Politics and History

Habib was born into an affluent Muslim family in Baroda in 1931. His father, Mohammad Habib, was also a historian and worked in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). His family was involved in the Indian freedom movement, and his father had strong ties with Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Habib’s family background nurtured his interest in history during his childhood. His father was interested in Marxism and subscribed to the weekly publication of the Communist Party of India (CPI), People’s War. From childhood, he was exposed to Marxism because of his father’s interest and the presence of Marxist literature in his house.

While attending AMU, his father’s university, he became a member of the Student Federation, a pro-communist student organization, in 1950, and formally joined the CPI in 1953. As a party member, he was involved in the peace movement and in organizing the nonteaching staff of AMU.

After graduating from AMU, Habib went to Oxford University, where he received his doctorate in history. On his return to India, he joined the faculty at AMU and continued his work as a Marxist activist. He was politically active during the period of the Emergency in India during the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi’s government suspended civil liberties and ruled by decree.

In 1980, he assumed the role of dean of the faculty of social sciences at AMU. Habib is an elected corresponding fellow of the British Royal Society, and he was the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research from 1986 to 1990. He has also served as general secretary, sectional president, and general president of the Indian History Congress. In addition to his own writings, Habib is the series editor of the People’s History of India, which has now produced more than thirty volumes.

Stirring the Waters

In 1963, Habib published his doctoral thesis as a book, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707). This book changed our perception of the Mughal agrarian economy for good. Following in the footsteps of Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi and other Marxist historians who came before him, Habib applied Marxist historical methodology to trace the development of India’s agrarian economy during the Mughal period.

At the time of its appearance, The Agrarian System of Mughal India was a unique work. Habib’s depth of understanding, his extensive use of Persian and other primary sources, and his nuanced interpretation of the subject matter opened new paths in the historiography of medieval India. In the words of Tapan Raychaudhuri, the book functioned to “stir the shallow, turbid and yet extensive waters of Indian historiography.” Another historian, Percival Spear, declared his awe at the breadth and depth of Habib’s scholarship.

Before Habib entered the field, W. H. Moreland and Radhakamal Mukerjee had covered the same topic in their books. However, neither the Eurocentric perspective of Moreland nor the nationalist approach of Mukerjee could capture the multifaceted nature of the Mughal agrarian economy and society. Their works fell short when it came to the condition of the rural agricultural working class. They also failed to show the dynamic nature of the agrarian economy and the system of taxation, which was based on a sophisticated cash nexus, as Habib described in the book:

The Assignment system, as it was established and worked under the Great Mughals, itself pre-supposed the prevalence of a certain type of economic order. The jagirs were divorced, as far as possible, from any rights to the land, and were essentially assignments of revenue, assessed and expressed in cash. This could only have been possible in a society where the cash-nexus was well established, but this in turn meant that agrarian trade should have reached a high level of development. . . . Both these conditions were present in Mughal India.

In The Agrarian System, Habib captured all aspects of Mughal India’s agrarian life, from production to consumption, from the trade in agricultural produce to the material condition of the peasantry:

Under these conditions, it must have been inevitable that the actual burden on the peasantry should become so heavy in some areas as to amount to depriving them of their means of survival. . . . Frequently therefore the peasants were compelled to sell their women, children, and cattle in order to meet the revenue demand.

His interpretation, which uncovered the process of extracting a surplus and the nature of the class structure in Mughal agrarian society, created new momentum in the discipline of Indian Marxist historiography.

For the first time in the field of medieval Indian history, Habib talked about the political tensions that arose from within Mughal society, generating pressure for agrarian rebellion. When discussing the nature of such rebellions, Habib made the following argument:

While the ties of castes and religious communities helped to enlarge the scale of peasant uprisings, they also tended to cloud or obscure their class nature. Nevertheless, the real transformation was brought about by the intervention of elements from the zamindar class that had their own objects in opposing the Mughal ruling class. The fact that either the peasant rebellions, at some stage of their development, passed under the leadership of zamindars (or their own leaders became zamindars), or, from the very beginning, the desperation of the peasants provided recruits for rebelling zamindars, seems to have been a decisive significance in merging the risings of the oppressed with the war between two oppressive classes.

Habib also discussed in detail the exploitative nature of the Mughal state and the peculiar characteristics of agrarian relations in Mughal India. In 1999, a revised second edition of the book was published, drawing upon new sources and interpretations.

Reframing Marxism

This was just the beginning of Habib’s contribution to the writing of Indian history. In subsequent articles, he sought to reinterpret the Marxist concept of the Asiatic mode of production, challenging the notion of a timeless, unchanging India in the period before British colonization that had influenced the articles on India published by Marx in the 1850s.

Habib demonstrated that there was substantial growth in the Indian market system following the development of the urban centers in the sixth century CE. He shed light on the system of extensive cultivation of crops to meet the needs of the big urban markets. Habib would go on to discuss the development of science and technology along with highly mobile and developed craft production in medieval India.

