Irfan Habib


Irfan Habib is an Indian historian of ancient and medieval India, following the methodology of Marxist historiography. He is well known for his strong stance against Hindutva and Muslim communalists. He has authored a number of books, including Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707.

Early and personal life

Irfan was born in an Indian Muslim family, the son of Mohammad Habib, a Marxist historian and ideologue belonging to the Communist Party of India, by his wife Sohaila Habib. Irfan's paternal grandfather was Mohammad Naseem, a wealthy barrister and member of the Congress party, and his maternal grandfather was Abbas Tyabji, sometime Chief Justice of the High Court of Baroda princely state.
Irfan's wife Sayera Habib was Professor of Economics at Aligarh Muslim University. The couple have three sons and a daughter.

Academic

After he returned from Oxford he joined AMU as a member of the faculty. He was Professor of History at Aligarh from 1969–91. He is presently appointed as Professor Emeritus at the Department of History of the AMU. He delivered the Radhakrishnan Lecture at Oxford in 1991. He is an Elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Royal Historical Society since 1997.
Habib has worked on the historical geography of Ancient India, the history of Indian technology, medieval administrative and economic history, colonialism and its impact on India, and historiography.
Amiya Kumar Bagchi describes Habib as "one of the two most prominent Marxist historians of India today and at the same time, one of the greatest living Marxist historians of India between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries."

Positions

He was Coordinator/Chairman of the Centre for Advanced Studies, AMU from 1975–77 and 1984–94. He was Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research during 1986–90. He was the general secretary, Sectional President, and then the General President of the Indian History Congress.

Philosophical and political views

Habib identifies as a Marxist and uses Marxist historiography in his work.
Habib has also written books about Vedas and Vedic age, and he considers the Vedas to be a good historical source, which describes transmission in a priestly culture, that valued faithfulness. He further lays out the reasons that the texts were orally transmitted for hundreds of years, then they were finally written down.
Habib had a sustained commitment to secularism. He led the historians at the Indian History Congress of 1998 who moved a resolution against the "saffronisation" of history. He has said that the BJP government at the Centre which was in power from 1998–2004, especially the MHRD Minister himself, were responsible for inventing facts and dates to suit their interpretation of Indian history. To counter Irfan Habib, Murli Manohar Joshi released a book which rebuts the history of what the former minister calls '‘Habib & Co'’.

Honours

In December 2019, the Governor of Kerala Arif Mohammed Khan accused Irfan Habib of disrupting his speech at the India History Congress session held at Kannur University, Kannur.

Selected publications

;Books Authored
;Books Edited: