History as a subject taught at BA & MA level, appeared in India from about the time of the Great War. Indigenous historians had been able to publish very good, evidence based, textbooks but the post-independence generation felt they were too conservative, too nationalistic, and perhaps overemphasised Religion in their work.
The problem was that they were men of great diligence and intelligence. Their successors tended not to be. The prestige of the discipline declined. India needed to look to the future. There were diminishing returns to donkey work in the archives.
Romila Thapar & Amartya Sen first met on the boat to England where both had gone for higher studies. Sociologically speaking, both came from the English speaking upper middle class which had worked closely with the British. Sen's grandfather was a Judge. His father was the first Indian to gain a PhD in Soil Science. He held senior positions in the Government and was also a Professor of Chemistry. Thapar's father was an Army Doctor. Her family were more entrepreneurial than Sen's and counted as part of New Delhis noveau riche elite. Both were non-Brahmins and thus sought to downgrade the achievements of that community. They were also atheists of a fashionably Left-wing kind. During UPA1, when Congress was in alliance with the Left, both were considered important. Thapar was Sonia's advisor on Indian matters. Sen, having received the Nobel Prize, was considered a font of economic wisdom. It was believed that his influence played a part in resistance to Manmohan's ambitious plans for economic reform. Instead, more emphasis was placed on welfare schemes- e.g. MNREGA.
Sen & Thapar began to be resented for their apparently anti-Hindu (or at least anti-Hindutva) ideology. Also, the question was asked, what good had they done for the country? Sen's economics was useless. Thapar had only managed to make Indian history boring and deeply dispiriting. Thus, as Modi rose, their star declined. This caused them to double down on attacking the Modi government and thus won them praise from the Left. But ordinary people will only vote for the Left if it can make their lives better. Cambridge educated toffs may think that what really matters is one's moral attitude or ideology. It is vulgar to care about what is merely material. The role of the intellectual is to virtue signal. Evil Capitalists provide goods and services because they are greedy for money. Scold them by all means while being careful not to say anything which is either sensible or true.
Jacobin magazine has an article on Thapar written by Sabrani Chakroborti. She works for an Institute funded by Neville Singham- an IT maven who strongly supports the Chinese Communist party and who has moved to that country.
Romila Thapar is one of India’s foremost historians
This isn't saying much. Still, at one time, Sen & Thapar had some salience as being relatively independent of the official Communist Party line.
and has made an immense contribution in the field of early Indian history. Thapar is best known for her writings against the communalization of India’s past and right-wing historical fabrications.
Like Sen. Yet both had to leave their ancestral home when India was partitioned on religious lines. There is little point saying 'boo to Hindu communalism' if you had to run away from Islamic fanaticism.
Through her work on the periodization of Indian history and the history of religious beliefs and communities, she has exposed the chauvinistic agenda of the far right and its efforts to manufacture a falsified view of the past.
e.g the view that Kaffirs get short shrift in Pakistan and have to run away from there.
Thapar was born in 1931 in a Punjabi Khatri (traders) family.
Khatris are Kshatriyas (warrior aristocracy) who took to trade under Muslim rule. But they also entered the administration. Some adopted a Persianate literary culture.
She belonged to a household where male members of the family worked in different echelons of the colonial administration, and received her school education in several different cities of what was then undivided India.
Her family were considered 'loyalists'. They were successful in anglicizing themselves. This meant that they rose and rose under Nehru- the last Englishman to rule India- and his daughter. Thapar and her brother had quite close social ties with the ruling Dynasty.
Her parents were close to people like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the anti-colonial activist who was known as the “Frontier Gandhi.”
Who was side-lined after Partition.
While studying at St Mary’s High School in Pune, she used to go to Gandhi’s own prayer gatherings, and remembers that on Gandhi’s advice, she started wearing khadi clothing for some time.
Everyone makes some such claim. I gave up biting the heads of chickens after meeting Mahatma Gandhi in a pub on the Edgware road.
While her family had a liberal approach to her education, it was still an unconventional, even radical move for her to pursue higher studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Not really. She would be safer there than on an Indian campus- i.e. less likely to be recruited by the Commies. SOAS was rather a conservative place compared to Cambridge.
