Essays of a Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns

666 Pages·2019·3.152 MB·English

by  Sumit Sarkar

essays of a lifetime
SUNY series in Hindu Studies
WENDY DONIGER, EDITOR
sumit sarkar
Essays of a Lifetime

· ·
Reformers Nationalists Subalterns
Essays of a Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns by Sumit
Sarkar was first published by Permanent Black D-28 Oxford
Apts, 11 IP Extension, Delhi 110092 INDIA, for the territory of
SOUTH ASIA.
Not for sale in South Asia
Cover design by Anuradha Roy
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 Sumit Sarkar
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sarkar, Sumit- author.
Title: Essays of a lifetime : reformers - nationalists - subalterns /
Sumit Sarkar.
Other titles: Selections.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press,
[2019] | Series: SUNY series in Hindu studies | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027697(cid:1)| ISBN 9781438474311
(cid:1)(cid:1)(cid:1)(hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474335 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: India--History--British occupation, 1765-1947.
| Nationalism--India. | Social change--India. | Bengal (India)--
History--British occupation, 1765-1947.
Classification: LCC DS463 .S2722 2019 | DDC 954.03/5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027697
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
I. BHAKTI AND SAMAJ: SOCIAL REFORM
AND RELIGIOUS MODERNITY
1. Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past 1
2. The Complexities of “Young Bengal” 25
3. The Pattern and Structure of Early Nationalist
Activity in Bengal 53
4. The Radicalism of Intellectuals: A Case Study of
Nineteenth-Century Bengal 86
5. One or Many Histories? Identity Formations in
Late-Colonial Bengal 105
6. Kaliyuga, Chakri, and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and
His Times 151
7. Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society 237
8. The Kalki-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in
Early-Twentieth-Century Bengal 312
II. NATIONALISTS AND SUBALTERNS
9. Nationalism: Ideology and Mobilisation 369
10. The Conditions and Nature of Subaltern Militancy:
Bengal from Swadeshi to Non-Cooperation,
c. 1905–1922 416
11. Primitive Rebellion and Modern Nationalism:
Forest Satyagraha in the Non-Cooperation and
Civil Disobedience Movements 474
v
vi Contents
12. The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism:
Civil Disobedience and the Gandhi–Irwin Pact
1930–1931 489
13. Popular Movements and National Leadership
1945–1947 536
14. The Return of Labour to South Asian History 576
III. TRIBUTES
15. Thinking about P.C. Joshi 614
16. Edward Thompson 621
17. In Memory of Eric Hobsbawm 626
Preface and Acknowledgements
These essays were written over a period of more than
four decades. Some have been included in books that I wrote:
A Critique of Colonial India and Writing Social History. Some
appeared as articles in other books: Subaltern Studies, for instance.
Others were published in journals like Annales, Historical Materialism,
and Economic and Political Weekly. In the present collection they have
been arranged thematically, not chronologically. As a result there may,
within the same section, be striking differences in emphasis, concerns,
and even language. All, however, are connected by a common set of
preoccupations that I have come back to, time and again, in new
ways: social and religious values – old and modern – nationalism,
subaltern activism.
A very legitimate question may be asked: Why do I need to bring
together essays that have been published earlier? What is perhaps
worse is that they are here published unaltered, even though I do
not agree any more with many of the points I raised then. In fact,
some of them positively embarrass me now, and I can see all could do
with considerable revision – which is now beyond my capacity. The
most obvious explanation is, of course, that they raised discussions
and debates when they first appeared, and most are no longer easily
available. Friends have often asked me to make them accessible and
my ever-kind publisher has obliged – as always.
But there is, perhaps, a more serious explanation. The essays
were written over a long time span, when a lot kept changing in
the world of Indian history-writing. This collection, though based
on the work of a single historian, may provide a clue to the broad
nature of those changes. For that reason, too, it was important to
leave them in the form in which they were first written. Let me
iden tify some of the changes. In the early 1970s, some of us Bengali
vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
historians were struggling against the weight of a cultural and politi-