As a Marxist, Habib has always subscribed to Marx’s dictum that one should question everything (even the ideas of Marx himself). His close reading of Marx influenced his critique of the classical Marxist understanding of the Asiatic mode. Habib revealed the dynamism and complexity that was present in medieval Indian society. This was an important breakthrough in the process of deciphering the nature of Indian history.

In his 1988 article “Problems of Marxist Historiography,” Habib challenged the crude application of a particular Marxist framework to Indian history. That framework presented historical development in terms of a progressive sequence of stages, going from primitive communism to slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, before culminating in socialism. This view of history was notably expressed by Joseph Stalin in his 1938 essay “Dialectical and Historical Materialism.” As Habib once noted, this essay served as “the major introduction to the main principles of Marxist historiography” for those who joined the communist movement in the 1940s and ’50s, “or even later.”

For Habib, this interpretation could not be the only yardstick for measuring history. He argued against using the term “feudalism” as “an umbrella to cover all precapitalist systems whatever their actual modes of surplus-extraction,” whether those systems were located in Europe, India, or China:

I agree that failure to universalize feudalism would lead us to accept a multiplicity of social formations over different territories; but I see no scandal in this. I would reassert that this is also implicit in the Communist Manifesto, when it treats capitalism as the first universal mode of production, and speaks of complex class structures preceding it.

He noted that scholars such as Samir Amin and Chris Wickham had returned to the concept of an Asiatic mode of production but now reframed it as the tributary mode, distinguishing it from European-style feudalism.

Capitalism and Colonialism

“Problems of Marxist Historiography” also strongly argued against the “internalist” explanation of the development of capitalism:

What I think needs correction is the view tacitly accepted by many Marxist historians that every social order is created exclusively by the internal contradictions of the previous one only at the apex of its development. Thus slavery-feudalism-capitalism form a unilinear succession, which if confined to Europe, would show that social evolution in its highest stages belonged to Europe alone. I would contest the premise.

Marx and Engels were conscious, as shown by many of their statements, of the backwardness of European feudal society when compared with contemporary societies in other parts of the world. European feudalism was not necessarily — in terms of commodity production, productivity, etc — the most advanced social formation in the world in its day. That it was ultimately transformed into capitalism was by no means due to the development of its internal contradictions alone.

Habib pointed out the importance of technological advances that were imported to Europe from China, including the printing press and gunpowder. But he also stressed the role that “overseas plunder” and “the ravaging of Africa for slaves” had played in the development of capitalism.

This was an argument that Marx himself had made, most famously in his chapter on “primitive accumulation” in Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

However, Habib criticized British Marxist historians such as Maurice Dobb and Eric Hobsbawm whose work had “either omitted a consideration of this aspect of colonial relationships or only assigned it a marginal role in the origins and sustenance of capitalist expansion in Britain.”

In the same essay, Habib called for a reassessment of the Marxist interpretation of India’s freedom struggle. He urged readers to see the national movement as a “common heritage” that was never the exclusive property of the Indian National Congress, the party that dominated Indian politics for several decades after independence.

For Habib, it was important to emphasize the “positive aspects” of the national movement, such as secularism, women’s rights, national unity, freedom of the press, and parliamentary democracy. These aspects could offer “the initial points for a people’s front, in which all classes may be united and can carry forward the cause of democracy and socialism.”

Breaking New Ground

Habib has also made a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the Indian economy. Volume 2 of The Cambridge Economic History of India (CEHI) was published in 1982. Habib challenged the ahistorical approach of this book, whose authors, he charged, “seem determined to read modern Indian history without looking at colonialism.”

In his article “Studying a Colonial Economy — Without Perceiving Colonialism,” he explained that India was subjected to “a continuous drain of wealth” under British rule — something that the historians who contributed to the CEHI neglected. For Habib, the motivation behind the so-called revolution of 1757, which established British military dominance in Bengal, was to disrupt the traditional channels of Indian trade:

Insofar as the East India Company and its servants saw their conquests in India as commercial acquisitions, the seized treasuries and tax income appeared to them as nothing but gross profits. The “Plassey Plunder,” where enormous individual fortunes were made, was followed by a continuous extraction of wealth, through taxation, monopoly and corruption, generating a stream of exports from India, without any corresponding imports.

Drawing on the work of Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Habib sharply criticized the articles in the CEHI which denied or downplayed the deindustrialization of India during the colonial period, and insisted that the key determining factor behind the negative transformation of the Indian economy was colonialism:

The CEHI offers an interpretation of modern Indian economic history which is both incomplete and tendentious. The CEHI omits any serious scrutiny of colonialism and underrates its impact on Indian economy. To say this does not mean that the nationalist view of these matters as stated in the “classics” is all that is required to reconstruct modern economic history; or that the nationalist view did not have flaws, such as too often ignoring internal contradictions within the Indian economy or (much less often) presuming an earlier golden age. But the nationalists undoubtedly had a case.