Her father, Daya Ram Thapar, offered her the choice between pursuing higher education abroad or getting married comfortably with money saved as a dowry for her marriage at home. Thapar chose the path of education.
Back then, some young Indian women- like Vikram Seth's mother- qualified as barristers while they were in London.
Moving Away From Indology
When Thapar was a student, two strands of historiography dominated the study of India’s early history: Indological and nationalist.
There was a somewhat crude Marxist approach critiqued by people like Kosambi. Thapar was believed to be going in a more 'cultural' direction under Basham. Might she be the successor of K.M Munshi? No. The country was moving towards the Left.
The discipline of Indology was created to advance the colonial agenda of explaining the development of Indian society in terms of spiritualism and religion.
No. It existed independently- more particularly in Germany and other European countries. Philology made great strides during the Nineteenth Century. It played a part in weakening faith in the literal truth of the Bible.
It focused primarily on elite textual sources, the majority of which were composed in Sanskrit.
The study of Sanskrit proved a great boon for the theory of linguistics. A great mathematician- Herman Grassmann- translated the Rg Veda and compiled a dictionary of Rg Vedic Sanskrit. He established that it could not be the pure 'ur-language' ancestral to all the Indo-European languages.
The methodological problem with the discipline was that it emphasized the collection of information rather than the interpretation of these sources.
That may be said of the ad hoc approach of the Eighteenth Century. The German Seminar System enabled the rapid burgeoning of research able to discriminate the antiquity and significance of specific texts.
In spite of the scholarly vigor of some towering figures, such as Thapar’s own doctoral supervisor, A. L. Basham, the approach of the discipline remained unchanged.
It changed significantly once the notion that the Vedas were a window into the minds of primitive man was given up. The comparative method was triumphing. There were similarities between the civilizations of the Axial Age and it was likely that this had been equally true of what had gone before and what would subsequently come about.
Basham made a seminal contribution in studying the socio-religious components of early Indian society, yet India remained to him a land of “wonder,” as conjured up by the title of one of his best-known books, The Wonder That Was India.
Basham made his subject interesting even for the lay-man. Thapar was determined to make her subject as boring as shit. If Indians came to believe that the country had always been a shithole they would stop expecting the Dynasty to make their lives better. Also, by saying 'Hindus were always bestial', you took the wind out of the sails of Hindu Nationalism. That was a good thing. The country must lose territory to China and Pakistan and anybody else who wants to drive out Hindus and take over their territory.
Romila Thapar is one of India’s foremost historians and has made an immense contribution in the field of early Indian history.
She tried to ensure it would be boring and that studying it would make Hindus want to convert.
Nationalist historians, on the other hand, were preoccupied with a search for the “Golden Age” of the Indian past, when people lived in harmony and close cooperation under the aegis of the Hindu kings.
Whereas anti-Nationals wanted Hindus to spend all their time hating each other and hoping to emigrate.
Needless to say, both forms of historiography were inadequate for explaining the development of social, political, and economic organizations, state structures, or institutions like caste, religion, and patriarchy, which inflicted discrimination and exploitation on various sections of Indian society over the course of many centuries.
Hindus did have a society. It was very evil. Hopefully some foreign power will take over the country and ethnically cleanse it of Hindus.
Thapar made a conscious decision to move away from both of these trends. Her doctoral project, later published in 1961 as Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, looked at the history of the Mauryan empire with a focus on epigraphic sources. The Mauryas rose to prominence in the latter half of the fourth century BCE with their stronghold in the northern Gangetic plain. The physical expansion of the empire reached its zenith under Asoka during the third century BCE, establishing its presence in different parts of the subcontinent.
Lord Buddha was a Kshatriya. Thus he was good. Brahmins are bad.
By shifting the focus away from the empire’s dynastic history, Thapar explained and interpretated the formation of the state as a process, encapsulating political, economic, religious, and ideological factors. She used Indica, a text composed by the Greek historian and diplomat Megasthenes, as a source for analysing the social history of the time.
The English translation of it was published in 1877.
