Sumit Sarkar (born 1939) is one of the foremost historians of modern India. He is the author of Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (1973), Modern India (1989), and Writing Social History (1998), among others. He was a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Group as well as one of its most important critics.^[1]

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (February 2019) This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. (February 2019)

He was born to Susobhan Sarkar. His maternal uncle was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.

He completed his BA (Honours) in history at Presidency College, Calcutta and MA and Ph.D. in the same subject at the University of Calcutta. He taught for many years as a lecturer at the University of Calcutta, and later as a reader at the University of Burdwan. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. He was professor of history at the University of Delhi.^[2]

He was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar literary award for his book Writing Social History by the West Bengal government in 2004. He returned the award in 2007 in protest against the expulsion of farmers from their land.^[3]

He was one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective, but later distanced himself from the project. He noted that arguments made in the later issues of the journal as well as in books by Partha Chatterjee blanketly criticized Enlightenment, the nation-state and secularism lined up with indigenist critiques that were at home with the Hindu right. In his view this error was traceable to a basic confusion in the early project that posed an absolute separation between the elite and subaltern domains.^[4]

He contributed a volume to the Towards Freedom project of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), publication of which was blocked in 2000 by the ICHR under the influence of then Indian government administered by the Bharatiya Janata Party as alleged by Sarkar.^[5] The publication of the volume was eventually allowed by the Government of India once the Congress party came to power after the general election of 2004.^[6]

• Modern Times (Ranikhet, 2014)
• Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1946, (New Delhi, 2007)
• Beyond Nationalist Frames: Post-Modernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History, (Delhi, 2002)
• Writing Social History, (Delhi, 1998)
• Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right, (with Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen; Orient Longman, 1993). ISBN 0863113834.
• Modern India: 1885-1947, (Basingstoke, 1989)
• The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908, (New Delhi, 1973)