Habib also noted that the CEHI articles on the de-urbanization of Indian cities like Lucknow overlooked the complex results of colonial intervention, presenting a false narrative of urbanization of India under the Raj:

In 1799 its population was estimated at half a million, and in 1858 at a million. Even [Tom] Kessinger admits that Lucknow became “probably North India’s largest city” . . . . The moment Lucknow passed under British control with the annexation of Awadh in 1856, a steady decline began. The depopulation must have been heavy after the British seizure of Lucknow during the rebellion of 1857–58; but the decline continued till 1911.

This critique opened up space for writing an objective history of the Indian economy and influenced many later works on Indian and even global economic history.

In his 2010 article, “Note Towards a Marxist Perception of Indian History,” Habib discussed the significance of the Indian caste system and affirmed the need for Marxists to present a “cogent historical perception” of how that system worked:

It is important to stress that the caste system is not simply an extension of a natural division of labour: it is a mechanism of exploitation of the toiling people, who are kept mutually isolated and hierarchically differentiated so as to remain divided and disunited. Just like gender inequality, the caste system is not linked to any particular mode of production but has subsisted under different modes of production in India.

According to Habib, neither Buddhism nor Islam had presented any obstacle in practice to the continuation of the caste system.

He also called for Marxist historians to give greater attention to the oppression of women:

The links between gender repression and ideological (or psychological) hegemony of the dominant class over the oppressed classes (men of even the most oppressed classes feel they are masters over women, while women of marginally higher classes still look down upon women of classes below) have not been investigated. In India where the battle for women’s full equality with men is so important for the Left Movement, it is necessary to promote interest in women’s history as part of the narrative of the exploitative systems of the past and present.

Political Activism

Alongside his academic contributions, Habib has been a political activist throughout his life. As a member of the Communist Party, he has always protested against state repression, whether that repression took the form of the Emergency officially proclaimed by Congress in the 1970s, or the undeclared, de facto Emergency of recent years under Narendra Modi.

Habib’s commitment to secularism, democracy, and Marxism has kept him engaged in the fight against religious fundamentalism and fascism. Along with other Indian historians such as R. S. Sharma and Romila Thapar, he was deeply involved in opposition to the Hindutva mobilization against the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which culminated in the destruction of this historic mosque in 1992. Under his leadership, the Aligarh Historians Society published a booklet titled History of Babri Masjid to show academic support for the cause.

He has continually opposed the “saffronization” of Indian history under BJP rule from the 1990s to the present day, warning that those who promote this agenda want to replace history with myths. For Habib, the success of the Hindutva agenda would destroy both the secular basis of the Indian nation and the possibility of rational history writing. Modi’s government has recently removed chapters on the Sultanate rulers and the Mughal period from history textbooks.

Habib also challenged the appropriation of national icons such as Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Sardar Patel by the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). At an event that took place on AMU campus in 2016, Habib labeled the RSS an “anti-national” force, reversing the charge that the group always directs against dissenting voices:

A nation is not about territory but about people. And Nationalism means pursuing the interest of the people of that territory. Those who incite violence against any section of that population are committing anti-national activity. That is exactly what RSS has been doing.

A RSS activist, Gopal Baghel, filed a legal complaint against Habib for these comments. The historian faced another legal action in 2020, accusing him of making “poisonous statements” during a speech at AMU that opposed the government’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The complaint demanded that Habib apologize for having stated that the RSS was “formed to attack Muslims,” and for his jocular remarks about Modi’s home minister Amit Shah: “You advised Amit Shah to remove Shah from his name as it is a Persian word.”

The government-appointed governor of Kerala, Arif Mohammad Khan, even claimed that Habib tried to physically assault him at an Indian History Congress event in 2019. Many students and academics who were taking part in the conference had protested when Khan began defending the CAA during his speech. Habib was on the podium at the time and approached the vice-chancellor of Kannur University, asking him to intervene and stop what was happening.

The governor, whose security guards jostled Habib, accused the historian of assaulting him. The Aligarh Society of History and many other academic bodies condemned this as a blatant falsehood. Habib would have been eighty-eight-years-old at the time of the alleged “assault,” which he dismissed as a product of Khan’s imagination. This did not stop the governor from branding Habib as a “goonda,” a term used to describe violent street criminals.

In spite of these blatant acts of harassment, Habib is still continuing his struggle against religious fundamentalism on both academic and political fronts. Now well into his nineties, Habib is publishing books under the rubric of the People’s History series, giving interviews, and defending the practice of objective, evidence-based history in India. Hindutva attacks cannot change the fact that Habib’s work has earned him global admiration and made him an essential reference point for students of Indian history.