In terms of source materials and methodology alike, Thapar was a pioneering historian who changed the way early India is studied.
No. She merely did what her predecessors had done but took greater care to bore the pants of her readers.
Thapar moved to Delhi and eventually joined the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
It had been set up after devaluation. The upper-class could no longer afford to send their kids to UK or US for non-STEM instruction. At JNU, you could pretend to be a Leftist while waiting to get a Government job or join the family business.
Socioeconomic concerns were at the center of historical discussions in which she took part during the 1960s and ’70s, a period that was formative for her academic journey. During these years, she developed some of her most significant arguments on the development of social formations and the processes of early Indian history.
This was a period when new statistical methods and more realistic economic and political science models became available. To be fair, Thapar had had no exposure to this. In any case, History was just something you crammed up to pass the Civil Service exam. What was important was that you regurgitate the politically correct view in a mindless manner.
These interests are clearly visible in her attempt to contextualize the transition from a pastoralist Vedic society to the formation of states in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent.
The context was that the thing happened in India. But what was happening wasn't that different from what was happening elsewhere. Forests were cleared. Agriculture became more intensive. Surpluses were invested in cottage industries. This contributed to the growth of emporium cities and maritime commerce. All this was well understood by the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
The 1984 book From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First Millennium BC in the Ganga Valley presented her arguments. Thapar’s exchanges with such historians as D. D. Kosambi,
a mathematician. He claimed to have proved the Reimann hypothesis!
R. S. Sharma,
who actually knew Indian history. He belonged to both the indigenous tradition as represented by Rahul Sankirtayan as well as that of Basham.
Eric Hobsbawm, and George Rudé, as well as colleagues at the Delhi School of Economics like Amartya Sen and Sukhamoy Chakraborty, assisted her greatly in the elaboration of these ideas.
Only Sharma knew Indian history. The others didn't. The rise of Sikhs, Marathas, Bhumihars etc. was actual 'history from below'. So was the displacement of 'Forward Caste' politicians by those from the agricultural and other backward castes which has been a continuous process throughout Thapar's life-time. There is little point railing against Modi when he is OBC and started off as a 'chai-wallah'. Currently the President and the Chief Justice are of Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe backgrounds.
Of these scholars, Kosambi made a seminal contribution in shifting the focus away from Indology to history
He was a good Sanskritist. Sadly, he lacked a structural causal model of the ancient economy and thus could do little to challenge Marxist orthodoxy.
while Sharma produced texts like Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India, which offered a materialist view of the past. We should also note here the important discussion known as the “Feudalism Debate” about the characterization of early Indian society, broadly between 600 and 1200 CE.
Since everybody meant something different by the word 'feudalism' the thing was farcical.
Marxist historians like Sharma and D. N. Jha
Sharma's student. He claimed there was no evidence that there had ever been a temple under the Babri Masjid. At the time people thought Thapar & Jha would provide evidence. But they had none. The Court judgment went against them. Leftist historians came to be seen as fantasists who didn't know any actual history.
contributed to this debate with different perspectives on feudal social relations. The idea that this was a period of economic and urban decline was central for their arguments.
i.e. Hindu India was shit. Thanks be to Allah, Muslim Turks took over much of the country.
Scholars like Irfan Habib, on the other hand, rejected the label of “Indian Feudalism” for this period. A significant critique also came from two JNU historians, Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya and Harbans Mukhia.
Nobody cared. Indians understood that Indian Princes kept fighting with each other. But plenty of wealthy or politically important families do so even now. What was lacking was determination to tackle collective action problems.
For her part, Thapar did not participate in the debate, but she has developed the concept of “Threshold Time” for a time frame spanning the years between 300 CE and 700 CE. She defines this as a phase containing social, economic, and cultural developments that were in continuity with the later period, dismissing the notion of decline.
Still there had to be decline otherwise Islamic rule would be seen as a calamity. But the same argument could be made about British rule or the idea that the Japanese or the Chinese should be encouraged to conquer the country.
Thapar refuted the colonial interpretation of Indian society as being stagnant and devoid of any element that could advance processes of historical change.
