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Romila Thapar

Indian historian (born 1931)

Romila Thapar (born 30 November 1931) is an Indian historian. Her principal area of study is ancient India. Thapar is a Professor of Ancient History, Emerita, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

on 23 June 2016

Quotes

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  • The fundamental sanity in Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.
    • A History of India, Volume 1, 1990, Penguin Books.
  • Not surprisingly, nationalism was replaced by a form of militant Hinduism, and the communal atmosphere in Indian politics in the late 1930s and the 1940s tended to vitiate the study of ancient and medieval history. The Gupta period became the ‘Golden Age’ largely because it was the period of renascent Hinduism. Many of the ills of India were ascribed to ‘the Muslim invasions and rule’. It was maintained that Hinduism in its Sanskritic form was the essential culture of India, and other forces were in a sense an intrusion.
    • Ancient Indian social history : some interpretations by Thapar, Romila [1] 1978.
  • [In India’s case] what one can foresee, perhaps, for the end of the next century [i.e. the twenty-first], is a series of small states federated within a more viable single economic space on the scale of the subcontinent.
    • Romila Thapar in an interview in Le Monde, 11 May 1993: quoted in The Problem of Indian History by Michel Danino* (Published in Dialogue, April-June 2012, vol. 13, no. 4)
  • All history is contemporary history; you can't get away from the politics around you.
    • Sagar: South Asia Graduate Research Journal, Volumes 2-3 Center for Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1995, 61
  • Capitalism is often believed to thrive among Semitic religions such as Christianity and Islam. The argument would then run that if capitalism is to succeed in India, then Hinduism would also have to be moulded in a Semitic form. ... Characteristic of the Semitic religions are features such as a historically attested teacher or prophet, a sacred book, a geographically identifiable location for its beginnings, an ecclesiastical infrastructure and the conversion of large numbers of people to the religion—all characteristics which are largely irrelevant to the various manifestations of Hinduism until recent times. Thus instead of emphasizing the fact that the religious experience of Indian civilization and of religious sects which are bunched together under the label of ‘Hindu’ are distinctively different from that of the Semitic, attempts are being made to find paralle!s with the Semitic religions as if these parallels are necessary to the future of Hinduism.
    • In Anatomy of a confrontation : the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi issue by Gopal, Sarvepalli, 1991 , (also quoted in Elst, Koenraad. Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam) online
  • The parallel can be seen for example in the recent resurgence of the worship of Rama, where the control of this religious articulation is politically motivated. The characteristics of the Semitic religions are introduced into this tradition. The teacher or prophet is replaced by the avatâra of Vishnu, Rama; the sacred book is the Râmâyana; the geographical identity or the beginnings of the cult and the historicity of Rama are being sought in the insistence that the precise birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya was marked by a temple, which was destroyed by Babur and replaced by the Babri Masjid; an ecclesiastical infrastructure is implied by inducting into the movement the support of Mahants and the Shankaracharyas or what the Vishwa Hindu Parishad calls a Dharma Sansad; the support of large numbers of people, far surpassing the figures of earlier followers of Rama-bhakti, was organized through the worship of bricks destined for the building of a temple on the location of the mosque. There has been an only too apparent exploitation of belief. The current Babri Masjid dispute is therefore symbolic of an articulation of a new form of Hinduism, militant, aggressive and crusading, which I have elsewhere referred to as Syndicated Hinduism.
    • 'Syndicated Moksha', Seminar, New Delhi, September 1985, 313, p. 22. See also, 'Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity', Modern Asian Studies, Cambridge, 1989, 2, 23, p. 239.
  • The invention of an Aryan race in nineteenth century Europe was to have, as we all know, far-reaching consequences on world history. Its application to European societies culminated in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Another sequel was that it became foundational to the interpretation of early Indian history and there have been attempts at a literal application of the theory to Indian society. Some European scholars now describe it as a nineteenth century myth. But some contemporary Indian political ideologies seem determined to renew its life. In this they are assisted by those who still carry the imprint of this nineteenth century theory and treat it as central to the question of Indian identity. With the widespread discussion on 'Aryan origins' in the print media and the controversy over its treatment in school textbooks, it has become the subject of a larger debate in terms of its ideological underpinnings rather than merely the differing readings among archaeologists and historians.
  • Dayananda Sarasvati, seeking to return to the social and religious life of the Vedas, used the Vedic corpus as the blueprint of his vision of Indian society. But he argued that the Vedas are the source of all knowledge including modern science, a view with which Max Mueller disagreed. He underlined the linguistic and racial purity of the Aryans and the organisation which he founded, the Arya Samaj, was described by its followers as 'the society of the Aryan race'. The Aryas were the upper castes and the untouchables were excluded.
