Jadunath Sarkar and the Fall of his Empire of Truth

Inconvenient Truths – the NCERT Textbook Row

India’s schoolbooks are finally lifting the veil on a past too long buried in euphemism and ideological amnesia. Our four-part series examines the roots of India’s textbook wars and the historiographical battles that have resulted in this distortion.

Part 4

Consigned to oblivion in Nehruvian India, Sarkar’s monumental works demand to be read by anyone seriously wishing to understand early Modern India and its enduring problems.

Last week, the controversy over NCERT’s textbook revisions prompted the liberal American historian Richard Eaton to enter the fray. In a long essay for a prominent digital platform, Eaton railed against the Indian government’s war on the Mughal Empire.

At one point, Eaton invoked Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s monumental five-volume study of Aurangzeb (1912-24), calling it “a work so authoritative, so exhaustively researched, that for nearly a century after its publication, no historian dared attempt another comprehensive account of the emperor’s reign.” And yet, Eaton suggested that Sarkar’s portrayal grew darker with each volume - not only of Aurangzeb, but of Muslims more broadly. “Perhaps more than any other factor,” Eaton wrote while asserting that it was Sarkar’s “negative assessment” of Aurangzeb that had shaped how millions have thought about that emperor’s place in Indian history.

Well, Eaton, along with Audrey Truschke - the most outrageous of Aurangzeb revisionists - and their Indian admirers in the chic Left, are pygmies peering at a mountain.

They lack Sarkar’s patrician integrity, his mastery of classical Persian and Sanskrit, Portuguese, French, Marathi and Dingal, his unrelenting archival stamina and his Olympian scholarly discipline.  In Sarkar, India has produced a historian worthy of standing beside the great chroniclers of empire on par with Gibbon, Ranke and Mommsen. To sneeringly dub him the “high-priest of communalism” is not just incorrect but an act of moral cowardice.

Unlike their critics, comfortably ensconced in varsities with easy access to archives, early Indian historians like Sarkar and V.K. Rajwade had to laboriously hunt down documents - firmans, state papers, family archives – to write our history from scratch.

His devoted friend G.S. Sardesai notes in his tribute to Sarkar in ‘Life and Letters of Jadunath Sarkar’ (1957, ed. by Hari Ram Gupta) Sarkar travelled frugally, in third class, armed with little more than a light kit and a bundle of large-scale survey maps. He shunned comfort and resisted the burdens of hospitality. On foot, he crossed miles of rough terrain, climbing steep hills with the tenacity of a soldier.

One such arduous journey took him to the ancestral home of the Jedhe family - custodians of the invaluable Jedhe Chronology, a primary source for early Maratha history. That visit, like many others, helped him identify long-forgotten sites and settle scholarly disputes.

In every sense, Sarkar earned his knowledge the hard way - on foot, in dust and with maps rather than dogma. This was a man who could reproduce Tukaram and Kabir, Kalidas and Rabindranath, Shakespeare, Hali and Hafiz in the same breath.

That Dipesh Chakrabarty, a doyen of the Marxist-subaltern school, chose to devote a major study to Sarkar titled ‘Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth’ (2015) is proof that his towering stature is too great to be ignored.

No Hindu since the days of Ishwardas Nagar and Bhimsen Burhanpuri in Aurangzeb’s own time had dared to write an original study of the Mughal emperor. Sarkar saw the scale of the task and rose to meet it with characteristically methodical zeal. He began Persian from scratch and worked through manuscripts by hand. The result was ‘India of Aurangzib: Its Topography, Statistics and Roads’ (1901), based entirely on original sources, which stunned contemporaries with its precision.

Even Maulana Shibli, a titan of Islamic learning, despite his disagreements with Sarkar, acknowledged the integrity of his effort and aided him in locating rare manuscripts like the Haft Anjuman. In order to prepare for his monumental endeavour on Aurangzeb, Sarkar’s instinct was clear: to understand a Muslim ruler, one must understand Islam not merely as faith, but as historical force. He therefore immersed himself in Islamic history outside India, recognising that Aurangzeb was less an individual than an embodiment of an enduring ideology.  

