement reveals interesting crests followed by troughs". The failure of both radical intellectual heroes and much exploited peasant rebels indicates the specific ways in which colonial situation warped, hindered, or frustrated legitimate aspirations. In Sarkar's words, "the limitations of the intellectuals, radical and conservative alike, were connected with the socio-economic structure moulded by colonialism". However, active collaboration or silent weeping eventually gave way to political action, preparing ground for developing a coherent ideology in the shape of drain of wealth theory. 

Sarkar also presents a complex picture of the caste question, moving from simple binaries: religious-cum-caste relations complicated by class status, Muslim and Christian presence offering salvation, and Gandhi coming up with his own notions, though maintaining ambivalence on equality and social and scriptural justification of discrimination and hierarchy (adhikarbhed) in society. Combating this, marginalised, but politically assertive communities such as Namsudras, Mahishyas and Rajbansis came up with their own vernacular histories articulating their identities. Namsudras protested against being condemned as Chandals, for the latter were identified as descendants of a Brahmin woman producing children through sex with a shudra man. Namsudras imagined themselves other way round and in a better position: descended from intercourse between a shudra woman and a Brahmin sage. They sought to enhance their social respectability and political status through education, which was hitherto denied to them by upper-caste bhadraloks, who, indeed, according to reports, tried to prevent Namsudras from opening schools for educating their children.

Further, Mahishyas refused comparisons with Namsudras, pointing to upper castes having had water from their hands. That was the bottom line identified as: jalacharanya! Also, Rajbansi upper-crust claimed Kshatriya status, rejecting any connection with the tribal group Koch, purging their customs of "non-Aryan" modes, and constructing a more prestigious history of the community. In doing so, Rajbansi leadership allied itself with upper-caste Hindu identity politics with an anti-Muslim slant. Mercifully, this kind of build up collapsed in the face of a class solidarity resulting in the Tebhaga movement of mid-1940s. Yet, the Marxian Left's understanding of caste as "epiphenomenon of class" did not help either. The two registers of caste and class defused any possibility of a broad plank for transformative politics. Further, as Sarkar notes, solidarities based on nation, region, religion or community, class, caste, tribe or women are unable to sustain themselves beyond a point - making identities around them fluid and transient with multiple possibilities.

Working from within the emerging Hindu fold, Ramakrishna Pramhansa (1836-1886) warned his followers against falling in the usual trap of lust and greed which forced them to endure the humiliation of colonial government employment as lowly and depressed clerks (the troika of kamini, kanchan, and chakri) - resembling conditions of Kaliyuga and calling for avatars or gods for course correction, sometimes with scandalous results. Sarkar's fascinating chapter on "terrible immoralities", including ritual murder, terrifying arson and sexual perversion involving a self-styled Kalki-avatar and his few disciples in a village of Bikrampur, reputed as a civilised heartland of Bengali Hindu bhadralok, is a case in point. This was a scandal that was to be hushed into silence, for it also had a Chandal or Namsudra character who was welcomed into a village Brahmin bhadralok's household in which women outnumbered men, only to completely violate established norms during a night-long orgy and violence in mid-December 1904. The term Kalki was also abused by the sadhus, who used it for calling the penis-shaped pipe for smoking ganja, which, in turn, could give a heady feeling of setting things right side up again. There were other uses made of both the ashes and the pipe itself.

From a more sensible context, though sometimes charged with emotions bordering on madness, Sarkar quotes Ramakrishna Kathamrita in which the Guru (Ramakrishna Pramhansa) articulated the catholicity of traditional and inclusive Hinduism, recognizing many separate ways to achieve the same goal: “There is a pond with three or four ghats – Hindus call what they drink jal, Muslims pani, the English water. He is called Allah by one, God by others, some say Brahma, others Kali, still others Ram, Hari, Jesus, or Durga”. The Bengali Bhadralok’s urbanity was carefully shaped in the nineteenth century by an intelligent mix of tradition and modernity, which was aimed at transcending the narrow limits of the usual caste and religion based prejudices, though in some contexts its lapsing into politics of Hindutva kind cannot be ruled out altogether. The considerable sophistication provided to a broad-based Hinduism by Swami Vivekananda, a renowned successor of Ramakrishna, is susceptible to misuse for narrow political ends in our time.

Sarkar offers interesting insights on these important issues. Broadly following the same tradition of scholarship of Thompsonian social history kind and maintaining critical historical distance, Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya writes in his endorsement on the back cover: Sumit Sarkar critiques his own location within the new Marxist nationalist history - "pushing disciplinary boundaries, disturbing neat classifications, resisting false historical comparisons, problamatizing categories, and questioning linear narratives". The end product is awe-inspiring scholarship presented in the gentlest of form and style. Sarkar doesn't need to shout like political ideologues and propagandists. He commands respect for the outstanding research he has done and meticulously produced books he has published. 

A shorter version of this write-up has appeared in the Sunday Guardian:

https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/opinion/modern-social-history-best