Irfan Habib

Some Lesser Known Facts About Irfan Habib

• He is an Indian historian of the ancient and medieval India, who follows the approach of Marxist historiography.

•  He is known for his strong stance against Hindutva and Islamic fundamentalism.

• Some of the books written by him includes the Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963), An Atlas of the Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps with Detailed Notes (1982), An Atlas of Ancient Indian History (2012).

• Irfan worked at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) as a history professor from 1969 to 1991, after returning from Oxford.

• In 1991, he gave his Radhakrishnan lecture at the Oxford University.

• Since 1997, Irfan has worked as a member of the Elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Royal Historical Society.

• He has majorly worked on the topics like Ancient India, historical geography, history of Indian technology, medieval administrative and economic history, and colonialism and its impact on Indian historiography.

• Amiya Kumar Bagchi, an Indian Political Economist once described Irfan 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”.

• From 1975 to 1977, Irfan was the Chairman of the Centre for Advanced Studies, AMU.

• From 1986 to 1990, he served as the general secretary, sectional president, and the General President of the Indian History Congress.

• He led the historians working at the Indian History Congress of 1998 for the resolution against the Saffronisation.

• He held BJP and specially the MDRH minister responsible for inventing facts and dates to suit their interpretation of Indian history.

• He criticised BJP for removing the chapters about Muslim rule from the school textbooks and the references of Muslim’s contribution to the country’s freedom struggle. He argued that these revisions aim to deny Muslims their place in India’s history and is a Islamophobic agenda.