Shoaib Daniyal of SCROLL speaks to Dipesh Chakrabarty about his book The Calling of History 'History in India has been driven by identity': Dipesh Chakrabarty on historian Jadunath Sarkar The noted subalternist on the life and times of the colonial-era historian. Born in 1870 in East Bengal, Jadunath Sarkar was an academic and public intellectual who was a pioneer in the art of history writing in India. He was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. His comprehensive histories of Aurangzeb and Shivaji greatly shape modern India’s understanding of these two figures even if Sarkar was marginalised by much of academia after 1947 b...