Ram Sharan Sharma

Ram Sharan Sharma (26 November 1919 – 20 August 2011), commonly referred to as R. S. Sharma, was a historian and academic of Ancient and early Medieval India.

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April 10, 2026

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April 10, 2026

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"In the late Sixties and early Seventies, historical research got entangled in the larger politics of the state in which the Congress under Indira Gandhi and the Communist Party of India found themselves on the same wave length. The establishment of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) in 1969 under the chairmanship of Prof. R. S. Sharma was largely the result of this politics. Besides being an eminent scholar, Prof. Sharma's sympathy for the Left ideology in general and for the CPI in particular was well-known. His close association with the then Education Minister and CPI sympathiser, Nurul Hasan, was common knowledge. During his chairmanship, there were allegations from many historians that ICHR was being used for propagating history from a Marxist standpoint. The nexus between ICHR and NCERT was also mentioned in the same vein. [….] During the Emergency, people watched with dismay the camaraderie between the Congress and the CPI and in that context the role played by the Left historians was not overlooked. [….] At the micro- level, it was the Left-oriented historians versus the rest. [….] The battle apparently looked like one between ‘secular’ and `communal’ historians but behind the facade was the realpolitik of the Congress and the CPI, on the one hand, and the Janata bandwagon, on the other."

- Ram Sharan Sharma

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"R.S. Sharma's whose Indian Feudalism has misguided virtually all historians of the period, not only because it it entirely written from the a priori assumption of the 'dark age', doggedly searching for point by point parallels with Europe, but also, ... because there has never been anything to challenge it... Sharma has repeated his views innumerable times - almost verbatim often, and hardly developing them... Sharma's thesis "involves an obstinate attempt to find 'elements' which fit a preconceived picture of what should have happened in India because it happened in Europe (or is alleged to have happened in Europe by Sharma and his school of historians whose knowledge of European history is rudimentary and completely outdated) or because of the antiquated Marxist scheme of a ‘necessary’ development of ‘feudalism’ out of ‘slavery’. The methodological underpinnings of Sharma's work are in fact so thin that one wonders why, for so long, Sharma's colleagues have called his work 'pioneering. It generated a spate of ‘feudalism studies’, elaborat­ing Sharma’s thesis, differing perhaps on minor points, as the case maybe, and critical here and there of ‘the inadequacy of the data’, but remaining variations on a theme.... There are, as indicated before, a very few authors whose work effec­tively addresses the feudalism thesis in a critical manner... Sharma, for one, appears to have been in no mood to take heed of criticism levelled at his work. Under the impact of the feudalism thesis the historiography of the period is still in utter disarray."

- Ram Sharan Sharma

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