Romila Thapar and politics of the present

Prof Nira Wickramasinghe

The entanglements and complicity between history as a discipline and the nation continue to concern social scientists and historians. Throughout her illustrious career Romila Thapar, Emeritus Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi has been deeply engaged in unraveling this issue by pointing out the erasures and the politics of attribution of significance in historical writings. Her work has been analytically critical as well as historically grounded and has helped us think about the reasons why certain facts are foregrounded, why some stories are told and others are stifled.

Romila Thapar - profile in brief

Graduated from : Punjab University, India Obtained Doctorate from: University of London Worked at: As Professor of Ancient Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru Universiy, New Delhi Author of: Asoka and the Decline of the Maurya (1963) A History of India Ancient Indian Social History From Lineage to State

While her own work as a historian constantly strived to open up the past, popular representations of the past seem to be pulling in the opposite direction. In Sri Lanka too the kinds of linkages that are made with the past in popular TV programs tend to marginalize many communities and cultures that make up Sri Lankan society while privileging the dominant state ideology based on the idea of a foundational authentic and pure Sinhala Buddhist culture. It is no surprise then that in post-war Tamil majority areas, texts such as the Yalpana Vaipava Malai are increasingly being hailed as counter-evidence to state readings of the island’s past.

Both perspectives that normalize certain memories and authenticate claims for territory and control by referring to history need to be questioned if our country is to forge ahead unhindered by violence.

Questioning accepted knowledge

In Sri Lanka, only a few historians have abandoned positivist approaches and empiricist premises to offer a rereading of texts and statements through interdisciplinary analyses on events that have long been accepted as uncontested truths.

Popular perceptions, however, remain deeply influenced and shaped by more accessible sources and by the knowledge imparted through a state education curriculum which assumes a static past, which is of course the bequest of colonial scholarship. Change is not impossible.

What is needed is not to replace one flawed vision by another but to incite our citizenry and children to become curious about the world that surrounds them and question accepted knowledge instead of memorizing one version of it. Perhaps one must also encourage governments to set up autonomous institutions to deal with school textbooks and the curriculum so that regime change does not lead to an endless rewriting of texts to suit political agendas and to ensure that the privatization of textbook publication is subject to minimum quality control.

Thapar’s work and interventions in the public sphere are an invitation to think about standards of academic writing in our country as well as the responsibility of the scholar towards society. Her career is exemplary.

Thapar received her doctoral degree from London University in 1960 and returned to independent India to pursue her teaching and scholarship. Her research on ancient India evolved new ways of reading evidence from archaeology, mythology, literature, philosophy, ritual texts, folklore, and other sources. The results yielded illuminating perspectives on contemporary India as well as new comparative and conceptual insights for historical studies more broadly. Today her works are read by scholars from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities and have an appeal that transcends academic and national boundaries.

Exploring memory politics

First published in 1966, Thapar’s History of India, Vol.1, updated in 2002 as Early India has been in print ever since. Her subsequent books secured her reputation as one of the most distinguished and productive scholars in her field. Her most recent book, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004), provided a new frame for understanding a pivotal moment in Indian history. In 2004 the US Library of Congress appointed her the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South. In 2008 she was awarded the prestigious Kluge prize along with Princeton University historian Peter Brown.

The Kluge award is often referred to as the American Nobel Prize, as it covers the human sciences for which there are no Nobel awards.

In the History of India, Vol. I (published in 1966), Thapar adopted a social science approach as she moved beyond political/dynastic history and succeeded in incorporating a variety of human activities in her narrative, from the economic, social, technological, religious to the literary and artistic. But she never remained in the abstract and continued to search for new evidence on early India in archaeological finds, works in Persian and Arabic and numismatics. Thapar’s work is truly interdisciplinary and comparative, an example of boundary breaking between disciplines of the humanities and social sciences as well as the literary genre.

She belongs to the generation of Indian historians who waged war against communal histories through their questioning of communal stereotypes and their championing of a secular national history. Her approach has moved from an earlier concern with facticity - that is battling facts with facts - to an exploration of politics of memory. What is remembered or forgotten takes precedence over the question of whether an event happened or not. Through her often courageous stands on issues concerning identities and traditions Thapar is the epitomy of the intellectual who is, as the French say, ‘engage’.

Through her work and extensive publications she has been recognized and honoured worldwide as a scholar of singular distinction. Reading Thapar can help us transcend the limits that the politics of the present impose on us.

The writer is Chair in Modern South Asian Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands

(Prof Romila Thapar will deliver the 11th Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Lecture at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute Auditorium on August 1 at 6.00 pm)