Romila Thapar's life-long mission was to ensure than ancient Indian history was no fun. Smart students would run away from it. The theory was, this would prevent them from embracing Hindutva ideology & Indian nationalism.
Psyche magazine has an article by Raghu Karnad- one of the founders of the Leftist 'the Wire' titled
Romila Thapar: doyenne and dissenter
Romila, like her elder brother, was close to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Indeed, she was said to be Sonia Gandhi's adviser on Indian culture.
The great historian came of age at the end of British rule in India.
Provincial autonomy had been granted when she was 4 years old. If the Muslims hadn't objected, a Federal India could have been cobbled together by 1937. Incidentally, Thapar's family had to run away from their ancestral homes in Lahore.
Thapar belongs to the Nehruvian age. 'Glimpses of World History', by Nehru, came out in 1934. Nehru was greatly impressed by the Harrapan civilization. He visited Mohenjodaro in 1936. The Indian ego got a boost by the demonstration that its civilization was coeval with those of Egypt & Mesopotamia.
Kids of the period read HG Wells & Durant- whose 'the case for India' came out in 1930.
Now 94, she continues to defy a regime
which was democratically elected. Modi is not a dynast. No wonder, she is against him.
determined to forget the pluralism and dissent of India’s past
There was none during Indira's Emergency. Thapar didn't raise a peep against it though she now claims she didn't sign some letter praising Indira & thus was investigated by the tax-man. The truth is, there was no such letter & the tax man was investigating everybody with 'benami' property & undeclared income.
...Change and continuity are rival ways in which historians can conceive of and narrate the past. It is tempting to use the same terms in thinking about Thapar’s own life.
Or her family's life. They started off as loyalists of the Windsor dynasty and ended up as loyalists of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
For people my age, Romila Thapar has been a star historian for about as long as we’ve been sentient.
But nobody can recall reading her shite. Basham- we remember. Keay, Dalrymple & French- we still enjoy. True, we still turn to the older Indian historians to get a fuller picture.
She has taught and published across the tenures of every Indian prime minister, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi.
So has Amartya Sen. Both are useless.
Larger arcs of time than usual are to be found in her histories, but also in her reminiscences.
Because she is as old as fuck.
The past is outsize in the problems she considers as a scholar as well as those she confronts in her life.
She hasn't had a lot of problems in life. Daddy paid to send her to England. Perhaps a phoren degree would be preferred to a fat dowry since educated women could get good jobs in the big cities.
Would Thapar become a barrister & earn good money? No. She became an academic. Nothing wrong in that. She could marry a colleague. Academics get a lot of holidays. Ayahs are cheap in India.
She came of age at the end of an era, that of British rule in India.
British rule could have ended in 1924.
As a woman and a scholar, she broke deliberately from convention and precedent.
Over the course of the Nineteen Thirties, more and more upper class Hindu women had pursued education instead of getting married off in their teens.
In a country searching for the best use of its freedom, she found the best use of her own.
Because she was stupid, she studied and taught a low IQ subject. Her first degree was in English but to go further in that subject (at that time) you needed Latin, Greek, French and also had to learn Anglo-Saxon & so forth. If she had done History in India, she would have been forced to learn Sanskrit & Persian & Arabic. The good news about studying Indian history abroad is that you don't need to know much about India. You can rely on secondary sources & get extra marks for being a genuine darkie.
Now, late in her life and her career, as religious nationalism
which triumphed in 1947
and authoritarianism
which peaked in 1975
tear apart and transform India,
There is no 'tearing apart'. Transformation is on the basis of rising productivity & life chances.
she is witness to yet another historical rupture,
Rahul is a cretinous coward. That is why he refused to become PM & lead his party to victory in 2014
and a new regime in which she is both a figure of dissent and a scholar of it.
She is neither. Nobody gives a flying fuck about her. Why? It turned out she had no evidence to back up her claims re. the Ram Temple etc.
In October 1986 Romila Thapar & 12 other JNU historians wrote an angry letter opposing the committee formed for Sri Krishna Janmasthan at Mathura. They claimed that Hindus and destroyed Jain & Buddhist temples but Muslims had seldom done so. Sita Ram Goel showed this claim was nonsense. Thapar & Co were not able to controvert the evidence he presented. The Indian History Congress (IHC), was a Marxist outfit and as such had every right to oppose the construction of temples because God is a fucking Jewish Capitalist as was proved beyond doubt by Prophet Kali Marks & Spencer. What was odd, was that it began passing resolutions almost every year, from 1984 onward, urging the government to 'protect' the Babri Masjid. It was this double standard which stuck in the craw of the Indian intelligentsia. It is one thing to be against organized Religion. It is another to suck up to the fucking Ayatollahs.
Which is why, to many Indians, Thapar is a national treasure, and to others she is a traitor.
She is an upper-class lady from a family close to what was the ruling dynasty. True, she was useless as a historian but, maybe, she was only pretending to lurve Islam. After all, she could be considered a Partition refugee who had to be sycophantic to the powers that be.
In 1947, the year of independence and partition in the subcontinent, Thapar was 15, in her final year at convent school in Poona, and class prefect. She was told it would be her privilege to lower the Union Jack and raise the new flag on the school grounds. She would also have to give a 15-minute speech. That threw her into a tizzy. For several nights, she lay in bed worrying about what to say: what did it mean to be Indian, outside of the British Raj?
The same thing as it had meant in 1930 at which time the British made it clear that the country- which was already a member of the League of Nations- would move towards Dominion status. To be fair, she might not have understood what such big words meant.
