He is the author of Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1908 (1973), Modern India (1989), and Writing Social History (1998), among others.
He returned the award in 2007 in protest against the expulsion of farmers from their land by the erstwhile state government ran by the CPI(M) led Left Front..[3] He was one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective, but later distanced himself from the project.
He noted that arguments made in the later issues of the journal as well as in books by Partha Chatterjee blanketly criticized Enlightenment, the nation-state and secularism lined up with indigenist critiques that were at home with the Hindu right.
In his view this error was traceable to a basic confusion in the early project that posed an absolute separation between the elite and subaltern domains.
[5] The publication of the volume was eventually allowed by the Government of India once the Congress party came to power after the general election of 2004.