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“Cohesion, coherence and chronology” was the mantra of Jadunath Sarkar. He helped make history and found a place in history himself. That’s why we’re celebrating the legacy of his visionary scholar on his death anniversary today.
Died on 19th May 1958
The word “history maker” paints the picture of very specific kinds of people in our minds. It’s either super strong and chiselled warriors like the Amazonians winning great battles or brilliant brains discovering things that alter the future of the entire mankind. Our idea of history makers ironically leaves out the people who actually make history- historians.
We tend to view history as facts, but the reality is far from it. It’s often very difficult to weigh in the actual intent, meaning or effects of a historical fact because they are rooted in a time gone by. In order to actually understand them holistically, we need to put them in a context.
This is what historians do for us. They provide us with a lens to digest the mumbo-jumbo of details, enabling us to see history.
If the lens is faulty, the vision is going to be blurry, and it would be extremely tedious to reach a conclusion and hence the skill of the lens maker is essential to this process.
An exceptional lens maker who changed the perspective of viewing history in India, literally, was Jadunath Sarkar. Born 10 December 1870, he went on to make path-breaking contributions to Indian historiography.
Sarkar belonged to a family of Zamindar but instead of continuing this ancestral role, he diverted towards academia, a field in which he displayed excellence since the beginning. As if getting the first rank in his masters was not enough to prove this, he also managed to secure the prestigious Premchand-Roychand Scholarship.
It must be noted that Jadunath was initially a student and professor of English and not history, but history was soon to change.
It was only after getting into the Provincial Education Services that his journey into the subject started officially. He served as a professor at renowned institutions like Banaras Hindu University, Madras University and Ravenshaw College.
As a historian, Sarkar primarily worked on Mughal history with the extent of his studies extending to the fall of the Mughals, or what conventionalists called the period of the 18th-century crisis.
While the Mughal Empire had been a fairly researched topic, his works picked upon rather ignored aspects. Needless to say, Jadunath’s magic wove in new threads into the rich tapestry of the empire’s historiography.
He closely worked on the use of sieges and siege artillery by the Mughals in extending their power, an argument that got in new ideas in the gunpowder debate- a theory that the Mughal Empire was made possible due to gunpowder.
However, it would not be right to limit Sarkar’s work to such a small scope, which is evident in multiple schools of history that claim his legacy. The ideas of Jadunath did not go uncontested and some of his hypotheses have also been refuted by revisionist historians, but that does not diminish their relevance.
For the new trends he introduced into the subject, Sarkar was given a knighthood and honoured with the Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire. He was an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society of London.
The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta is one of the many research centres established in Sarkar’s memory.
History is as much living and breathing as it is a thing of the past. New developments in our world mould our ways of understanding it, and it wouldn’t be ironic to say that some histories go obsolete. The place that Sarkar held came to be occupied by Marxist and Post-Colonial historiography. Yet the contribution of Jadunath Sarkar can sustain itself. It provides a great starting point for exploration in uncharted territories of the subject.
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