The Calling of History on Jadunath Sarkar

“Jadunath Sarkar was once a name every educated Indian knew...he was easily the most highly-regarded Indian historian and had a very strong public presence in late colonial India.”

“A group of younger scholars at Allahabad, Aligarh and Oxford were conducting research that would ensure that by the time someone like me came into the world of South Asian history as a young novice in Calcutta in the early 1970s, the name of Jadunath Sarkar would be all but forgotten among the prominent historians of India. [...] Our teachers did not teach about emperors, battles and the character of kings anymore. They did not believe in the role of heroes of history. Heroes had been replaced by “causes.” Cause was a code word for institutional analysis.”

“In the words of the late British history scholar, J F Richards, Jadunath Sarkar “set the narrative frame for the late Mughal period virtually single-handed.””

“Historians (of Jadunath Sarkar’s time) who criticized Sarkar’s emphasis on “character” never stopped to ask why someone of Sarkar’s erudition, intelligence and sense of engagement with the politics of his time would be so obsessed with the role of character in political history.””

“[when one surveys Sarkar’s life and work as a historical scholar, one cannot miss the connection between his] “insistence on the cultivation of a certain truthfulness on the part of the historian—the demand that the historian make a sincere attempt to rise above his or her own times and interests—and his ideas about historical truth.” [This also includes] “a certain cultivation of self-denying ethics in the personhood of the historian, a practice of a sense of ascesis, was therefore essential, for without that, the historican could not receive the truths the facts told.” ...[Historical research and writing, for Jadunath Sarkar, was] “a way of preparing oneself for a truth that was beyond partisan interests.” [This was] “a self- denying quality he willingly imposed on himself...It was an inextricable part of his historical method; the man was the method.””