Passing of a pioneer of subaltern and Marxist historiography in India

The writing of modern Indian history has never been a politically neutral enterprise. From the colonial period onward, historians have approached the Indian past through frameworks shaped by their ideological commitments, institutional locations, and the political pressures of their time. The dominant colonial framework cast Indian history as a story of religious conflict and civilisational stagnation, requiring British intervention to impose order. Against this, nationalist historiography — associated with figures like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and later the Indian National Congress's cultural project — celebrated a unified Indian spirit resisting foreign domination. Both frameworks, however, tended to privilege elite actors: rulers, reformers, and nationalist leaders.

The post-independence decades saw the emergence of new historiographical schools that challenged these elite-centred narratives. The Aligarh School, associated with scholars such as Irfan Habib, applied Marxist socioeconomic analysis to medieval Indian history, foregrounding agrarian relations, revenue systems, and class dynamics. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new intellectual formation — Subaltern Studies — pushed this critique further, arguing that even Marxist and nationalist historiography had failed to recover the agency and experience of peasants, workers, women, and lower-caste communities. The group drew on the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci's concept of the 'subaltern' — those subordinated by structures of power — and sought to write history from below.