Romila Thapar is one of the most prominent historians and indeed an iron lady, who is known to speak against the communalistic form, as well as the right-wing construction of Indian history. There are several reasons for the widespread hate towards Romila by the right-wing groups and the jaded progressives. Before going into detail let’s start from the beginning. Romila Thapar was born in 1931 in a Punjabi family. Daya Ram Thapar, her father was an army doctor and she was the sibling of a renowned journalist and once a member of the close aides of Indira Gandhi, Romesh Thapar. Her uncle, Pran Nath Thapar had served as the Fourth Chief of Army Staff during the Indo-Sino War in 1962, and the cousin of the star anchor of The Wire, Karan Thapar. At the age of 93, she is still active, reading, writing and rebuking while living a single life in her two-story home in Maharani Bagh situated in Delhi. She received her education from different parts of India when it was undivided. She did her higher studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. A true nationalist to her heart she recollects her encounter with Mahatma Gandhi when he was in Pune, she asked to him for an autograph, upon wearing a silk kurta he chided her in a firm manner and advised her to wear khadi which she immediately did. We can understand that despite the passage of time or having faced a number of challenges, her independent nature remains strong and evident.

While studying she came to know that there were two kinds of history which dominated the country- one which was shaped by the colonials and the other where historians glorified the Hindu kings. She criticised the former because it followed the colonial agenda of an un-evolving civilization and only emphasized the religious traditions without any interpretation. We can maybe see that both of them failed to justify the development of Indian Society in social, political and economic systems, as well as the institutions related to caste, religion and patriarchy. Her thesis was on Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryan Empire where she explains the history of the empire by using inscriptions as her evidence. The Mauryan Dynasty became the most powerful in the late 4th Century BCE with its centre in the Northern Gangetic plain. Under emperor Ashoka in 3rd Century BCE the empire reached its highest point spreading across different parts of the Indian subcontinent. Later she joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University where she evolved how society was formed and how early Indian history was changed over time, which we can see in her book ‘From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First Millennium BC in the Ganga Valley which was published in 1984.’

She strongly voiced against the traditional Western-focused belief that ancient India did not have an understanding. She studied two ways of looking at time- The first one is history repeating itself, and the second one is history progressing forward in a straight line. One of her most famous books is Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 was an expanded version of her previous book, History of India, Vol. 1. In her book Early India, she made several updates like adding new facts, ideas and perspectives which reflected how her own thinking had evolved over time, but she is also open to change her views when new evidence appears’ before her. She explained that Marxism is an approach to study and understand society and history, the way we explain history depends on the manner in which we analyse it on the basis of the evidence. Some historians use multiple sources to understand a broader picture while some use only one source or only one perspective. At the end, they all lead to different conclusions.

If we talk about nationalist historians, who claim that the Indian past was considered as the golden age during the tenure of Hindu kings. They assert that the birth of Hindus can be traced back to the Aryans and the Indus Vally Civilization. Romila Thapar refutes this by saying that only one undeviating culture of Aryans reined the subcontinent by including all the cultures. She says that violence cannot be attributed to the other ethnic groups who arrived to India later. Henry Elliot and John Dawson published an eight-volume book between 1867 to 1877, called The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians declared that Hindus needed to accept that British rule was much better for Hindus, compared to the reign of the Islamic rulers. The nationalist historians did not criticise this fact because it kept the idea of golden age of the Hindus above Islamic invasion. They forget that the Hindu society was divided for hundreds of years even before the arrival of Islamic rulers and influences and it also does not mean that with the arrival of Islam, people started to fight for power and control over lands. Romila Thapar insists that there was a lack of factual data for explaining that ancient India was entirely Hindu. This is because the rulers during that era prolonged their backing to a large scale of religions and sects. There were a number of instances where there was more alliances or partnerships between the governments of rulers. But it is a sad reality in propaganda-fueled society that people will mostly focus on the forced conversions by the Muslim rulers. Thapar gives the example of Ashokan pillar which was shifted during the Mughal period where she denotes that, edicts of Ashoka were overwritten by Samudragupta (Gupta ruler), then Tughlaq and the Jahangir to their presence. Many of these pillars were not destroyed.

The dislike for Romila among the right-wing groups is implanted deep into their minds from the start when she made a distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva. The former is a religion and the latter is a politics by the Hindu majoritarianism. As well as during Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) theory of the Aryan race which she said was not racial because the term was linguistically inclined, on the basis of numerous evidences in archaeology and linguistics. Thapar also wrote the textbooks on Ancient India for class VI and protested against the deletion of certain paragraphs like those which included eating of beef and the creation of a caste system by claiming them as part of the propaganda. Earlier she was also termed as a “Marxist and an Anti-Hindu” during the first NDA government.

If we see that the current idea of nationalism started from the anti-colonial struggle and believes that true nationalism is their twisted version of Hindu nationalism. She explains that this nationalism is spreading like a wildfire because in the present scenario, our nationalism needs an enemy; it needs an object to despise to thrive. Our understanding of history is influenced by the negative propaganda where people believe in the information circulating in different media platforms without even checking it twice. Even if we delete our history from research projects, books, records or even from institutions, there are global centres where new discoveries about our past are being added everyday which ensures that history is never truly erased.

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