This was not the colonial interpretation. It was the pessimistic conclusion that many came to as India's international economic importance declined in the century preceding Independence. The fact that it continued to decline under the Dynasty confirmed the view that there was some fundamental 'Hindu malaise' that ensured the country would always be a shithole.
Although Thapar relied on other disciplines like social anthropology, she heavily borrowed from the conceptual frameworks put forward by Marcel Mauss, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and others for her interpretation of the economic aspects of pastoral and state societies and the close connections between the state and religion.
They were wholly out of date. The 'rational peasant' theory was taking off in the Sixties. What was needed was a 'Law & Econ' mechanism design based approach. But historians were too stupid to attempt any such thing. The problem with making your subject as boring as shit is that it becomes adversely selective of boring shitheads.
This shift was important because it refuted the colonial interpretation of Indian society as being stagnant and devoid of any element that could advance processes of historical change.
There was no such interpretation. It was obvious that 'banyans' had helped European traders to thrive in Surat and that Kayasths, Khattris, Niyogis, Baidyas etc. eagerly took up jobs in the lower ranks of the administration. Industrialization began in the mid Nineteenth Century. But there were problems of infrastructure and logistics. Economies of scope and scale were seldom achievable. Moreover, entrepreneurs had a 'trader' or 'speculator' mentality and had little knowledge or interest in technology. Alfred Marshall was aware of all this three decades before Thapar was born.
After Independence, India could have permitted the rise of big Corporations. It chose to go in the direction of crony capitalism based on rent extraction- i.e. the license permit Raj. Thapar & Sen and so forth didn't raise a peep against this. They were useful idiots in the sense that they were utterly useless. Still, foreigners rated them. That must count for something- right?
Against Communalism
In his History of British India, published between 1818 and 1823, James Mill put forward the idea of dividing Indian history into three segments: Hindu,
because the guys running things were Hindu
Muslim,
because the guys running things were Muslim or worked for Muslims
and British.
even though there were no Britishers in India. Curzon was actually a Brahmin lady from Coimbatore.
The agenda behind this approach sought to vilify Turko-Persian rule in the subcontinent.
The Brits noticed that they got a lot of support from Hindus when they displaced a Muslim ruler- e.g. Tipu Sultan.
It was also evident in the introduction to an eight-volume work, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians (1867–77) by Henry Elliot and John Dowson, which stated that the Hindus would have to accept that British rule was far superior from their perspective to that of the Muslims.
This was stated explicitly by Raja Ram Mohan Roy & Dwarkanath Tagore. That is why they lobbied Westminster to lift any restriction on British emigration to India. Rabindranath Tagore reminded his readers that if the Brits ran away, Hindus would lose lives and property in East Bengal. Stop clamouring for your own throats to be slit.
For their part, nationalist historians did not attempt to criticize the Hindu–Muslim–British periodization, as it was a comfortable fit for their own schema of a “Golden Hindu Age” that was disrupted by a “Muslim invasion,” following which the civilization of India passed into a “Dark Age.” Thapar and her colleagues Harbans Mukhia and Bipan Chandra developed an important critique of this framework in three separate essays that were published together in 1969 as Communalism and the Writing of Indian History.
This was a time when peasant and backward caste leaders were challenging the Forward Castes. The Dynasty could recruit 'Young Turks' (leftists able to connect with rustic voters) and maintain some sort of caste formula (e.g. Brahmin/Harijan/Muslim or Kshatriya/Harijan/Adivasi/Muslim) but the bigger dominant castes, or even the bigger Dalit castes, had leaders who were willing and able to create their own caste-formulas. JNU Professors were aware of these 'winds of change', but neither liked the thing nor understood what was happening. They contented themselves with saying 'Jan Sangh is Communal. Communalists are Fascist (unless they are Muslim). Boo to Fascism! We must create a United Front of oppressed peasants, exploited proletarians, raped rabbits, bahishkrit birds & Gandhian goats to combat the rise of the RSS.
In her own contribution, Thapar insists that there was no basis for labeling ancient India as “Hindu.”
There was never any such religion. Brits brainwashed people into thinking they weren't Muslim. Also, Brits invented gender. Previously all Indians had at least one penis and one vagina. Lord Curzon forced them to choose one or the other. This is called 'bio-politics'.
