History Men is the story of the intersecting lives of three deeply committed historians: Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958), who was an expert on the Mughal period; G.S. Sardesai (1865-1959), whose works were on the Marathas; and Raghubir Sinh (1908-1991), who studied the Rajputs. How the three became close friends and joint workers; how they wrote about the great confrontations between the Mughals, Rajputs and Marathas; how their long association exposed continuing conflicts of interpretation and explanation; and how, together, they illuminated a historical moment make for a story worth telling.
A narrative built from original research based on the correspondence and the published and unpublished writings of the three scholars, this is also a portrait of rich friendships, of the minutiae of the lives of these historians, and their fierce commitment to historical research as they addressed the significant questions of the age they lived in. Anyone who is interested in the making of historical narratives will find History Men a compelling read.
T.C.A. Raghavan has a PhD in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has been High Commissioner of India to Singapore and to Pakistan. He retired from the Indian Foreign Service in 2015. His first book, Attendant Lords: Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim, Courtiers and Poets in Mughal India, was awarded the Mohammad Habib Memorial Prize for the best book on medieval Indian history by the Indian History Congress in 2017. He is also the author of The People Next Door: The Curious History of India s Relations with Pakistan (2017). He is currently Director-General of the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi.
ON 15 May 1958, an eighty-eight-year-old Jadunath Sarkar in Calcutta wrote the following lines from the English poet Tennyson to G.S. Sardesai in Kamshet, a small village near Poona. The occasion was Sardesai's forthcoming ninety-fourth birthday on 17 May.
Since we deserved the name of friends,
And thine effect so lives in me,
A part of mine may live in thee
And move thee on to nobler ends.'
Sarkar died at his home in Calcutta after four days and G.S. Sardesai a year and a half later.
Their friendship and association had extended over half a century - beginning when both were relatively obscure scholars (and few would have even termed Sardesai a historian in the early twentieth century) and continuing into the 1950s when both, in differing measures and from different quarters, were regarded as sage-historian-scholars of their times.
The correspondence between Jadunath Sarkar and G.S. Sardesai began in 1904 following an introduction through Gopal Rao Deodhar who suggested that their association would be mutually beneficial: to Sarkar for Maratha documents and to Sardesai for Persian and Mughal sources. Sardesai was later to relate how Deodhar encountered Sarkar by chance `sweating over the Persian manuscripts of the Khuda Baksh Library and incidentally mentioned me [i.e., G.S. Sardesai] and my work to him'. Recalling the first letter he had received from Sarkar some half a century earlier he said: 'Sometime in the year 1904 a letter in an unknown handwriting indicating vigour and precision and with contents securely formal and business-like, took me by surprise at Baroda. The name of the writer did not solve the mystery as I had not till then heard of him.' What the letter offered was a 'honourable bargain': that Sardesai supplement Sarkar's considerable Persian collections with Maratha sources. This was, Sardesai recollected, 'like a divine windfall' as he himself was feeling the need for Persian sources and did not know Persian. In short, the letter became, `the pledge of future cooperation between the Mughal and the Maratha'.
Sarkar and Sardesai met for the first time in 1909. The occasion was a Maratha Literary Conference organized by the princely state of Baroda. Sardesai was the secretary of the conference and had the 'long sought opportunity to meet and know at close quarters Jadunath after four years acquaintance through correspondence'. Sardesai wrote later that the Baroda conference gave him 'an All India Outlook in letters' and 'a more valuable acquaintance, namely, Jadunath's personal friendship'.The Baroda meeting went well since we have letters exchanged soon thereafter describing time spent together. In November 1909 Sarkar wrote: 'You may come here and pass a week with me ... The shortest route would be Baroda-Ratlam-Ujjain-Bhopal-Itarsi-Jubbulpur-Allahabad-Mughal Sarai-Bankipore.' The two met regularly - at least once every year afterwards for the next four decades - and in between these meetings, as Sardesai wrote, 'We have built a historic bridge of letters concealed as yet from any fifth eye.' The frailty of old age prevented meetings thereafter but the correspondence continued till Sarkar's death.
The third figure in this triad is Maharajkumar Raghubir Sinh, scion and heir to the throne of the small princely state of Sitamau in central India. Born in 1908, he came to Sarkar's and subsequently G.S. Sardesai's attention on account of his research that culminated in his thesis submitted to the Agra University in 1936 titled `Malwa in Transition or a Century of Anarchy (1698-1766)'. Raghubir Sinh was introduced to Sarkar by Dr J.C. Taluqdar of St John's College, Agra, as a possible D. Litt student. Sarkar does not appear to have required much persuasion - the idea of having a Rajput scion with a serious interest in history as a student would have been appealing. The heir to a princely state wanting to write a serious research dissertation was certainly unusual for the time. Despite the almost forty-year age gap between them, a close relationship developed between the two. The association continued for the next three decades as the younger man, nurtured and encouraged by Sarkar, was admitted into a small but elite circle of his former students who now comprised some of north and eastern India's best-known historians. 'I am very glad indeed,' wrote Sarkar to Raghubir Sinh in September 1933, 'to learn that you intend to continue your historical researches. It will be no trouble to me, but a pleasure rather, to render you any assistance in my power.
Raghubir Sinh was by no means the best known of J.N. Sarkar's many students, but he was clearly one of his favourites. He was also one of the few who combined a keen interest in historical research with a public career not directly related to research or teaching history. In 1936, Sarkar forwarding his report on Raghubir Sinh's thesis `Malwa in Transition', wrote to Sardesai: 'The candidate's work gives me much hope of his future, as a worthy recruit to our campaign of sound historical research. G.S. Sardesai and the English historian P.E. Roberts were the other examiners of Raghubir Sinh's thesis.
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