Susobhan Sarkar
Susobhan Chandra Sarkar was an Indian historian.
Background and education
Sarkar, son of Suresh Chandra Sarkar, was born into a Brahmo family of Dhaka. He attended Dhaka Collegiate School, studied history at Presidency College, Calcutta and continued his higher education at Jesus College, Oxford, from 1923 to 1925. His daughter Sipra Sarkar was a professor of history at Jadavpur University, Calcutta and Sumit Sarkar was professor of history at Delhi University.Career
He returned to India as a Lecturer in History at Calcutta University before being appointed Reader in History at Dhaka University in 1927. Through the 1920s he was involved in the administration of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, still under the active tutelage of its founder, Rabindranath Tagore. In 1932, he was appointed Professor of History at Presidency College, Calcutta. He will be remembered as a long serving professor of the college who inspired generations of students from both science and arts streams.He moved to Jadavpur University as Professor in 1956. He returned to Calcutta University for his final academic post from 1961 to 1967.
Sarkar, whose work was influenced by his Marxist and Gramscian ideas, taught the history of modern Europe, particularly the development of constitutional history in Britain and political thought in Western Europe. He also wrote from the 1930s about the Bengal Renaissance. His Notes on Bengal Renaissance sparked an interest in nationalist Indian historiography. He also wrote the manifesto of the CPI.
His student, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya writes, "Beyond the walls of the Presidency College and the two Universities he served in Calcutta, Professor Sarkar is known to historians through his writing- on the Bengal Renaissance, on historiography, on contemporary history, and, in a more specialised way, on the seamy commercial underside of the expanding British empire in eighteenth century South Asia. Further, as an interpreter of Marxism to a wider audience, he offered a new perspective on history in a series of essay in Bengali, of which one became a locus classicus, the, essay Itihaser Dhara. Yet the essential Sarkar is not to be found in what he left behind in his writings. It was to be found in the life he led, like some others of his generation, dedicated to a vocation and an ideology. It was the moral integrity in this dedication which left its mark on the minds of his students."