She notes that the rulers of that period followed and extended their patronage to a range of religions and sects.
Why? The motive was economic. Religious centres attract trade and industry. This increases tax revenue.
She also questions the division of the past into “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern,” a Eurocentric approach that long remained influential. Instead, she suggests we should describe the time frame between the first millennium BCE and 1300 CE as that of Early India.
Saying 'early' is nice. Saying 'ancient' is totes Fascist.
Just as the nationalist historians had borrowed the periodization of British colonial scholars, the proponents of Hindutva ideology appropriated the Orientalist claim of Aryan superiority.
No. They knew Aryan just meant 'noble' or 'free born'. Tamils aren't Aryan. But the vast majority of us are Hindu.
The classification of the people living in Vedic society as members of the Aryan race relies on
the place being called Aryavarta. I suppose it was Jainism and Buddhism which spread the use of the word into the South and East.
European racial concepts, applied to the Indian past in a contrived and inaccurate manner. There were different sets of people in the Vedic culture who were not identified as Aryan since they did not speak Sanskrit.
But most Indians speak languages descended from Sanskrit or which have derived much of their vocabulary from it.
The founding ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) gave this racial theory an additional religious dimension.
Which it also had for Nehru (who demanded the 'Brahminization' of India) and Gandhi and so forth.
In their theorization, the religious identity of the Hindus became central to the conception of Aryanism. They also claimed that the Hindus were the descendants of indigenous Aryans and should thus be considered the true inheritors of the land.
Whereas in Britain, the Brits consider the Chinese to be the true inheritors of their land.
Using the Vedic corpus, Thapar argues that “Aryan” (or “Arya”) was not a racial but rather a linguistic category.
It was likely to be both- at least in homogenously populated areas. But this bleeding obvious.
There is a range of evidence from different fields — linguistics, archaeology, and more recently genetics — that cuts against the chauvinistic propaganda of the RSS and its co-thinkers.
The RSS has plenty of 'non-Aryans'. They appeal to an ecumenical Hinduism or 'Hindutva' which is based on the fact that in law and in reality Hinduism really does exist. So do penises. True mine is very small and so you could say 'research shows that only 0.01 percent of the body mass of humans are constituted by penises. Thus, we can dismiss the notion that penises exist. Chauvinists like Trump pretend to have a penis. But they don't really.'
We have seen this debate renewed again and again,
there is no debate. One side says Hinduism doesn't exist. It is a myth just like the notion that some humans have penises. The other side says Hindus need to come together to solve collective action problems and thus rise up economically and socially.
often through the undermining of evidence or the control of information by state-run institutions.
The RSS isn't a state-run institution. It is wholly voluntary.
At a time when we find popular myths or manufactured tales about the past being peddled as history,
e.g her claim that there was never a Ram temple in Ayodhya
Thapar has stressed the duty of historians to stick with the evidence
She failed to do so. The Bench found there was evidence of the Temple. This was provided by scientifically trained archaeologists.
. She has also warned us not to fall into the trap of confusing historical sources with actual historical processes. For example, popular perception often views everything depicted in the two epics Ramayana and Mahabharata as if it were history.
The Hindu view is that it is 'mithak'- imperative rather than alethic.
In her study The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India (2013), Thapar contends that we can indeed use these texts as sources for writing history.
That had long been done.
They reflect upon processes of transition from one form to another and deal with social relations of the time, so one can trace an embedded sense of consciousness about the past in these texts.
One can trace a common literary and religious heritage. Plenty of Kshatriyas claim descent from Lord Rama and Lord Krishna.
However, no one should look at them as faithful documents recording actual historical events.
No one did. It is a different matter that imperative claims can be made on the basis of wholly imperative texts.
Religious Nationalism and Imagined Communities
Since India gained its independence in the 1940s, the way that we define the Indian nation has become a matter of bitter controversy.
Nope. There is a legal definition upheld by the organs of state. Dispute it and you may be sent to jail.
