For the past half-century, one of the most influential, respected, and popular scholars of modern Indian history has been Sumit Sarkar. When his first monograph, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (1973), appeared, it showed something of a paradigm shift within its genre. As one eminent historian put it: “Very few monographs, if any, have ever rivalled the meticulous research and the thick description that characterised this book, or the lucidity of its exposition and the persuasive power of its overall argument.”

Ten years later Sarkar published Modern India 1885–1947, in which the synthesis and critique of everything significant that had been written about the period was hailed as admirably cogent and lucid.

The present volume comprises essays and lectures that have not appeared within Sarkar’s earlier essay compilations –  Writing Social History (1997), Beyond Nationalist Frames (2002), and Essays of a Lifetime (2017). In reproducing some of Sarkar’s finest writings, it complements and completes his oeuvre as essayist and shows once again what Sarkar has always been: the most intellectually stimulating and sharpest sceptical-Marxist historian of his time.

Sumit Sarkar is possibly India’s best-known and most widely admired scholar of modern Indian history. Apart from his own books, he has co-edited (with Tanika Sarkar) Women and Social Reform in Modern India (2007), and Caste in Modern India (2013). He was for many years Professor of History at the University of Delhi, Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and visiting professor at illustrious campuses in the USA and Europe.

Ravi Ahuja’s has researched widely on India’s social history of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. After teaching at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, and at SOAS, London, he joined the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen, in 2009 as Professor of Modern Indian History. His books include Pathways of Empire (2009) and Shipping Lords and Coolie Stokers (2024).