As a historian Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958) is a study in himself. Though born and bred in the liberal high culture of Hindu Bengal, the influence of the liberal high culture of Britain and its empiricist thinkers, from Locke to Burke and Bertrand Russell, often moulded his judgement of men and events.

Sarkar's multi-volume history of the fall of the Mughal empire was marked by its sweep and clarity. It took him the best part of his working life and the labour entailed was formidable. First came the learning of languages: Arabic, Persian, Marathi, Rajasthani, French and Portuguese. Then followed the relentless search for manuscripts and documents and every other source that is vital for the historian's craft. Finally, came the years of study, of collation and the distilling narrative.

Sarkar was deeply moved by the anarchy and violence that consumed India in the 18th century. He was shocked by "the imbecility and vices of our rulers, the cowardice of their generals, and the selfish treachery of their ministers. It is a tale which makes every true son of India hang his head in shame".

Scrupulous in acknowledging the Mughals' contributions to India's political and cultural development, Sarkar perceived that, like the kindred Ottomans, also a people of the Central Asian steppe, the Mughals were nomads at heart sitting atop a military administration. Sarkar did not live to read Lapidus, but he well understood from his own exhaustive study of the Mughal polity that the civilisation it represented was spent.

His mind operated within broad parameters. He admired Britain but was critical of the constricted vision and selfish workings of British imperialism in India. He was scornful of an ossified Hinduism dreaming only of the past. "Give up your dream of isolation, standardise and come into line with the moving world outside, or you will become extinct as a race through the operation of relentless economic competition in a world that has now become as one country," he once wrote.

This was globalisation before it became common currency. Sarkar argued for an India receptive to the most creative ideas from abroad; yet he also envisioned an India that would be an independent centre of learning and enlightenment, not a supplicant forever knocking on the doors of Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Vienna and, more relevantly today, Harvard and Yale and Princeton.

Sarkar's place as scholar and historian will survive post-modernist confection -- and attempts of constructionists and discourse analysts of subalternity, colonialism and gender to dethrone him.

Premen Addy is a historian and editor, India Weekly, London.

D.D.Kosambi
(1907-1966): Depending on how you see it, this former professor of mathematics at Pune University revolutionised historiography in India -- or subverted it. To generations of academics, it is obviously the former. Before Kosambi, history was little more than a narrative of names and dynasties at best and a melange of myths at worst. That's when Kosambi (An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 1956) brought a scientific temper, the analytical tools of Marxism and created an entire tradition of social history. Suddenly, the past had a new future.