As Thapar wrote in 2016:
For Indians of my age who grew up on the cusp of Independence, nationalism was in the air we breathed. Nationalism was not something problematic. It was an identity with the nation and its society.
Nonsense! By 1946, it had become obvious that Independence would mean partition. Some people would have to run away from their ancestral homes. Where would the boundary line be drawn? This was a particularly troubling question to Thapar's own family.
Indian nationalism in this form never demanded loyalty to any particular religion, caste, ethnicity, region, or other sectarian identity.
Why did Nehru pass a law preventing Muslims who fled in panic from returning to the country? Why were all non-Muslims fleeing Pakistan given refuge in India?
However, far-right Hindutva forces have attacked and abused this sense of inclusive nationalism emanating from India’s anti-colonial struggle.
Which culminated in Partition.
For the votaries of Hindutva, nationalism can only mean conforming to their own falsified idea of Hindu nationalism.
No. Nationalism just means wanting your country to be strong. Votaries of Hindutva are perfectly happy to accept that a person of foreign origin can settle in India and become an Indian nationalist.
This ideology offers two contrasting images, that of Muslims as invading “outsiders,”
Turks originate in Telengana. Arabs are actually from Assam.
and that of Hindus as homogenous, unchanging “insiders.” Through many of her writings over the course of decades, Thapar has questioned this notion of Indian society as being divided between two religious communities that are binary opposites.
But her people didn't question it while remaining in their ancestral Lahore.
In her famous 1988 lecture, “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity,” she argues that there was no such thing as a Hindu religion as the Hindutva partisans would understand it in early India.
Also penises don't exist.
What is now labeled as “Hinduism,” Thapar points out, has its origins in Vedic and later Puranic Brahmanical religion.
What are now labelled as penises had their origins in vaginas.
Alongside these forms of belief, alternative religious or philosophical currents existed such as Buddhism, Jainism, and the Ajivika religion.
We are welcome to combine them. Hindus go to Jain or Buddhist temples and eagerly audit sermons given by their monks and nuns.
Thapar also notes that India in the second half of the first millennium BCE even had the presence of a vibrant materialist philosophical tradition represented by the Charvakas or Lokayatas.
It was a strawman. Interestingly, it is possible to combine this approach with belief in karma- e.g. by postulating the 'aashrav' (ingress) of subtle karma binding particles.
Thapar has questioned the notion of Indian society as being divided between two religious communities that are binary opposites.
Also, Pakistan does not exist. Thapar herself lives in Lahore.
In fact, we could best describe the Puranic Brahmanic religion as an agglomeration of various religious sects, with their affiliations directed toward either Vaishnavism or Saivism.
This also holds for non-Brahmanic religion- i.e. sects where no Brahmin priests are employed.
There were severe interreligious and sectarian rivalries in the battle for state and elite patronage. Thapar gives an example of such competition dating from the seventh century CE in the present-day state of Tamil Nadu, where the Siva sects attacked the local Jain order, virtually ousting the monks (Shramanas) from the territory.
Jains deny this happened. They may be right since they were more scrupulous in preserving historical records.
All the religious institutions used to compete amongst themselves for endowments from locally powerful ruling houses and communities. The elites would often extend patronage to competing religions and sects to augment their own prestige and support base.
Current elites, however, must only patronize Islam and Christianity. Hinduism is very evil.
The conflict between these sects were not merely ideological or scriptural, but often involved unabashed violence.
Whereas Muslims never killed kaffirs.
Even in such cases, however, it never took the form of a war cry calling for the destruction of an entire community of those who belonged to a particular sect. These bouts of violence happened at the local level.
Everything happens at the local level.
For Thapar, the development of religious beliefs and practices went through various changes over the course of Indian history,
because development involves changes.
never resulting in the formation of a monolithic religion of any variety.
Hinduism seems monolithic enough to the vast majority of Hindus. We say there are regional differences but the essence is the same.
She notes that we can best view the institution of religion as consisting of distinct and disparate sects and castes that operate along a social continuum.
Sadly, her own people ran away from their ancestral home. The 'social continuum' involved their being killed.
Association with any particular sect or belief did not necessarily mean the formation of a religious community.
But it could pave the way for it.
