Irfan Habib and Modern Indian History

This essay analyses the contribution of Irfan Habib to the history of modern India. It presents his engagement with key ideas of modern Indian history in the form of a plot or a story. In writing this story I have taken the liberty of creating my own chronology of his writings, which is different from the chronological order in which these writings appeared. In the writing of the story, I have also ascribed certain impulses which inspired the writings of those works. In reality this may or may not have been the case. This essay makes good use of the narrator’s discretion in attributing these impulses to Irfan Habib, the main character of the story.