Irfan Habib

• 1. Introduction

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  Irfan Habib was born on the 12th of August 1931, into a family where history was not merely an academic pursuit but a lived inheritance. His grandfather on his mother's side, Abbas Tyabji, served as Chief Justice of the High Court of Baroda State and walked alongside Mahatma Gandhi. His paternal grandfather, Mohammad Naseem, was a barrister who sat in the Indian National Congress. His own father, Mohammad Habib, was himself a historian tied to the independence movement. Into that lineage, the young Irfan grew up surrounded by people who believed that understanding the past carried moral weight.

  What does it mean to write history from a Marxist perspective in a country as ancient and contested as India? Which dynasties deserve close study, and which have been written out of the story for political reasons? How does a scholar trained at Oxford spend decades reexamining land records and tax rolls from the Mughal era to argue that peasant suffering was structural, not incidental? Those are the questions Habib has spent a career answering. He went on to become one of the most widely recognised historians of medieval India, the author of a body of work that spans atlases, economic surveys, and polemical essay collections, and a figure who has never stepped back from public debates over who controls the Indian past.

• 2. The Mughal Ledger

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  Habib's doctoral work at Oxford, completed under C. C. Davies, eventually became the foundation for his most celebrated book: The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707, first published in 1963 and revised in a new edition by Oxford University Press in 1999. The dates in the title are not incidental. They bracket the reign of Akbar through the death of Aurangzeb, a period when the empire's administrative machinery generated enough documentation to allow a historian to reconstruct how land was taxed, how peasants were squeezed, and how wealth moved upward through a layered hierarchy of intermediaries.

  Habib's method was to treat the agrarian economy as the engine of Mughal power. He worked through Persian-language records, revenue surveys, and chronicles to map the relationship between the imperial state and the rural population. The result was a picture of systematic extraction that challenged romantic views of Mughal rule as merely splendid or culturally brilliant. His follow-up work, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 1982, gave the geography of that empire a cartographic form, pairing political and economic maps with detailed notes and a substantial bibliography. A later volume, The Economic History of Medieval India: A Survey, published by Tulika Books in 2001, extended his analysis across a wider chronological sweep.

• 3. Aligarh and the Marxist Turn

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  After his Oxford doctorate, Habib joined the history faculty at Aligarh Muslim University, the institution with which he has been associated throughout his entire professional life. He held the Professor of History chair from 1969 to 1991 and later became Professor Emeritus. Economist Amiya Kumar Bagchi described him as "one of the two most prominent Marxist historians of India today" and "one of the greatest living historians of India between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries."

  Habib's Marxist framework is not a thin ideological gloss laid over conventional narrative history. His book Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, published by Tulika Books in 1995, collects essays that take on caste, peasantry, class struggle, colonialism, and the theory of historiography itself. He has argued that Marxist analysis provides tools for understanding India's long history of social stratification and economic inequality that other frameworks leave undertheorised. His AMU base gave him an institutional home close to a Muslim-majority intellectual tradition, and the combination has made his career an emblem of a secular, left-leaning strand of Indian academic life that has been under sustained political pressure.

• 4. A People's History

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  Few historians anywhere have attempted what Habib undertook with A People's History of India, a multi-volume series for which he serves as general editor and to which he has contributed a large number of individual volumes himself. The series is published jointly by the Aligarh Historians Society and Tulika Books. Its volumes range from prehistory and the Indus Civilisation through the Vedic Age, Mauryan India, the Delhi Sultanate, the Vijayanagara Empire, Mughal-era technology, and both phases of the Indian national movement.

  Volume 25, published in 2014, covers the Indian economy under early British rule from 1757 to 1857. Volume 28, from 2006, examines the economy from 1858 to 1914. Volume 30, from 2018, traces the national movement from its origins to 1918, and Volume 31, from 2020, carries the freedom struggle through to 1947. Volume 36, from 2015, turns to man and environment. Together, the series attempts to narrate Indian history from the vantage point of ordinary people rather than courts and dynasties. Habib has also co-authored An Atlas of Ancient Indian History with Faiz Habib, published by Oxford University Press in 2012, extending the cartographic method he applied to the Mughal period back into antiquity.

• 5. Vedas, Secularism, and Saffronisation

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  Habib's engagement with ancient Indian texts is more nuanced than his critics in Hindu nationalist circles have sometimes acknowledged. He has argued that the Vedas, despite being transmitted orally rather than through written manuscript traditions, can legitimately serve as historical sources, provided a historian accounts for the discipline of faithful transmission that governed that oral tradition. That is a position that takes the texts seriously on their own terms rather than dismissing them.

  At the same time, Habib has been a persistent voice against what he calls the political distortion of Indian history. In 1998, he led historians at the Indian History Congress in passing a resolution against the alleged "saffronisation" of history, a term for the incorporation of Hindu nationalist interpretations into school curricula and public-history initiatives. In 2023, he gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he criticised textbook revisions that removed or reduced material on Muslim rule in India, including the Mughals, and that diminished references to Muslim contributions to the freedom struggle. He argued that such revisions reflected a Hindu nationalist interpretation of the past rather than historical scholarship. The Indian History Congress, where Habib served as General President in 1981, has been one of the principal institutional arenas for these debates.

• 6. Honours and Recognitions

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  In 1968, Habib received the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship for research on seventeenth-century India, an early marker of his standing in the field. In 1982, he and Tapan Raychaudhuri received the Watumull Prize of the American Historical Association for The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume I, which the two scholars co-edited and which covers the period from 1200 to 1750.

  In 1991, Habib delivered Oxford's Radhakrishnan Lecture, named for the philosopher and Indian president Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. He has been an elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Royal Historical Society since 1997. In 2005, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, one of the country's highest civilian honours. The Government of Uttar Pradesh added the Yash Bharti Award in 2016. The University of Calicut conferred an Honorary Doctor of Letters in 2010. In 2021, New College, Oxford, appointed him an Honorary Fellow, making him formally recognised by both his old university and the institution where he built his career. His wife, Sayera Habib, was herself Professor of Economics at AMU, making theirs a household shaped on both sides by scholarly life at the same university.