There were multiple forms of identity in South Asia, and sectarian confrontations at the upper levels of society might have no impact further down the social scale.
The opposite too was the case. People like J.N Mandal got on well with Jinnah- indeed Mandal was his law minister- but Mandal and his people had to run away to India soon enough.
While talking about religious persecution, Thapar brings up the question of untouchability, which is the most brutal form of oppression validated by the Brahmanic religion.
There are untouchables in Japan which has no Brahmins. There are Brahmins in Bali where there is no untouchability. It seems the 'Kshatriya' religion of the Buddha spread the practice.
This poses a challenge to those who believe in the superiority of the Hindu religion, since they have absolved it of responsibility for all forms of exploitation and oppression, including untouchability.
Not really. Untouchability is clearly linked to a primitive pathogen avoidance theory. The solution is modern medicine. Once granny saw that most infections can be cured she didn't care who you played with.
In similar fashion, she questions the idea of a homogenized Muslim community.
It was homogenous enough to demand and get Partition.
The invention of these “imagined communities” — a term that she borrows from Benedict Anderson
who was thinking of Indonesia which has a lot of islands.
— has served the ideologies of religious nationalism.
Thapar isn't attacking Pakistan's religious nationalism. It is only Hinduism she hates.
Thapar has frequently cited Hobsbawm’s remark that “history is to nationalism what poppy is to a heroin addict.”
Hobsbawm was wrong. There was American nationalism before the place had very much in the way of history. Economics and claims to valuable territory are important for nationalism.
Listening to the Voices of History
The impact of a heightened sense of nationalism was brutally demonstrated in the aftermath of the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992.
Rajiv should have taken charge of building the temple there. Perhaps he would have done so had he not been killed.
The Hindu chauvinist forces organized through the Sangh Parivar organized a ratha yatra (a type of religious procession), which was led by the national president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Lal Krishna Advani. The campaign of the Sangh, which had been going on for several years, culminated in the destruction of the mosque and communal rioting that claimed thousands of lives.
It culminated in the creation of a beautiful new temple. The Muslims too are happy with the grand new mosque for which they have been allocated public land.
The ratha yatra began from the temple of Somanatha on India’s western coast. The Sangh justified this choice of starting point by asserting that it was a question of undoing a “historic wrong.” They claimed that the subcontinent fell under foreign (Muslim) rule after the invasion by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century CE, who supposedly vandalized and looted the temple of Somanatha.
Muslims never do any such thing. That is why Pakistan is full of temples. Indeed, the proportion of kaffirs in the population keeps rising there.
One of Thapar’s most powerful pieces of writing, Somanatha: The Many Voices of History (2004), came against this backdrop.
In 2002 Sonia had said the Sankaracharya who did her griha pravesh ceremony would preside over the building of the Temple once the Court gave permission. Thapar & Co were keen that Sonia take a 'Secular' direction. This was a mistake. There was no harm in projecting Rahul as a Brahmin leader. There are plenty of Brahmin voters in UP & Bihar.
She demonstrates that there is no unitary voice we can trace in the historical sources, whether contemporary or later, about Mahmud’s raid.
But there is a unitary voice which says 'Hinduism never existed. Even if it did, it was shit.'
She argues that we can only find hyperinflated claims about the magnitude of the raid in Turko-Persian sources, which had their own political agenda. None of the other sources, such as Brahmanical or Jain texts, have anything to say about the raid or its aftermath.
But Islamic sources do. Why advertise your own humiliation? Pretend the thing never happened till you are powerful enough to get your revenge. The Somnath temple was rebuilt after Hindus took over the country.
Thapar questions the Hindutva attempt to remedy a supposed historic injury of which there is no evidence in popular consciousness.
What is evident in popular consciousness is that JNU historians are anti-national sycophants of the Dynasty.
What emerges from these sources instead is an image of a region flourishing on trade across the Indian Ocean and accommodating Arabs as well as other, non-Sunni Muslim communities like the Shias, the Ismailis, and the Bohras.
Who ran away from Sunni persecution in Sindh.