Thapar was born in 1931 into an elite
self-made & quite wealthy but not elite. They weren't royals.
class of Punjabi Khatris, one well-rewarded for its service to the British Raj. Her father was a doctor in the army, so Thapar spent much of her early childhood in the rebellious North-West Frontier, on British India’s border with Afghanistan.
It is still rebellious. Pakistan has been fighting a war with Afghanistan this year.
Home was the hill-fortress of Thal. From there, her father would drive to practice in nearby villages, and Romila would go with him, spending hours cloistered with Pashtun women, acquiring from them a love of rings and silver jewellery. The family later moved to cantonments: Peshawar and Rawalpindi along the North-West Frontier, and later Poona, in peninsular India.
If she had any literary talent, she could have written about this.
Every winter without fail, Romila would travel to Lahore to spend the holidays with her cousins in her grandmother’s large home. Lahore was the capital of the province of Punjab, and a byword for the urbane mingling of India’s faiths and cultural abundance.
Kipling had given it a certain glamour. It was doing well economically. Punjab was exporting wheat to global markets.
It was the twin city to Delhi, only 250 or so miles away.
Back then, Delhi was a backwater. Like Lala Hardayal, you did your first degree at St. Stephens & then went to Lahore University.
In 1947, however, when the country was divided into India and the new state of Pakistan – the gruesome condition of its independence – her grandmother’s house, the city of Lahore, and half of Punjab were severed from India.
Why? Will Karnad- or Thapar- admit this was because Muslims have no love for kaffirs? No.
For a year, the province was convulsed with atrocities, as its residents were driven in terror across a new border, into the nation-states where they now ostensibly belonged; Muslims west into Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs east into India. The ethnic cleansing had started months earlier, but it was off the leash by August 1947, when young Romila lay sleepless in bed.
Army families would be safely evacuated. They would gain compensation in the form of property confiscated from Muslims who had fled or whom the Custodian of Evacuee property believed were 'intending' to leave.
What did it mean now, to be Indian?
Hindu. If you were Muslim, you stayed in Lahore.
A hint at one answer was inscribed on the flag she would raise on the morning of 15 August. Its central device was an archaeological motif: a spoked wheel, or chakra,
Guess what a Hindu Emperor is called? 'Chakravartin'. Nehru's dynasty saw itself in this light.
found on a ruined pillar in Sarnath. Rediscovered in the 19th century, the inscriptions on this pillar, and others like it, had helped reveal a picture of an ancient empire, that of the Mauryas.
There was plenty of information available about them from Jain & Sinhala chronicles, Greek travellers & the Arthashastra.
At its peak in the 3rd century BCE, the Mauryan rulers held sway over most of the subcontinent, under a sort of philosopher-king, Ashoka.
He was an able warrior & administrator. Milinda could be called a philosopher.
The discovery of Ashoka and the Mauryas had been a balm to the ego of colonised India.
No. The previous celebrations of the Vedas, Manusmriti etc. had been that balm. Nobody gave a shit about Buddhism. However, 'ahimsa' (non-violence) was a convenient doctrine if you were a loyalist or genuinely grateful for 'Pax Britannica'.
It meant that, like the Europeans and the Persians, Indians too had had an empire of the classical age, strong but enlightened;
Europeans already knew this because of a Macedonian bloke named Alexander. Hindus, of course, had longer memories of ancient dynasties which had ruled vast territories.
Rome but also Greece. In 1950, the 2,000-year-old symbols of Ashoka became the chosen emblems of the modern republic of India.
It replaced Gandhi's spinning wheel. Sadly, the sexy figurine of the Harappan dancing girl wasn't used.
History was unfolding all around her. But in the early years of the republic, history – let alone ancient history – was no subject for a bright young person.
It never was. If you were smart you did STEM subjects or, at the very least, became a lawyer or got into the ICS & other covenanted services. In the Fifties, it is true, it was the mathematical economist who had the securest path to power & influence. Manmohan was a two term Prime Minister.
The country was building its way out of colonial backwardness with infrastructure and industry.
This had started under the Brits.
The ‘temples of modern India’, said Nehru, were hydroelectric dams.
The first such was built in 1897.
Thapar was a precocious student, but she was at a loss for what to do with herself.
She was too stupid to do STEM subjects. Sad.
In her high-ceilinged living room, which seems almost built out of countless books and the mementos of her career, Thapar recalled her unsteady start – the girl before she found her tiger.
The reference is to her nephew who was a tiger conservationist.
‘I agonised,’ she said. ‘What should I do? What should I do? Bored the hell out of all my father’s friends because they’d come to see my parents and I’d sit there and say: What do you advise me to do? What subject should I take up?’
Why not medicine? There was always a need for female doctors. Also, her daddy was a doctor.
It was always certain that Thapar would receive a higher education, but it was far less clear that she’d have a profession or career. Her mother was a college graduate, but had never been allowed to work outside the home.
Perhaps, if her husband had been a Civil Surgeon, she would have been a teacher at the local Government Girls school. She is likely to have become its Principal.
Romila’s older sister was married and a homemaker. Her father was patient, but he was always clear: ‘Ultimately, you have to get married. We have to find you a husband. Just try not to be difficult about it.’
Fair point. Either you have an arranged marriage or you end up eloping with some Muslim Lothario. Nehru's sister had done so. Mahatma Gandhi himself had to break up the marriage.
In 1953, Thapar escaped to London,
she was sent there by Daddy. There was enough money for either a degree or a dowry- not both. Thapar chose well. Hubby might turn into an alcoholic.
enrolling in a programme in history at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies,
though Indian history was better taught in India.
where she became a favourite of A L Basham
He had a degree in Sanskrit from SOAS & did his PhD on the Ajivikas. Though his attainments were slender, he wrote well and had a genuine interest in religion & spirituality. He married an accomplished Bengali lady & had a daughter.
