A lovely fragment from Émile Chabal’s new book on Eric Hobsbawm about the historian’s first journey to India in 1968.
#en #article #book #history
Hobsbawm arrived to discover that he was already something of a Marxist academic superstar: his writings on pre-capitalist formations had circulated through cheap reprints, photocopies, study groups, cafés and communist bookshops, and were being argued over by Indian historians years before he appeared in person. Then, after being “mobbed” by students at Aligarh, he travelled through northern India, attended communist meetings in Bihar, took notes on party cadres, asked about the wages of rickshaw pullers and shoemakers and the illnesses of the working class, and became fascinated by a bandit-turned-Communist candidate who looked suspiciously like material for his work on social banditry.

The piece is an excerpt from Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (2026).