Sarkar’s ‘History of Aurangzib’ - five volumes of majestic scholarship transpired amid communal tempests and political upheaval. The third volume (1916) unsettled Hindus and Muslims alike for opposing reasons. The chapters on Jaziya and temple destruction were explosive for Muslims. Yet, Sarkar’s tone remained judicial. Like a Supreme Court judge, Sarkar laid out the evidence, pointed to the verdict and left it to the conscience of the jury of posterity. He wrote neither for nationalist applause nor colonial validation.

When attacked for omitting Aurangzeb’s Banaras Firman that detailed a land grant to a temple, Sarkar’s rebuttal, devastating in its simplicity, showed it was a tactical gesture issued during Aurangzeb’s military rivalry with Shah Shuja and not an expression of ecumenism.

His facts, once marshalled, left little room for ideological rescue acts.

His ‘Shivaji and His Times’ (1919) sent a different kind of tremor through Maharashtra. Sarkar, stepping into terrain long claimed by regional romanticists, declined to play to the gallery. His Shivaji was not a saint, but a statesman. Sarkar coolly observed that Shivaji failed to forge an enduring state, and that the Marathas never achieved nationhood under the Peshwas —a fact that continues to enrage chauvinists.

Sarkar’s admiration for the Marathas was rooted in a deep appreciation of their historical resilience and republican spirit. “There is a wonderful diffused sense of democratic equality and self-respect among the Marathas,” he once wrote, “which can make them the best nationals of Free India.” Elsewhere, he observed: “They alone among the Hindus had beaten back the tide of Muslim conquest and defended the independence of their country against all the resources of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. The Marathas have a historic advantage of unique importance in the India of today.”

However, Sardesai observed an “imbecile jealousy and resentment at this inroad into the Maratha preserve by a bold Northerner (Sarkar).” This jealously continues to animate his critics even today, be they Marxist and left-liberal academics with scant command of Persian or regional chauvinists nursing wounded pride.

Sarkar was self-critical to a degree seldom observed in historians. He kept revising his chronology of Shivaji’s escape from Agra well into old age.

After ‘Aurangzib’, Sarkar spent the next 25 years on an even more ambitious task, writing the stunning ‘Fall of the Mughal Empire’ (1932–1950) in four volumes which charted not only the collapse of Mughal Empire but also the rise and fall of the Maratha dominion and the emergence of a third empire - British India.

His verdict was scathing: “The Mughal Empire and with it the Maratha overlordship of Hindustan fell because of the rottenness at the core of Indian society… corruption, inefficiency, and treachery disgraced all branches of the public service.”

Till the end, Sarkar remained a stern judge of men and epochs. He called Shivaji “the last constructive genius of the Hindu race,” but did not flinch from documenting the Maratha depredations of Bengal in the 1740s. He further irked the Poona historians by not echoing Maharashtra’s lament over the Panipat calamity. Instead, Ahmad Shah Abdali and Najib-ud-Daula earned his respect for their tactical brilliance and strategic clarity in the Maratha-Afghan clash.

Sarkar’s set-pieces in his two opuses are breathtaking in their prose and vividness. Whether describing the desperate charge of the Rathores and Hada Chauhans at Dharmat, Shah Jahan’s parting with Dara Shikoh on the eve of Samugarh, the long Maratha-Mughal War, the psychological tension of Rajputana in turmoil in the 1740s or the cataclysmic Third Battle of Panipat in 1761 – they unfold with a cinematic intensity unmatched in Indian historiography.

No historian before or since has written prose with such grandeur, precision and tragic beauty.

Consigned to oblivion in Nehruvian India, Sarkar’s scholarship, which pandered to no one, became politically inconvenient. While the West reveres Edward Gibbon as a monument of historical style, India has failed to honour Sarkar with even basic institutional recognition.

This must change. Sarkar needs to be read in order restore a standard of historical writing that refuses to dilute complexity for convenience.

In his dialogue De Oratore (On the Orator), Cicero, writing in 55 BC said: “History is the witness of the times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.”

Jadunath Sarkar embodied that credo. India must now live up to it.