, one of Britain’s leading Indologists. His classes were so specialised – and undersubscribed – that they became, in effect, personal tutorials.
SOAS was a gentleman's club. It was said that Professors had Intelligence connections. Sadly, these weren't with the KGB. Why? They were too stupid for it to be worthwhile recruiting them.
Her adventures outside the classroom were just as educational. To a young Indian woman raised in stuffy cantonment towns, the sheer autonomy – and the fun – was amazing. The buzzy cosmopolitanism of London, Thapar later wrote, left her ‘utterly intoxicated’.
It left me actually intoxicated. Thapar wasn't a lush.
She was invited by friends to go hitchhiking in Provence, France. They visited Roman ruins and slept in hostels that were often no more than barns, with bales of hay to spread out as beds. On the roads, the small automobiles rarely had room for three, so they would wave down trucks, ‘these huge camions’, and squeeze in on the wooden bench on which the drivers slept at night. It was a summer she had never imagined she would experience.
Meanwhile, back in India, there were highly educated Indian women who were making common cause with the revolting masses in places like Telengana.
When her undergraduate programme came to an end, her father wrote to say that he was out of funds. She would have to come home and – here she paused – ‘get married’.
i.e. he had enough funds to buy her some basic sort of groom- if not a horse & carriage. Perhaps, the hope was, she would get married to a nice White Professor
In turmoil, Thapar wrote to her elder brother, Romesh. He replied with a line she still enjoys repeating. ‘He said: Marry if you must, but not if only turnips are available.’
Her brother was doing well. At the very least, she could make a living as a journalist.
‘That clinched it.’ Here was a reason to discontinue tradition. She applied for a doctoral fellowship, proposing – almost to her own surprise – to study Ashoka.
A safe option.
Some in the committee grumbled; they believed the subject was done to death.
But SOAS mainly attracted thickos. You can't expect them to do any original work.
She won her doctoral award anyway. She went to ‘Bash’ to tell him the news.
He was a nice man & loved India.
‘He looked at my face and said: Why are you looking so depressed? I’ve never seen you look so depressed.’
‘I said, I’ve got the fellowship.’ She mimicked a voice of despair: ‘I’ve got to become a historian.’
Fair point. The life of a young historian is one of drudgery & diminishing returns.
In Ashoka, Thapar had a subject who harmonised with contemporary society and its concerns.
No. What 'contemporary society' was concerned with was land reform. But for this to be effective, you had to understand how things had gotten to the present state. The Brits, after all, had taken over an already existing system. Was this also the case with Akbar & Allaudin? It was pointless to go back much further than that.
The Ashokan inscriptions, inscribed in rock-faces and pillars – most in the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts, but a few in Greek and Aramaic – are among the oldest legible writings found in the subcontinent. Among much else, they tell this legend: after witnessing a great carnage at the battle in Kalinga (modern-day Odisha), Ashoka repented his imperial wars.
The Kalingans got their revenge under the Jain King, Kharevail.
Moved by the teachings of the Buddha, he began to propagate a code of non-violence, the Buddhist dhamma.
Why did other 'universal' Emperies adopt 'universalist' Religions at around the same time? The answer was that such religions spread literacy & this was helpful for creating an Imperial bureaucracy. Furthermore, universal religions suppress thymotic strife of a clannish type.
His edicts call for mutual tolerance between bahmanam-shamanam: that is, between the orthodoxy of Vedic Brahminism, with its sacrificial rituals and hereditary priesthood, and newer, distinctive beliefs like those of the Buddhists and Jains, which swayed followers toward self-salvation through an ethical code.
There were Hindu monastic orders. Indeed- 'Vratyas' may have existed in Vedic times.
Thapar immersed herself in the inscriptions, and the philology – the close reading of ancient languages – that informed earlier work.
Do Indians consider her a good Sanskritist? No. Her English, however, is perfectly serviceable.
She was also alert to newer methods becoming available from adjacent social sciences.
She was too stupid to absorb them. Econometrics is mathematical.
She grew comfortable with her identity as a historian, knowing that the discipline – its rigour of research and writing – ‘would give direction to my great need for autonomy’.
There had been more rigour in Indian history departments in the Fifties- which is why Ranajit Guha didn't get a PhD from Calcutta. Romilla was a nice, well connected, lady whose brother was an influential Lefty. Thus she had to be tolerated.
She still had a taste for physical adventure, and increasingly, an eye for what the historian might learn from actual landscape.
Indian landscapes? No.
In 1957, halfway through writing her dissertation, she was invited to be an assistant on an expedition to the Buddhist cave-sites at Maijishan and Dunhuang.
Which aren't in India.
She travelled in the interiors of revolutionary China, then on the eve of the Great Leap Forward, dancing the foxtrot with Russian engineers, playing table-tennis with monks and revolutionary guardsmen, and eventually even shaking hands with China’s premier Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao himself.
This was the time of 'Pancheel' & Hindi-Chini bhai bhai.
In Xi’an, she visited the monastery of Xuanzang, a 7th-century pilgrim to India, and a great friend to modern historians because of the priceless chronicle he left of his travels. Thapar, alone on an upper balcony, looking out over the monastery and the land, felt an uncanny sensation: the ‘sweep of past centuries’ made palpable around her.
Though the same could be said of the Delhi landscape.
Back in Beijing, she was eager to meet Chinese academics to discuss what she had seen.
But she didn't know Chinese. Also she hadn't seen much.
‘The questions were broadly concerned with what they were doing to protect the ancient sites, and whether the new society that they were organising after the revolution was what they had wanted,’ she told me. She found them reticent. The previous year, Mao had urged that ‘a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.’ Already this brief window for dissent was closing. In a diary she kept at the time, Thapar noted the rising noise of the party’s rectification campaigns – disciplinary actions to enforce the party line.
Thapar learned her lesson well. Follow the party line but also appear to be an utter imbecile. Otherwise, they might insist you join the Party & hand over a portion of your wages.
Historians had begun to face vague but chilling accusation of being ‘Rightist’. (One of them, Xiang Da,
who died during the Cultural Revolution. He was 66 years old. The Tujia ethnicity, to which he belonged, suffered severe famine related mortality during the Great Leap Forward.
an authority on the Dunhuang murals, had allegedly remarked that a hundred flowers were not blooming in the field of Chinese history, but only five, and they all said the same thing.) To Thapar, the shift in the scholarly climate ‘was sad, and somewhat shattering after our time and work.’ She wrote: ‘So far there have been no tanks and no bloodshed. But will it stop at this?’
No. Communism is utterly shitty. Still, they might seize power in India. Better be a 'useful idiot'.
Thapar’s dissertation was published in 1961 as Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas.
Like Chinese Empires, Indian Empires declined because of monsoon failure or other climactic reasons.
It was groundbreaking work, veering away from modes of historiography that dominated the study of ancient India at the time. Influentially, she explained Ashoka’s dhammic code of tolerance as a moral but also an imperial ideology: one that ‘borrowed from Buddhist and Hindu thought’ but also served to hold together a humongous empire.
It was like Alexander's 'homonoia'. China took a different part by creating a bureaucracy with its own ideology & paideia.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Nehru’s India, a large, poor and increasingly riotous democracy, was trying to do something similar – to hold state authority and dissent in balance,
No. It was kicking the shit out of dissent- if this could be safely done. The problem was that lack of revenue meant State Capacity was low- more particularly because the State was doing stupid shit.
without falling apart. Thapar saw herself naturally included in its project.
The project of doing stupid shit.
With her doctorate complete, she returned to Delhi. Many of the extended family there, she found, viewed her study abroad as ‘a kind of finishing school’.
She had learned how to use fork & knife. Hopefully she would not kill cows and eat them.
‘They said, What are you doing now?
Killing cows? No? Well that's all right then.
‘And I said, I’m teaching.’
Set up a private school & you can make good money. Look at Bimla Nanda. Not only did she marry a well connected America (who founded Fabindia), she set up an elite pre-school (Playhouse) for New Delhi's posh kids. This meant everybody had to be very nice to her otherwise their grandkids might end up being taught Hindutva by darkies.
‘Oh, so you’ll become a school mistress.’
The headmistress of an elite school is a person of great consequence. IAS officers will ensure she gets a big building plot & plenty of cement etc. If you want a summer home in Kashmir, the rules will be bent so you can do so. On the other hand, if you end up as a College Professor, nobody will give you the time of day.
When her brother Romesh came up from Bombay to see her, though, he put a word in their father’s ear. He told him: ‘Please remember, you are not to treat her as an unmarried daughter. You have to treat her as you would a professionally qualified son.’
Don't forget, the country is moving to the Left. Having a female Leftie academic in the family can be very helpful to us- provided we suck up to the dynasty.
Romesh had always understood her, she said, but ‘I was very, very impressed with that.’
He had the savvy to ingratiate himself with Indira.
The sweep of Thapar’s work in the 60-odd years since then is not easily conveyed.
save by saying it was moronic shite.
Since Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, she has produced more than two dozen other volumes, which established her as the doyenne of her period – early India – and of the subcontinent’s history at large.
She says early India was shit. That's why Indians must be content with a recent India that is shit.
Moving beyond dynastic history, she enquired into the formation of early Indian social structures: kingship, caste groups, religious sects, early states and their economic forms.
No she didn't. Why was there convergent evolution of jatis over such a large stretch of territory? Thapar has no answer to this question. Sadly, the answer is game-theoretic & explains such variation as existed. Thapar was too stupid to go in for this.
Alongside the study of classical, usually Sanskrit, texts, her generation of historians went to work with archaeological and social-scientific methods. Over the 1960s and ’70s, as Indian history ‘moved from being Indology to a social science’, many of Thapar’s ideas became paradigmatic in the field.
Only for useless cretins.
In 1970, she joined the faculty of a new university founded in New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),
she was previously a Professor at Miranda College- which is part of Delhi Uni. Nothing wrong with that at all. Plenty of smart girls took History & then passed the Civil Service exams.
a pioneer in interdisciplinary teaching and critical inquiry. Today, it is regularly ranked as India’s best university.
It is a central university- in other words, it will be taken over by the hacks of the ruling party.
At the same time, Thapar had brought her critical approach to another exercise: writing new textbooks for Indian schools.
Under the dynasty. Now a different party is in power, those textbooks are being rewritten. Nobody cares.
The existing curricula taught history as a fixed sequence of events, for students to recite like catechism, she said. Thapar thought they should teach explanations for historical phenomena and change, and how historians reach those explanations.
She didn't know those explanations because they are game theoretic.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounds – ‘I would much rather write a PhD thesis all over again than write another textbook for children,’ she later said – but it was an important, not to say patriotic, undertaking.
It was anti-Hindu- more particularly anti-Brahmin. Thapar is a Kshatriya & tolerates Buddhism because its founder was a Kshatriya.
