India, Aug. 15 -- Sumit Sarkar, historian, academic and author, whose body of work as a scholar-author covers both the larger sweep of India's history inmodern times as well as specific microcosms within it, passed away two days before India's80th Independence Day. This week, we recommend Modern Times (1880s-1950s), which, in many ways, is a successor to Modern India, one of the foundational textbooks on colonial India. The book looks at late colonial India's history through the lenses of economy, culture and environment and examines caste relations, forest administration, land rights and more. Not using the entire modern nation-State as the subject of analysis, it highlights diversity of spatio-temporalities from the period. For instance, the claiming of forest rights by indigenous populations is linked with the colonial administration's attempts to tie down nomadic pastoralists to limited geographies, which sparked tribal unrest....