  • The Hindutva version of the theory became a mechanism for excluding some sections of Indian society, specifically Indian Muslims and Christians, by insisting that they are alien.
  • If it can be argued that the Harappan culture is in fact Vedic or that the Rigveda is earlier even than the Harappan, then the Vedas continue to be foundational to the subcontinental civilisation of South Asia and also attract the encomium of representing an advanced civilization, superior even to the pastoral-agrarian culture actually described in Vedic texts.
  • The discovery of Harappan sites on the Indian side of the border between India and Pakistan is viewed as compensating for the loss of the cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa which are located in Pakistan.
  • Communal interpretation is based on the notion that for the last thousand years Indian history has been dominated by a society which consists of a monolithic Muslim community and a monolithic Hindu community. And that these two communities have always been in a state of conflict. Therefore every historical event that takes place is to be explained by this conflict. This I think is absolutely primitive history. This is worse than colonial history. Because historical interpretation has now moved on to a position where we analyse an event in a multi-causal way.
  • Another curious agenda is that of what is described as 'a critical mass' of Indians and a few others in America and Canada who refer to themselves as the Indo-American school (as against what they call the Indo-European school of scholars who work within the earlier Indian and European scholarship). The Indo-American school, according to one of its prominent spokesmen, consists of predominantly American-trained professional scientists researching on ancient India (presumably as a hobby), and using the resources of modern science and technology. Obviously well-endowed, they run their own journal from their main office in Canada. They too are committed to proving that the Vedic and the Harappan cultures are the same and that their antiquity goes back to the fifth millennium bc and therefore the Aryans are indigenous to India and took the Aryan mission westwards from India. Much of their writing contributes to the invention of yet more methodologies about a complex subject. What is striking about their publications is their evident unfamiliarity with the methods of analysing archaeological, linguistic and historical data. Consequently their writings read rather like nineteenth century tracts but peppered with references to using the computer so as to suggest scientific objectivity since they claim that it is value-free. Those that question their theories are dismissed as Marxists! That Indian scientists in America should take upon themselves the task of proving the Harappan to be Vedic, to having influenced other civilisations such as the Egyptian, and to proving that the Aryans proceeded on a civilising mission issuing out of India and going westwards, can only suggest that the 'Indo-American school' is in the midst of an identity crisis in its new environment. It is anxious to demarcate itself from other immigrants and to proclaim that the Indian identity is superior to the others who have also fallen into the 'great melting-pot'.
  • We know from the Qur'an that Lat, Uzza and Manat were the three pre-Islamic goddesses widely worshipped, and the destruction of their shrines and images, it was said, had been ordered by the Prophet Mohammad. Two were destroyed, but Manat was believed to have been secreted away to Gujarat and installed in a place of worship. According to some descriptions, Manat was an aniconic block of black stone, so the form could be similar to a lingam. This story hovers over many of the Turko-Persian accounts, some taking it seriously, others being less emphatic and insisting instead that the icon was of a Hindu deity. The identification of the Somanatha idol with that of Manat has little historical credibility. There is no evidence to suggest that the temple housed an image of Manat. Nevertheless, the story is significant to the reconstruction of the aftermath of the event since it is closely tied to the kind of legitimation which was being projected for Mahmud. The link with Manat added to the acclaim for Mahmud. Not only was he the prize iconoclast in breaking Hindu idols, but in destroying Manat he had carried out what were said to be the very orders of the Prophet. He was therefore doubly a champion of Islam.
  • Elliot and Dowson state that religious bigotry was characteristic of the Indian past. They do confess that in presenting the translations from Persian and Arabic sources, their intention is to highlight the oppressive rule of Muslim kings. They state that the intolerance of the Mohammedans led to idols being mutilated, temples destroyed, forced conversions, confiscations, murders and massacres, not to mention the sensuality and drunkenness of tyrants. Such descriptions were intended to convince the Hindu subjects that British rule was far superior and to their advantage. This was not an isolated attitude and is reflected in many British writings on Indian history. Religious bigotry was frequently read into the texts translated in the nineteenth century, which coloured the reading of the Turko-Persian texts. For example, where Utbi says, ‘He (Mahmud) made it obligatory on himself to undertake every year an expedition to Hind,’ the translation of this passage in Elliot and Dowson’s work reads, ‘the Sultan vowed to undertake a holy war to Hind every year’.
    • Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History, Penguin Group, 2008, pp. 207-8.
  • Secularism is the curtailment of religious control over social institutions, not the absence of religion from society. It is when our primary identity is of equal citizens of the nation, not as belonging to a particular religion or caste. But the Indian definition of secularism is limited to the coexistence of many religions which is incomplete because some religions can still be marginalised as they are.

Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

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The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, Penguin Books (2002).
  • To categorize some people as indigenous and others as alien, to argue about the identity of the first inhabitants of the subcontinent, and to try and sort out these categories for the remote past, is to attempt the impossible.
    • Introduction, xxiv.
  • That every civilization emerges out of interactions with others, but nevertheless creates its own miracle, was not yet recognized by either European or Indian historians.
    • p. 18.
  • Nationalism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject.
    • p. 19.
  • Some have argued that as language is the medium of knowledge, that which comes in the form of language constitutes a text; since language is interpreted by the individual, the reading by the individual gives meaning to the text; therefore each time a text is read by a different individual it acquires a fresh meaning. Taken to its logical conclusion, this denies any generally accepted meaning of a text and is implicitly a denial of attempts at historical representation or claims to relative objectivity, since the meaning would change with each reading. However, the prevalent views are more subtle.
    • p. 33.
  • Strangely, Indians travelling outside the subcontinent do not seem to have left itineraries of where they went or descriptions of what they saw. Distant places enter the narratives of storytelling only very occasionally.
    • p. 41.
  • The late arrival of the horse in India is not surprising since the horse is not an animal indigenous to India. Even on the west Asian scene, its presence is not registered until the second millennium BC. The horse was unimportant, ritually and functionally, to the Indus civilization.
    • p. 85.
  • Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.
    • p. 100.
  • Some forms of Indian asceticism, although not all, have a socio-political dimension and these cannot be marginalized as merely the wish to negate life.
    • p. 132.
  • Rajendra I ruled jointly with his father for two years, succeeding him in 1014. The policy of expansion continued with the annexation of the southern provinces of the Chalukyas, the rich Raichur doab and Vengi. Campaigns against Sri Lanka and Kerala were also renewed. But Rajendra’s ambitions had turned northwards. An expedition set out, marching through Orissa to reach the banks of the Ganges. From there, it is said, holy water from the river was carried back to the Chola capital. Bringing back the water through conquest symbolized ascendancy over the north. But Rajendra did not hold the northern regions for long, a situation parallel to that of Samudra Gupta’s campaign in the south almost 700 years earlier.
    • p. 365.
  • The destruction of temples even by Hindu rulers was not unknown, but Mahmud’s was a regulated activity and inaugurated an increase in temple destruction compared to earlier times
    • p. 427.

The Past as Present : Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

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The Past as Present, Aleph Book Company (2014).
  • Nations are not easily forged since many identities have to be coalesced.
  • In the questioning of existing explanations the validity of periodizing Indian history as Hindu, Muslim and British was increasingly doubted. It had projected two thousand years of a golden age for the first, eight hundred years of despotic tyranny for the second, and a supposed modernization under the British.
  • Pre-modern Hinduism had its warts—big and small—as do all religions, but its subtleties were richer than what is now being thrust on its believers. Hindutva is in many ways the antithesis of Hinduism, and aims to create a society that is narrow, bigoted and inward looking, in which the co-existence with those that differ, such as the minority communities of various kinds, is becoming increasingly impossible, as demonstrated by the frequency of communal riots.
  • Political ideologies focusing in particular on what they call ‘cultural nationalism’—and this is common to many societies apart from the Indian—blatantly exploit history.
  • Hindutva claims to represent indigenous Indian thought opposed to western interpretations of Indian religion, traditions and culture. The claim is that colonial scholarship used its understanding of Indian culture for political purposes to justify colonialism. Yet Hindutva is doing precisely the same by reformulating Hinduism along the lines suggested by colonial interpretations in order to facilitate its use in political mobilization. It uses colonial constructions of the Indian past such as the theories of James Mill and Max Mueller to further its programme of political control. The exploitation of history becomes a significant dimension of its attempt to appropriate the understanding of the past.
  • The history of India was constructed in accordance with nineteenth century European views on what history should be and what was thought to be Indian history.
  • A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.
  • I have over the years of my research been struck by the frequency with which the present makes use of the past either in a detrimental manner where it becomes a part of various political ploys, or alternatively in a positive manner to claim an enviable legitimacy and inheritance.
  • The political ideologues of the Hindu Right endorse a history rooted in colonial interpretations and are anxious to make that period of history a Hindu utopia.