She never married. At one point, while she was in her 40s, her mother urged her to adopt a child. It could be a girl, her mother said; daughters do more to look after you in your old age. ‘I thought about it quite seriously,’ Thapar told me. Her mother even offered to help raise the child, since Thapar was busy, ‘rushing around giving lectures here, there and everywhere’. Ultimately, she chose not to. ‘I said: no, I think it would be unfair on the child. I wouldn’t be able to give it – give her – the kind of attention that I would like to give a child.’
Good for her. Daughters must lead their own lives.
Thapar was in her 50s by the time India’s feminist movement arrived in strength in the 1980s.
It was pretty strong in the late Sixties & Seventies when a woman took over the running of the country. I'd say Nandini Satpathy was the first radical feminist to become Chief Minister (in 1973).
She is a committed feminist (visiting Paris, she would lay flowers at the grave of Simone de Beauvoir)
French women got the vote 20 years after the first Indian women got it.
but never felt a need to ‘write volumes on the status of women’ herself. ‘Some of us could just live a free life and, through the way we lived and talked and claimed our rights, we could make people think.’
What made people think was Indira forcibly sterilizing millions of poor men.
She taught at JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies, as professor of ancient Indian history, until her retirement, mandatory at the age of 60, in 1991. She is now a professor emerita there. Her career did not slow. After her retirement, colleagues honoured her with a Festschrift, or tribute: Tradition, Dissent and Ideology (1996). Nearly three decades later, with Thapar still active, a younger generation produced another: Questioning Paradigms, Constructing Histories (2019).
They are as useless as she is. Anyway, it was the 'Subaltern' school which most flourished. Indeed, post-colonial theory seems to have had quite an impact on Western Campuses.
After her ostensible retirement, she wrote Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002), which found a wide lay readership, despite the few concessions Thapar makes to genial or accessible prose. She was awarded honorary doctorates from leading universities on four continents, among them Oxford, the University of Pretoria and the University of Chicago. She twice declined the offer of a Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honour given by India’s central government, saying she preferred to ‘accept awards from academic institutions or those associated with my professional work’. In 2008, she shared the million-dollar Kluge Prize given by the US Library of Congress: the first woman, and the first scholar not living in the West, to ever receive it.
It had only been introduced in 2003. The other female to get it is African-American.
Thapar’s public lectures and events still fill up auditoria. On a Monday evening last July, I arrived at one such event – a panel discussion of ancient cultural ties between India and Rome – to find a crowd of Delhi gentry outside the gate, incredulous at not being allowed in. It was a full house, and then some; inside, people were already seated in the aisles and there was no room left even to stand.
The Indian upper middle class likes buying books but doesn't read them. Instead, they claim to have received 'darshan' from the author. When I was a kid in Delhi, the landlord of my Uncle's house in Karol Bagh would often reminisce about his meetings with Wallam Shake-peer & John Milton in London- where he himself had received a diploma in shoe-making. He did offer me one good piece of advise- 'don't read English books. They are filled with filth. I own all English books but won't let anyone read them'. Naturally, this encouraged me to read Shakespeare to get to the naughty bits.
The organiser, the conservation architect Ratish Nanda, tried to mollify the crowd, most of whom belonged to a class of citizens not used to being refused. Nanda suggested that we take a sundown stroll in the restored Mughal garden next door.
In July? Fuck that. A nice air-conditioned auditorium is preferable.
Some of us agreed. Drifting around the park, we confessed to each other how funny it was to feel this anxious to attend an academic panel discussion.
with air-conditioning
An hour later, as we circled back, a handful of people were still at the venue’s gates, fighting to get in, attempting various forms of influence on the security guard. That was a show worth watching, too.
Arre, you duffers are not knowing, I am Walliam Shakespeare! Romillaji was my student in London. That's why she spick Inglis gud.'
‘I guess it’s a good sign,’ said one person, ‘that she still has so many fans.’
Fuck fans. Airconditioning is the way to go.
A common way to speak of Thapar is to say she is an institution.
not a latrine
And, like many Indian institutions – universities, courts, the Constitution – Thapar has spent the past decade under attack.
No. Everybody understood all three were crap decades ago. IITs & IIMs are a different matter.
As a historian, Thapar’s main confrontation has always been with Hindu nationalism, or ‘Hindutva’.
Her people had to run away from Lahore. Naturally, they harbour an animus against the religion of the people who took them in.
The historiography she’d helped pioneer often broke up the frames of earlier history-writing, including a particularly rusty meta-narrative: India as the home of a timeless Hindu civilisation, ancient and continuous, but threatened since 1000 CE by Muslim invaders and tyrants.
From whom Thapar's family had to flee once Muslim power revived & the Brits exited.
This binary picture of the past – an ancient Hindu sublime and its medieval Islamic inversion – originated as a colonial theory,
No. It originated when Hindus were massacred or forcibly converted unless they fled to Hindu majority areas. This happened with the advent of Islam in the sub-continent. Thapar witnessed it for herself.
one that justified benevolent British rule displacing the Mughals.
British rule was a golden period for Thapar's family- not to mention the dynasty.
By the 20th century, it had become the gospel truth of Hindutva.
Because it was true. Why not pretend that the Greeks were instigated into throwing out the Turks by evil Britishers like Lord Byron
In 1977, a conservative-led alliance
It included the CPM
took power in India, bringing Hindu nationalists into the central government for the first time.
Hindu nationalists have predominated in the Congress party. When Nehru became Prime Minister, the Muslim population of Delhi was 33 percent. Within a year it was down to 5 percent. True, at a later point, Muslims became a vote-bank for the Dynasty. But they were still harassed by the Custodian of Enemy property- if they were rich- or massacred if they were poor. Rajiv's genius was to slaughter Sikhs as well. He won a huge majority.
