SUSOBHAN SARKAR 5 French Revolution, Fisher's Bonapartism. the digests by Hayes, Hazen and Katelbey; and in special papers, Undsay on the Reformation, George Thomson on the ancient Greeks, and Thucydides himself. His Marxist outlook was firm and clear, but he scrupulously presented other points of view. In my Fourth Year Honours class in 1952, I wrote him an answer about the reasons for the failure of Charles XII (the last Bourbon) in terms of the latter's incapacity to adequately repress bourgeois democracy. He stingingly pointed out in the margin that I was thinking like a reactionary; but gave 60 per cent of the marks—for the consistency of reasoning, he noted! It would be incorrect to call Sarkar a "man of dogma". He staunchly supported Stalin in the 1950s, but in his rule book, there was no room for being partiinost in classrooms. We were won over to his Marxism by his cold logic, not by any dogmatic assertion of strength, nor by any monopoly of the syllabus or control of textbook writing. Continually emphasising the guiding role of social conditions as well as of ideas in the processes of which events were the constitutive part, and drumming into his students the narrative of chronological order and of significant names, Sarkar highlighted the onward march of progress—albeit in the manner of nineteenth century Whig historians like Bury or Grote, yet emphasising the main currents of shifts in power within salient modes, in the way that Acton or Pollard had done in their equally liberal books. He picked out and analysed the patterns of causation in high watermarks of Western civilisation: the European Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, French and English developments from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and most of all revolutions led by the bourgeoisie in England and France, as well as the challenge to the bourgeoisie, explicated by European trade unionism, working class politics and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. At no juncture of these progressive trends did he underplay the suffering, immiserisation, alienation and obstacles to the development of the masses of mankind, which were the net result of feudal or capitalist civilisation in Europe. He chose to focus on Europe as almost a category of a paradigm and—perhaps somewhat contemptuously—left the teaching of Indian history to those, whom—in a somewhat Orientalist way—he considered either antiquarians or archival specialists. (Yet it should be remembered that his respect was very high indeed for that great textual scholar and ancient Indian chronologist, Hemchandra Ray-chaudhuri, that author of the classical Political History of Ancient India and Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History at Calcutta). In the 1950s it was a fashion among some of my contemporaries to carp—behind his back—at Sarkar's Anglo-Saxon attitudes, often attributed to his Brahmo Samaj modernist milieu and values. He did indeed imbibe much from the liberal democratic heritage, which is given the adjective Victorian, much of it from a great teacher