Lineage and Kingship

In speaking about her initial work on the Mauryan king Ashoka, Romila Thapar discusses the juxtaposition between the ethical and the political in Indian history. In exploring the meaning of Buddhism for those times she argues for a notion of dissent being implicit in such philosophies that later came to be grouped together as the Shramana dharma in opposition to the Brahmana dharma. The aim of renouncers was to propagate and adopt an alternate kind of society more attuned to the well-being of all humans. She explains how she has used archaeological data and how she has also read and used some social anthropology. This has changed some of the new perspectives on early Indian society from those that were prevalent a few decades ago.

The Function of the Historian

In this section Romila Thapar reflects on the function of the historian in general and more precisely on her approach to history. Nationalist historians had opposed some interpretations of Indian history made by colonial scholars but many were left unquestioned. Her generation of historians challenged colonial historiography on a larger scale and this also brought them into opposing some nationalist interpretations. Among these was the periodization of Indian history by James Mill into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods, and the theory that ancient India was a golden age that declined in the medieval period under Muslim rule. This questioning opened up many debates on a range of themes in the method of writing history, such as, the definition of a historical fact, priorities in historical explanation, testing the reliability of the data, as well as the incorporation of fresh and different data from archaeology.

From Panjab to London

In this section Romila Thapar talks about her childhood and family background. Her childhood was spent in various places from the North West Frontier Province of British India to school and college in Pune, before reaching Delhi, from where she went to London. She reflects on the Indian independence movement and the development of her interests in politics. This was almost inevitable among teenagers growing up in the years just before independence and influenced by Indian nationalism. She discusses her reading at that time both of the classics and of popular novels, and describes how she gradually developed an interest in early India. Thapar also shares her experience of the much-discussed Nehruvian ideal of building a new nation and the growth of radical ideas. She describes her years in London, slowly becoming a historian. This brings her to joining Jawaharlal Nehru University and working at the Centre for Historical Studies.

Shakuntala and Somanatha

In this section there is a discussion on two books written by Thapar, Shakuntala and Somanatha. She explains what made her choose these two subjects which, in a sense, suggest both a similar and yet a somewhat dissimilar narrative strategy. The story of Shakuntala is fictional yet it is a story that is frequently rewritten in history but incorporating some small changes. Thapar relates the changes in the drama to their historical context. She also shows how the projection of the central character in the story alters over time and is perceived differently both across time and by recourse to different cultural attributes. Her book on Somanatha takes the central historical event and examines how it is viewed in a variety of sources from variant perspectives. Some describe it in different ways whereas others do not refer to it despite writing about other events at Somanatha. The methods encapsulated in both these books are suggestive of new ways of looking at the past. This can also be seen in Thapar’s substantial work on how people in the past looked at their own past and how this illumines our understanding of that past.

The Historian and the Epic

The discussion in this section focuses on how a historian, who is a rationalist and follows a chronological sequence of events in history, analyses the assumptions of epic literature where historicity is of little consequence. Thapar explains that it is not necessary to prove that the events described in the epics are historically accurate, but clarifies that the historian can derive an understanding of the kind of societies represented in the epics from careful analyses of the texts. She discusses the two time concepts that prevailed then—the cyclic in the yuga theory and the linear in genealogies and the adoption of eras by rulers. There is also some discussion of the location of exile in epic literatures.

Modern Writing of Early Indian History

This section addresses the question of the modern writing of early Indian history from James Mill’s history to the themes that are of interest today. Two major schools were initially involved in interpreting the Indian past. One was that of the Orientalists, who were largely scholars of the ancient languages such as Sanskrit and Persian. The other was of philology. They were also interested in Indian religions and Hinduism in particular. Most were admiring of Indian culture, but the degree of reservations varied from scholar to scholar. Those who came from the Utilitarian school of thought were largely critical and described Indian civilization as static and given to a system they called Oriental Despotism. Inevitably this brought in notions of kingdoms and empires in relation to nationalist history, the role of caste in history and the background to concepts that were then current in India such as ahimsa/non-violence, and tolerance.