Irfan Habib was born on the 12th of August 1931 into a family where the struggle for India's freedom was not just a political movement but a bloodline inheritance. His father, Mohammad Habib, was a distinguished historian, while his maternal grandfather, Abbas Tyabji, served as the Chief Justice of the High Court of Baroda and was a devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi. This lineage placed Habib at the intersection of legal authority, political activism, and historical inquiry from his earliest days. The young Irfan grew up in an environment where the fate of the nation was discussed over dinner, and the weight of history was felt as a personal responsibility. His upbringing in an Indian Muslim family during the twilight of the British Raj instilled in him a deep sense of secularism and a commitment to the idea of a unified India that transcended religious divides. This foundation would later become the bedrock of his academic career and his fierce opposition to religious nationalism.
The Marxist Lens on Mughal India
In 1963, Irfan Habib published a work that would fundamentally alter the understanding of the Mughal Empire, titled The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556, 1707. This book was not merely a collection of dates and names; it was a rigorous application of Marxist historiography to the economic structures of medieval India. Habib argued that the economic history of the Mughal period could not be understood through the lens of royal decrees alone but required a deep dive into the agrarian relations, the peasantry, and the mechanisms of revenue collection. His methodology was revolutionary because it shifted the focus from the battles fought by emperors to the fields tilled by millions of peasants. This approach earned him the admiration of contemporaries like Amiya Kumar Bagchi, who described him as one of the two most prominent Marxist historians of India. The book, revised and republished in 1999 by Oxford University Press, remains a cornerstone of economic history, challenging the traditional narratives that glorified the Mughal state while ignoring the suffering of the common people.The Atlas of Power and People
While many historians wrote about the Mughal Empire, few attempted to map its economic and political geography with such precision as Habib did in his Atlas of the Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps with Detailed Notes, published in 1982. This work was a visual and textual revolution, providing a detailed look at how the empire functioned on the ground. It was not enough to know who ruled; one had to understand how the land was divided, how taxes were collected, and how the economy flowed through the vast territories. The atlas was so comprehensive that it became an essential tool for scholars and students alike. Later, in 2012, he co-authored an Atlas of Ancient Indian History with his son, Faiz Habib, extending this cartographic vision back to the earliest civilizations. These maps were not mere illustrations; they were arguments in themselves, challenging the notion that history was a linear progression of great men. Instead, they revealed the complex interplay of geography, economy, and power that shaped the subcontinent.