A burst of official censure of school history textbooks followed with some withdrawn or their distribution reduced, including ones written by Thapar. The alliance soon failed, but the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP), the electoral wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, was set to grow steadily in strength.
Because it was less shite than the other Janata parties.
In its first full term, in the early 2000s, the BJP resumed its campaign to correct, in school textbooks, what it saw as the entrenched historiographical bias against ‘Hindus’, one that had left them diminished and demoralised.
It was a godsend for the BJP.
Thapar spoke up in protest, and was drawn into controversy, and so into the harsh limelight of the culture wars.
Sonia, remembering her brother's close relationship with Indira, turned to her for advise on Indian culture. At the time Congress was in alliance with the Left & it was thought an anti-Hindu bias would appeal to those atheists.
Hostility toward academic historians had
always been around. People still read history books by the earlier generation of nationalist Hindu historians. They didn't read- or couldn't understand, if they did read- the worthless shite churned out by Leftists.
‘revived with the BJP government in 1999’, Thapar told me, ‘and with even more concentration since 2014’. That year, Narendra Modi led the party back into power, where it has stayed for more than a decade. To many of its supporters, and some of its opponents, the 2014 mandate was an event as transformative as 1947.
Only because Rahul refused to step up to the plate. Either the Dynasty must rule or it must appoint a proxy- like Manmohan- to do it for them.
The Modi regime has fought its history wars from the outside in.
No. It has better things to do. There were plenty of elderly Hindutvadis willing & able to make mincemeat of the Leftists. This was shown by the Ayodhya judgment.
Its grand narrative has returned, mainly through a mandate to creative industries; Hindi movies, popular publishing and TV news have all fallen in line.
Because they are profit-driven. If Lefty shite doesn't sell, drop it.
The historical genre in Bollywood is now dominated by a rolling spectacle of Hindu heroics against lurid Islamic savagery, as in Chhaava (2025), one of last year’s highest-earning Bollywood films. Professional historians have not yielded as easily.
Nobody cares, since nobody has heard about them.
Many have been quiet. Others, like Thapar, ready to dispute these caricatures of history, have become targets themselves.
Not really. We know her family was close to the Dynasty. Nothing wrong with that. The question is whether she gave Sonia good advise. She didn't.
First they came for JNU. The university is famed for having a Left-leaning student body, equally keen to read and to march.
It was subsidised by the Central Government. But, Indira beat the shit out of students when they tried to wag their tails. Abhijit Bannerjee himself was carted off to Jail though he was very well connected.
In 2016, the government began a long campaign to tame the radical campus. Police entered JNU following an on-campus protest for Kashmir,
which were a godsend for the BJP. They now rule Delhi. Congress & the Left have all but disappeared because of Shaneen Bagh & 'tukde tukde'.
and later arrested three of its student leaders. When one of the students was taken to court, the police stood back while Right-wing lawyers kicked, punched and humiliated his supporters for cameras.
Lawyers also beat up the police. The Police Commissioner refused to take action because he was retiring & feared bad publicity. This demoralized the police who were slow to react against anti-Hindu mobs at the time of the Trump visit. This too helped the BJP.
On primetime TV, news anchors used doctored video-clips to carry out a Grand Guignol of the ‘anti-nationals’ of JNU. The students were accused of sedition, which can lead to a life sentence. One of them, Umar Khalid, was working on a doctorate in history.
He is now a 'history-sheeter' like Sharjeel Imam. Kanhaiya Kumar, has abandoned his buddies & has joined Congress.
On campus, Thapar joined a series of protest teach-ins, which drew an audience of thousands. She knew what would come. Neither her measured, methodical style nor her international prestige would protect her from it. She began receiving threats and abuse over the phone – these continue, mostly over email. The same year, Mumbai Police provided an escort when she visited the city to give a lecture. By 2019, even the administration of JNU – where she had taught for 20 years, and been an emerita for almost another 30 – was asking Thapar to show them her CV in order to review her position.
Nobody cared.
On line, a widening campaign denounces her as a ‘saboteur’, a ‘failed Marxist Ghazi’ (ghazi is a medieval term for a crusading warrior for Islam),
it is the title of Ataturk. Asim Munir certainly thinks of himself as a Ghazi.
or in the phrase of a 2025 piece in the Organiser magazine, an ‘architect of intellectual treason’. ‘Thapar’s cabal,’ one web editorial recently had it, ‘disfigured the psyche of at least three generations … by poisoning Indian history.’ So far, there have been no tanks. Much of the force of intellectual intimidation in India remains anonymous, digital and decentralised.
I used to receive rape threats when my Twitter handle was 'Honeytits Cumbucket'.
It has been easy to treat Thapar, who exemplifies a class to which I also belong – of English-speaking Leftish liberals – as an effigy of a subversive, ‘anti-national’ elite.
Thapar's family was important. Girish Karnad's family- not so much.
It is even easier because of her sex. ‘I get abused not for the history I’m writing, but for being a woman. There’s a very substantial quantity of that,’ she said. ‘There are, for example, interviews on YouTube – with comments. There are some really horrible things, pornographic, sexist.’ In this regard, she said: ‘Being a woman has been tough.’
Only if you actually are a woman. I had no great difficulty being both a woman and a cat.
I don’t say so, but I suspect she hasn’t seen the half of it. (She does not use social media.) But she must have thick skin.
She is a thicko. SOAS didn't attract smart people.
‘Not too thick, but thick enough,’ she said. ‘Thick enough to keep on going.’