cal inheritance: that of the Bengal Renaissance on the one hand, and
of the nationalist movements on the other. Both had enjoyed a long
period of unchallenged ascendancy in popular estimation and in
Indian historiography – except in very reactionary circles.
Born in a family with generations of modern, liberal socio-religious
reformism behind it, and overlaid by a new Leftist content that my
father had added, I felt, in a spurt of youthful rebelliousness, that
Left ist values and Brahmo liberalism did not sit well together. So, a
lot of the essays on social reform probed the limits of the so-called
Renaissance heritage quite severely. I now find it interesting that
even then I did criticise Rammohun Roy for not doing more about
caste – a point that I developed more forcefully in another essay,
“The ‘Women’s Question’ in Nineteenth-Century Bengal”. Of course,
given the prevailing indifference to issues of social justice of those
times, my references were all too brief. “The Women’s Question” was
a part of A Critique of Colonial India but has not been included in the
present collection. It took issue with renaissance emancipatory claims
about gender at a time when gender was not yet central to main-
stream history-writing, feminist historians having barely begun their
journey.
Along with those of Asok Sen and Barun De, my writings provoked
deep shock among Bengali Left liberals who felt – maybe with some
justification – that this was iconoclasm of a totally unacceptable kind.
A senior C.P.I. activist even blamed me for betraying my father’s
views on the Renaissance. Interestingly, without telling me, my father –
Susobhan Chandra Sarkar, a towering teacher of history who had
written much on the Renaissance himself – published a strong re-
joinder rebuking the activist, justifying alternative readings of history,
and saying that socialism should be a broad enough road on which
many different people may travel together with ease.
This was also a time when “Cambridge School” historians had
begun to question and problematise Indian nationalism. With hind-
sight, I feel that they had a lot to offer, though I still believe that their
blindness to popular anti-colonial struggles was a major and strange
limitation. But they were practically the first historians to work with
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
archival records and private papers, and they looked closely at local
social contexts like caste. At the time, however, we found their cavalier
attitude to Indian nationalism highly offensive. Since their writings
emanated from a Western – worse, British – academic context, we all
too easily slipped into branding them “neo-imperialist”.
Bipan Chandra (professor of history at J.N.U.) and many others
reacted against the Cambridge School by looking closely and respect-
fully at, and identifying profoundly with, the work of great national-
ist leaders. I could not make myself go that way, and my article on
Gandhian nationalism should make it evident. As the shining promise
at the dawn of Independence began to dim by the late 1960s and early
’70s, and as a new wave of popular struggles began in various forms
against the post-colonial ruling classes, I felt it was more important
to explore the historical limits of mainstream nationalism, especially
the class perspective of its leadership. The ongoing Vietnam War, and
the residual excitement of May 1968, made quite a lot of us think for
some time, independently and in isolation from one another, that the
struggles of peasants and workers were more significant for national
and social liberation than the leadership provided by the elites.
Already, Ranajit Guha had gathered around him a group of young
scholars in England who were thinking on similar lines about how
to re-vision Indian history. That was the nucleus of the Subaltern
Studies collective, with which I, too, became associated for a while.
When I visited Oxford for a year in 1976–7, I met the group, and
I still remember the very exciting and stimulating discussions I had
with Professor Guha at his Sussex home, where the two of us, once
or twice, stayed up all night and I listened to him on the Indian
peasantry, practically spellbound.
I was very fortunate to meet and strike up a friendship with E.P.
Thompson and Dorothy Thompson that lasted till their death. I re-
member with enormous gratitude their great warmth and wonderful
hospitality whenever my wife and I visited them thereafter. His
magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Classes, had reached
us, very belatedly, just before I went to Oxford and met him. That,
and his later work, and the many discussions, political and historical,
with him over the years inspired me as nothing else had ever done