No historical source, whether from the time or afterward, talks about any “Hindu trauma” as a result of the raid. It was the British governor-general of India, Lord Ellenborough, who first promoted this idea, which was later picked up by the Hindu fundamentalists.
The story was that the Brits had found the gates of the temple in Afghanistan and were bringing it back to please the Hindus.
Thapar asks why there would be complete silence about the destruction of Somanatha temple in all the sources, other than the Turko-Persian ones, if it were a historical event of such magnitude.
Also, how come nobody posted a video of it happening on You Tube?
She could only find one Jain text that stated that the temple was in a state of disrepair due to weathering from sea spray and in need of renovation.
She found what she was looking for. Good for her.
In the rest of the book, Thapar moves further in time to show how local communities of northern India, both Hindu and Muslim, later developed folk traditions of their own in which Mahmud’s nephew, known as Ghazi Miyan, and Mahmud himself became symbols of cultural syncretism.
The story of Mahmud & Ayaz was famous among Sufis.
She questions the Hindutva attempt to remedy a supposed historic injury
which was done by Dr. Rajendra Prasad & Sardar Vallabhai Patel in the late 1940s.
of which there is no evidence in popular consciousness, presenting the whole episode as an invention of British colonialist and Hindu fundamentalist forces — a deliberate attempt to create what she calls “historical memory without history.”
Which is like the fact that some people believe men have penises. No such things exist. Donald Trump invented the story so as to get voters to reject Hilary & Kamala.
A Public Intellectual
In India today, mosques are being demolished under the state’s watch while members of religious minorities and Dalits are lynched with active support from the current political regime,
It is one thing to say Hindutva is anti-Muslim. It is foolish to think it wishes to deprive itself of Dalit support. Why not pretend Modi isn't an OBC man? He is a Dalit Muslim woman from Chicago.
defenders of rationalism are murdered, and intellectuals are put behind bars.
& academics guilty of visa violations get deported. Cry me a river.
Under such conditions, it is important to celebrate the contributions made by scholars like Thapar in upholding India’s secular and democratic values.
Her contribution was to weaken Congress and help the BJP by steering Sonia in an anti-Hindu direction. The fact is, Sonia was a 'pativrata' wife carrying on her mother-in-law's legacy of being close to Sankaracharyas and conducting family marriages according to Hindu rites. She believed Thapar who was saying 'common man isn't really Hindu. This is all a myth invented by British Viceroys.'
Alongside her contribution to Indian historiography, she has written textbooks for middle-school children and participated in the work of building up public universities. Under the rule of Narendra Modi, with any form of dissent not only dismissed but even branded as “anti-national,” Thapar has courageously taken up the role of a public intellectual.
Like Sen, she raises the blood pressure of educated Hindus who start looking at the BJP with a fond eye. American Hindus, in particular, don't want their kids to be taught that Hinduism is very evil in their public schools. Suddenly, the educated, professional, class discovered that those dhoti-wearing cow-worshippers in the BJP weren't so bad after all.
She did not hesitate to visit the protest site of Shaheen Bagh in solidarity with women fighting for their constitutional rights.
The right to say that kaffirs should not receive Indian citizenship. They should remain in Pakistan or Bangladesh and get killed.
She also came out in defense of JNU, where she taught for several decades, as it faced continuous attack from the BJP government.
It is a central university- i.e. the ruling party will pack it with its own brain dead academics.
In 2020, she offered a timely intervention with her booklet Voices of Dissent: An Essay, discussing examples of dissent in Indian society at several different historical junctures.
This caused Modi to order a lock-down. COVID is a myth. What actually happened was that the ruling class didn't want people to discuss Thapar's book. This is also the reason that many people believe men have penises even though no such things exist.
In spite of being the target for decades of vindictive and misogynistic attacks, Thapar has remained unmoved. Today, when amateurish claims are presented in the guide of genuine history, Thapar reminds us that a historian must always go with her evidence.
No. She reminds us that if- like Sen- your family ran away from the ancestral home because Muslims were killing kaffirs, then people will think it understandable if you betray some anti-Muslim prejudice. They will think you are a virtue signalling cunt if you reserve all your venom for people of your own religion amongst whom you took refuge.
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