Press Release: On Professor Sumit Sarkar's Demise

The Revolutionary Communist Party of India expresses deep sorrow at the passing of Professor Sumit Sarkar. Among those who can be counted as leading figures of Marxist historical research in India, he was one. On the one hand, he applied materialist conceptions profoundly in the study of History. On the other hand, while doing that, he was never to sink into what he himself designated as "vulgar Marxism". So he could see the Bengal Renaissance dispassionately and say that the Young Bengal were not always extremely radical, but also carry out the most important analysis of the Swadeshi Movement. In it, he could refute quite a bit of the criticisms hurled at Rabindra Nath Tagore's 'constructive Swadeshi' and show the limits of 'extremism'.

In the twentieth century, his most significant work was certainly Modern India. He showed the plurality of India's freedom movement, and instead of taking one of the binary poles of harsh Gandhi criticisms versus adoration, he sought to show how and why Gandhi was able to unite diverse opinions and build a nationalist movement on a much wider public space. For Marxist politics, this understanding is vital, because we cannot leave the responsibility for the success of the bourgeois nationalists to the "betrayal" by the revolutionary leadership. That can create temporary heat but cannot show the path ahead.

In the early stages of Subaltern Studies, he was associated with the current. But he was aware that excessive reliance on post-colonialism and post-modernism pushes the centrality and reality of class. In Writing Social History, he highlighted his own views.

In the article The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar, he was among the first to step forward and unmask the fascist nature of the RSS. He and Tanika Sarkar were among the historians who wrote the important pamphlet Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flag. Again, during Nandigram, both stood firmly with the movement.

The volume in the Towards Freedom series raised the anger of the Vajpayee government with good reason.

Since the distortion of history is a core ideological site of the Hindutva Fascist project, a historian like Sumit Sarkar is not merely an ally but a leader in that particular battlefield. In his passing, both the scientific study of history and the progressive democratic movement have lost a rare comrade.