She wasn't embarrassed when her side lost the Ayodhya case. This is because she knew her 'evidence' was a pack of lies.
The real cost of her public stance, she thinks, has been time. She still has work to do, but India’s new establishment is crowded with ersatz historians, pandering to fantasies and resentments, and ‘when startling statements are made, then the next lecture I give, I tend to address that,’ she sighs. ‘It’s not that it’s taking up very much time, but the little it has taken up I would rather have spent on major questions.’
You have to be smart to tackle major questions. Thapar is a thicko.
Through her career, she has made a sustained study of the lineage of intellectual dissent in India.
It exists without any lineage.
From the Ashokan edicts, Thapar discerned that dissent was a salient feature of ancient India.
This like saying 'defecation was a salient feature of ancient Mayan Civilization. The lineage of defecation had to do with having a Mummy and a Daddy, both of whom took dumps from time to time'.
(In fact, it was evident in the history of religions everywhere, she had said, and India was no different.) Here it was enshrined in early philosophy, which even described a system of constructive debate resembling dialectics: between poorva-paksha (the thesis) and prati-paksha (the antithesis), from which confrontation there may evolve siddhanta (the resolution).
Indians had logic. So did everybody else. Defecation, however, was confined to the ancient Mayans.
‘My generation of students was brought up to believe that there was no dissent in the Indian past,’ Thapar has said.
She is mad. My Mum's generation was brought up to believe that Buddhists dissented from Brahmanism & Bhakti saints dissented from Buddhism etc. etc.
‘Everybody agreed with everybody, and it moved seamlessly from one point to the next.’
Nonsense!
The early Orientalists had portrayed ancient India as a scene of drowsy, sensual stasis.
No. They had portrayed it as a wealthy & highly productive territory with big cities & ports and vast armies.
On that basis, nationalists built their own view of harmonious Indic civilisation free of any kind of internal conflict.
No. Nationalists gassed on about great Kings fighting other great Kings. The Mahabharata isn't the story of a Sorority sleep-over. It is the tale of what led up to a great battle & its tragic outcome.
‘The tradition of dissent is not intended to bring solace. It is rather a justification for the right to dissent, and a support for doing so’
By contrast, the tradition of defecation, does bring solace. Contra Thapar, there is no justification for carrying on a tradition- e.g. that of sacrificing your first born to Ba'al- which doesn't bring any fucking solace at all.
Her study of pluralism, schism and conflict within Indian structures of religion – bahmanam-shamanam onwards – punctured a hallowed image of pre-Islamic India as a continuous zone of enlightened consensus.
Indians made a distinction between 'matam' (dogma) and vigyan (science or praxis). If the vigyan is the same, maybe the differences in matam don't greatly matter. One may say that Umasvati-Nagarjuna-Sankara are 'observationally equivalent'. The Shraman is just a Brahmin who doesn't want to get married. What matters is whether some Prince or Guild will pay for his upkeep.
‘What I have been interested in all along is the social roots of religion,
in which case, it is helpful if you are yourself religious & participate in congregational worship
which I’ve used in my history,’ she said. ‘And therefore I’m accused of being anti-Hindu, which is the wrong accusation because it’s not that I’m anti-Hindu but I’m showing another dimension of religion, which is not liked by the worshipper.’
She is Kshatriya. She says 'boo to Brahmins!' Nothing wrong in that. But it isn't History.
In 2023, she published a short book on the subject, Voices of Dissent.
Sarkari sycophant thinks she is a dissident! But she wouldn't have been if Rahul hadn't been both cowardly & supremely incompetent.
She is not satisfied. ‘That’s my one regret – that I didn’t spend more time on that subject,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to suggest that we’ve deliberately ignored the dissenting tradition. It was a very strong one.’
It was and is wholly inconsequential.
The question of dissent sounds through many parts of her life: as a line of scholarly enquiry; as a personal principle and orientation in public; and as a habit to encourage in younger Indians, many of whom won’t remember the more expansive, voluble country that India was prior to 2014.
It was ruled by nice Italian lady. Maybe, if Rahul marries a nice Persian cat, that pussy will rule India for him.
Today it is a more brittle society, trained to exalt a mythical past of piety, conformity and order.
Modi has replaced dissent with defecation. Bastard has even built toilets for rural women so that they can stop dissenting and start defecating! Chee, chee!
To claim a tradition of dissent here is an act of dissent in itself.
Only in the sense that to claim there was no tradition of defecation in India, prior to Modi, is to shit the Professorial chair you occupy.
I asked Thapar if the long view was a source of solace in a stifled, oppressive time.
Who is stifling either of these nutters?
‘The tradition of dissent is not intended to bring solace,’ she replied, in classic, unsentimental style. ‘It is rather a justification for the right to dissent, and a support for doing so, and with reasons for doing so.’
Rights are only meaningful if linked to remedies under a vinculum juris or bond of law. India recognises various right to dissent- including that of a Judge who doesn't share the majority view. But, for the matter to be justiciable, there must be a clear violation of an immunity- e.g. if the Bench says 'such and such historian must not get any employment or remuneration from the Government'. The State can appeal this while those named may also request judicial review. This appeal can certainly be based on the utility or public purpose served by expressing a view the Bench finds opprobrious.
It must be said, there are certain matters- e.g. sedition, hate speech directed at a particular community- where 'dissenting' views are heavily punishable under Indian law.
I’m 50 years younger than Thapar, and I’ve also spent my life in India. A single milieu – the Gandhian-Nehruvian experiment in pluralism, rights and social democracy
which ended with partition. India is unitary. Still, till there is a uniform civil code, we may say there is a degree of pluralism.
