Sumit Sarkar Biography 
Sumit Sarkar is an Indian historian and author, who authored Swadeshi Movement. His book Writing Social History earned Rabindra Puraskar literary award 2004, given by government of West Bengal. But he returned the award in protest of Nandigram violence in 2007. Modern Times, Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Post-Modernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, Modern India: 1885-1947, Writing Social History, and Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right are other major works published by Sarkar, related to Indian history. He was one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective in 1980, a group of South Asian scholars interested in the postcolonial and post-imperial societies.
Sumit Sarkar hails from Kolkata, West Bengal. He was born in 1939. He studied at Presidency College, Calcutta and at the University of Calcutta, and started his professional career as a lecturer at University of Calcutta, where he taught for many years. Later he became a reader at the University of Burdwan and was also a Professor of History at the University of Delhi. His wife Tanika Sarkar is also a historian. His in-laws Sukumari and Amal Bhattacharya were educationalists.
He was a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, but later began to critique it. He made some major contributions towards Towards Freedom project of the Indian Council of Historical Research. The publication was once blocked by Bharatiya Janata Party in 2000, but later the ban was lifted when NDA came into power in 2004. He worked with K N Pannikar, another historian for the project, and both of them had formidable reputations as liberal and secular historians, and outspoken opponents of the Hindu right-wing.
Published: September 29, 2018
Updated: September 29, 2018
