Book Reviews : SUMIT SARKAR, Beyond Nationalist Frames, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2002, pp. 265

Abstract

What’s eating Sumit Sarkar? The present collection provides an answer. Like his previous volume of essays, Writing Social History ( 1999), Beyond Nationalist Frames suggests that Sarkar is very troubled by postmodernism, the ’Saidian turn’ in colonial and post-colonial studies, the various follies of Subaltern Studies (though he too was once a Subaltern recruit), and the rise of Hindutva. Of course, no one writes outside his or her worldly context, as Edward Said argued so insistently and compellingly, but so great is Sarkar’s worry with contemporary political and intellectual trends that it dominates his writings. Beyond Nationalist Frames contains essays that are united, according to the author, by a concern with ’the vicissitudes of our times, at once political and academic’ (p. 1). These include the advance of Hindutva, globalised capitalism, the post-Marxist and postmodernist moods, and the shift from social history to cultural studies. Together, these have imposed a colonial/anti-colonial binary, valorised concepts of indigenism and cultural authenticity, and led to facile critiques of Western discourses as mere instruments of alien hegemony. Writing against these surely indefensible ideas, Sarkar presents himself as an historian with an ’unfashionable