– shaped us both,
Thapar's education in London shaped her.
though her generation was the first to come of age within it, and mine may be the last.
Both Gandhi & Nehru had shit for brains. That is why their policies were abandoned.
What we embody is
stupidity
a contradiction, an identity crisis, or – in the reigning discourse in India – a kind of betrayal.
No. You are simply stupid.
Thapar is an Indian born into the colonial house of the English language,
This shithead hasn't heard about the US of A. Guess what language they speak there? It stopped being a colony in 17 fucking 76.
and into its liberal, international mores.
Actually, it was the Tories who passed the 1935 India Act.
But she has lived in India, studied it, and served in its institutions throughout her life.
No. She did not live in India while studying Indian history in London. How stupid is this shithead?
As a historian, she defies Hindu nationalism and its slanted ideas about the past.
Because she has slanted ideas of her own.
And she is better versed in the Sanskrit epics, the Vedas and the shastras than any critic who might come at her for being ‘a Hindu hater’.
Nonsense! Every fucking Hindu Pundit or Acharya or Upadhyaya is better versed in such things. But so are a lot of STEM subject mavens.
Her scholarly authority and prestige have been pressed into service, again and again, to defend those who are less well protected.
She failed on every occasion. Good historians don't make absurdly false claims.
In early 2020, she visited the women’s protest encampment in Shaheen Bagh, a semi-industrial outskirt of New Delhi. It had become the heart of a massive, country-wide movement to affirm India’s Constitution and its inclusive principles.
The Muslims there objected to non-Muslims, fleeing Islamic persecution, getting refuge in India. They failed. The BJP gained. Congress & the Left were wiped out.
In the conclusion of Voices of Dissent, Thapar wrote about being moved by the dignity of the women there, and their eloquence, without recourse to religious rhetoric.
They lost. Get over it.
With its non-violent ethos, and the crucial participation of women, Shaheen Bagh took her back to her own ‘very youthful participation’ in India’s freedom struggle.
She is lying. She didn't participate in it at all. I, on the other hand, was repeatedly arrested for shitting on Lord Curzon's head.
‘I felt after many years that I was witnessing a form of dissent that was somehow taking off from the roots of anticolonial nationalism,’ she wrote.
Because she was as stupid as shit. Her own people would not have been allowed to claim Indian citizenship if the Shaheen Bagh demand had been implemented in 1947.
Two weeks after her visit, however, the popular movement was stilled by a bloody, orchestrated riot in New Delhi.
Some Muslims were paid to start it because of Trump's visit.
Umar Khalid, the graduate student Thapar had stood with in 2016, had been a gentle and galvanising figure in the protests.
He was useless. At one time, people thought he could be used to split the vote, on a caste/creed basis, in some constituency with a strong Left infrastructure. But he was too crazy & stupid. The future lies with Owaisi who is a nationalist.
He was arrested, with other young Muslim leaders, under terrorism charges. Since September 2020, he has been in prison, without his trial having even begun. This January, a bench of India’s Supreme Court declined to uphold Khalid’s right to bail.
Because there is a prima facie case against him. Incidentally, India's draconian law in this respect dates back to the mid Sixties.
At this late stage in her career, and her life, Thapar fights a rearguard action for both dissent and historical scholarship.
i.e. she continues to repeat the same stupid lies.
She is not alone, but it is an increasingly lonely battle. With it comes the solitude of age. Time steals friends away, and physical frailty makes it harder to stay in touch with others. In December 2024, five months before the death of her nephew, Thapar lost one of her closest friends, Shirish Patel
who studied something useful at Cambridge.
, an engineer and urban planner devoted to Mumbai. He and his wife ‘were the kind of friends one thinks aloud with and doesn’t pause, you know’, she said. ‘I miss that very much indeed.’
Clearly, she found Karnad a cretin in comparison to Patel.
For Hindus, religion provides continuity. Moreover, the history of religion shows how collective action problems can be solved such that 'public signals' create superior Aumann correlated equilibria. Thapar was too stupid to understand this.
A good historian has company in his old age. It is the company of those who have said and done the best things in the best manner. Spivak spent her life amongst fools.
;... in a sense, continuity is a very meaningful way of living. I don’t mean that you should be completely stuck with it, and keep on thinking: What was it like in the past? and Am I carrying the past? The past goes on with you, without you even being aware of it. But there is something in that continuity that gives you the confidence that life will carry on.’
Hinduism & India will carry on. No thanks to her or Sen or other such shitheads.
In her generation, at least in India, Thapar is an outlier.
No. She was a nice enough lady of the sort who taught at Miranda House.
... Thapar still goes out into the world, with younger people at her side, to oppose the mounting wave of spurious history.
Sadly what she produced was shocking spurious.
Mornings tend to be quiet. She has company from the birds, she said, mostly magpies and bulbuls.
She always was bird-brained.
They arrive at the bowls of grain and water set out on Thapar’s veranda. Squirrels come too, and her dog, Bulleh,
Bulleh Shah? That's offensive to Muslims.
tries his luck for a bite of her breakfast. A recent guest is the ghoos, the bandicoot rat, who emerges from her hole in the corner of the garden, to the bulbuls’ distress. Occasionally, too, there is a long-tailed garden lizard, who approaches the very edge of the veranda. ‘It stands still and looks up at me, and I look at it,’ Thapar said, ‘And we go on out-staring each other, until it finally decides, This is no fun, and goes away.’
Thapar tried to make Indian History 'no fun'. Indians did 'go away' from it- if produced by cretinous Indian Leftists. But they still read Basham's 'the wonder that was India'.
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