Ram Sharan Sharma

Ram Sharan Sharma (26 November 1919 – 20 August 2011 ) was a Marxist historian and Indologist who specialised in the history of Ancient and early Medieval India. He taught at Patna University and Delhi University (1973–85) and was visiting faculty at University of Toronto (1965–1966). He also was a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a University Grants Commission National Fellow (1958–81) and the president of Indian History Congress in 1975. It was during his tenure as the dean of Delhi University's History Department that major expansion of the department took place in the 1970s. The creation of most of the positions in the department were the results of his efforts.

During his lifetime, he authored 115 books published in fifteen languages. He influenced major decisions relating to historical research in India in his roles as head of the departments of History at Patna and Delhi University, as Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, as an important member of the National Commission of the History of Sciences in India and UNESCO Commission on the history of Central Asian Civilizations and of the University Grants Commission and, above all, as a practising historian. At the instance of Sachchidananda Sinha, when Professor Sharma was in Patna College, he worked as a special officer on deputation to the Political Department in 1948, where prepared a report on the Bihar-Bengal Boundary Dispute. His pioneering effort resolved the border dispute forever as recorded by Sachchinand Sinha in a letter to Rajendra Prasad. With great difficulty his father sponsored his education till matriculation. After that he kept on getting scholarships and even did private tuition to support his education.

Education and achievements He passed matriculation in 1937 and joined Patna College, where he studied for six years from intermediate to postgraduate classes. His PhD thesis on the history of Sudras in Ancient India was published as a book by Motilal Banarsidass in 1958, with a revised edition in 1990.

Sharma taught at colleges in Arrah (1943) and Bhagalpur (July 1944 to November 1946) before coming to Patna College, Patna University in 1946. Prof. Dwijendra Narayan Jha published a book in his honour in 1996, titled "Society and Ideology in India: ed. Essays in Honour of Professor R. S. Sharma" (Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, 1996). In his honour, a selection of essays was published by the K. P. Jaiswal Research Institute, Patna in 2005.

Journalist Sham Lal writes about him, "R. S. Sharma, a perceptive historian of Ancient India, has too great a regard for the truth about the social evolution in India over a period of two thousand years, stretching from 1500 BC to 500 AD, to take refuge in a world of make-believe."

Professor Sumit Sarkar opines: "Indian historiography, starting with D. D. Kosambi in the 1950s, is acknowledged the world over – wherever South Asian history is taught or studied – as quite on a par with or even superior to all that is produced abroad. And that is why Irfan Habib or Romila Thapar or R. S. Sharma are figures respected even in the most diehard anti-Communist American universities. They cannot be ignored if you are studying South Asian history."

As an institution builder Impatient with inefficiency and guided by his radicalism, Sharma had experience as a builder of institutions. Early Medieval Indian Society: A Study in Feudalisation (Orient Longman Publishers Pvt. Ltd., Delhi, 2003) Perspectives in Social and Economic History of Ancient India (Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, 2003) Urban Decay in India c. 300- c. 1000 (Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi, 1987)

Theory of Feudalism The publication of his monograph Indian Feudalism in 1965 caused almost a furore in the academia, generating intense debate and sharp responses both in favour of and against the applicability of the model of "feudalism" to the Indian situation at any point of time. Sharma, while differing from Kosambi on certain significant points, added a great deal of depth to the approach with his painstaking research and forceful arguments. Sharma also notes that Tulsidas, who wrote the Ramcharitmanas in 1574 at Ayodhya, does not mention it as a place of pilgrimage nor does he refer to any temple of Rama in Ayodhya, let alone the Ramjanmabhumi temple. After the demolition of Babri masjid, he along with historians Suraj Bhan, M. Athar Ali and Dwijendra Narayan Jha came up with the Historian's report to the nation on how the communalists were mistaken in their assumption that there was a temple at the disputed site and how it was sheer vandalism in bringing down the mosque. However, the Supreme Court of India refused to give credence to this report and said, "At the highest, this report can be taken as an opinion."

Political controversies

In 1977, Janata Dal banned his book Ancient India. The ban was withdrawn by Congress in 1980. In October 2001, the BJP government found seven out of ten passages of the book to be objectionable. Later, Sharma wrote the revised version of Ancient India and he tried to "incorporate new facts based on recent archeological findings".

He supported the addition of the Ayodhya dispute and the 2002 Gujarat riots to school syllabus calling them 'socially relevant topics' to broaden the horizons of youngsters. This was his remark when the NCERT decided to include the Gujarat riots and the Ayodhya dispute besides the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in the Class XII political science books, arguing that these events influenced the political process in the country since Independence.

Legacy

On his death, at a function organised by the Indian Council of Historical Research and hosted by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, historians Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, D. N. Jha, Satish Chandra, Kesavan Veluthat and ICHR Chairperson Basudev Chatterji paid rich tributes to Sharma and emphasised his influence. Professor Bipan Chandra considered him to be "greatest historian of India", after D.D. Kosambi. Irfan Habib said, "D. D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma, together with Daniel Thorner, brought peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time."