Quotes about Romila Thapar

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  • I find Thapar’s emphasis on ‘freedom of expression’ very intriguing. The historical group of which Thapar is an eminent member came into being in the early 1970s “to give a national direction to an objective and scientific writing of history and to have rational presentation and interpretation of history”, as the web-site of the Indian Council of Historical Research declared. To argue that there was no ‘objective and scientific writing of history” till this group moved into government-sponsored power to control the funding and job-opportunities of historical research in India was distinctly reminiscent of a dictatorial streak in itself. By then historical research in the country had flourished for about a century and to argue that the previous historians were unaware of ‘objective and scientific writing of history’ was a vicious piece of self-aggrandisement on the part of this group. In fact, since the coming of this group to power, the world of Indian historical studies has been largely criminalised. When Thapar preaches in favour of historical tolerance, one does feel amused.... [Thapar] has not done much empirical research but considerably embellished her writings with smooth references to different vignettes of social science literature… Thapar’s attempt to paint herself and others of her ilk martyrs in the cause of historical studies is downright amusing... Romila Thapar has long been a Prima Donna… and her admirers go into tantrums at any kind of criticism of her.
    • D.K. Chakrabarti. in : Romila Thapar and the Study of Ancient India: History as propaganda: Dr. D.K. Chakrabarti, FOLKS Mag, June 2012. Edited by Dr. N.S. Rajaram. quoted in S. Balakrishna, 70 years of secularism. Also online at [2]
  • By making too much of fundamentalism, Thapar and her fellow travellers have made fundamentalism almost respectable. The fact that they are silent about the fundamentalism of other non-Hindu religious groups throws clear light on what is their attitude to the Indian religious scene.
    • DK Chakrabarti, Fifty Years of Indian Archaeology (1960-2010)

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  • Though she was already well-known, her hour of glory came with the unnecessary and artificial Ayodhya controversy. But in that controversy, she was on the wrong side. It doesn’t always come about, but in this case it did happen: justice. The wrong side, though absolutely dominant for more than a decade, was proven wrong. Her major claim to fame is now as the historian who was proven wrong, and this in a self-created controversy. I feel for her, she threw away her good reputation at the end of her career. Then again, she can still win it back by crossing the floor in time. She is in an excellent position, for instance, to create the much-needed dialogue between the different schools and disciplines in East and West; to stop the stonewalling, the guilt-by-association and the ridiculing that obstruct or poison the debate.

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  • Romila Thapar, an Indian historian... is reviled by some Indian scholars for her acquiescence to many western points of view.
    • Thomas C. Mcevilley - The Shape of Ancient Thought_ Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. Allworth Press (2001)
  • Romila Thapar, a prominent historian specializing in ancient India, has furthered a view of India that emphasizes its fragmentation. For this, she has been credited with changing the way Indian history is studied...Echoing Bishop Caldwell, G.U. Pope and other colonial-era Christians, Thapar speaks of identifying a ‘substratum religion, doubtless associated with the rise of subaltern groups’....Thus, Romila Thapar has become a powerful tool to reject the historical and cultural continuities that unite India and its civilization. ...[Romila Thapar's statement] that ancient Indians should be seen as mere ‘a cluster of distinctive sects and cults’. This characterizes Indian civilization as an amorphous and random collection like the tribes of other third-world nations before the European conquest... It reinforces the ideologies supporting the balkanization of India, seeing India as an artificial combination of thinly bonded or disconnected communities that must be liberated through separatist movements... She joined hands with western Indologists led by Michael Witzel in opposing the edits proposed by Indian parents in the California textbooks controversy, and dismissed the long list of factual errors in textbooks as a conspiracy of Hindu fundamentalists... Thapar is presented in the authoritative A Dictionary of the Marxist Thought as a Marxist historian in the dictionary entry for Hinduism.
    • Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan̲, A., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2016). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines.

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  • Romila Thapar's book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating.

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  • The pre-eminent interpreter of ancient Indian history today, Romila Thapar has definitively reformulated central questions and issues in the field. Her work on Indian social history in the 1st millennium BCE, the period of the Aryan expansion in North India, has been instrumental in deconstructing the stereotypes of ancient Indian culture propagated by earlier historians with particular ideological biases.

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  • It is true that in the decades in which India was ruled imperiously by the Congress, the task of writing history textbooks was allotted to Leftist historians who chose to view India’s past through a distorted lens. The most celebrated of these historians, Romila Thapar, has gone so far as to deny that Muslim invaders destroyed the temples of us idolatrous infidels. Undoubtedly, if she were writing about more recent history, she would deny that the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan — and would say that they fell to pieces of their own accord.

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