History may be a contested subject today, the site of shrill debates and ideological battles but there are no signs of the turmoil inside historian Romila Thapar’s living room in south Delhi’s Maharani Bagh. Her dachshund, Bulleh, named after Sufi poet Bulleh Shah, has quietened down after a few perfunctory barks and all is quiet. Frames of tribal art hang from the walls, on one corner is an unlikely series of her face photoshopped on cutouts of snazzy cars. The artwork, she says, were birthday gifts that her now 22-year-old grandnephew — her nephew, conservationist Valmik Thapar’s son — fashioned for her as a child with a passion for cars.
Sitting on her red swivel chair, Thapar, who turned 94 last November, talks thoughtfully on her journey, one that also chronicles that of the nation. The entwined journey has resulted in the making of her memoir, Just Being (Seagull Books, 2026), a sprawling account of her life, memories, the history and making of a nation and the pulls and strains of its lived reality.
“I was uncertain about writing them, because I thought who would be interested in reading about my life. Then I said I will write them but l will have them published when I’m dead, so that I’m not there to answer questions, to face interviews! But various people said to me, ‘don’t be silly and don’t wait till you’re dead, publish them now’,” says Thapar, who started writing them during the Covid pandemic.
Romila Thapar in her living room (Tashi Tobgyal)
One of India’s pre-eminent historians, Thapar is known for her seminal work on early India and for being among India’s historians who took history out of its simple narrative form to recreating the past by attempting to explain its whys and hows.
Thapar’s interest in history came early though her first love was botany. “It was such fun to make drawings of flowers and plants and even the occasional frog,” she laughs. But in the end she chose history.
Thapar was a school girl in Pune when India got Independence. As a prefect, she was chosen to raise the Indian flag and give a speech. “There was a huge anticipation in 1947.
Conversations were largely on what is the kind of nation and the kind of society that we are going to encourage and try to form,” she says. Some dreams came to be realised. “A few, but really rather fewer than one had hoped, assuming that within the first generation of Independence there would be substantial changes. I think we were moving in that direction but somewhere along the line it got stymied. The big change that took place in those early years was when it was decided to have adult franchise,” says Thapar.
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Thapar, meanwhile, continued her education in various parts of India with the family moving to wherever her father, an army doctor, was posted. As a child growing up in Thal Fort in North-West Frontier Province, now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, she remembers meeting Pathan women whose silver jewellery seeded a lifelong love for rings in her. Moving from one town to another, Thapar’s interest in people and places only grew. Then her father got interested in sculptures after seeing Chola bronzes at a museum in Chennai.
“As a hobby, my father got very interested in the history of Indian art. He started reading on it and it coincided with the six-month gap which I had between school and college. So, of course, he said to me, you’re doing nothing, you may as well read these books. In the beginning I thought, this is terrible, as I won’t understand what I’m reading. And then gradually I developed an interest but it was never really in art history as such, it was always in ancient history,” she says. She took up philosophy in college though, finding it intellectually exciting and then set off to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London where she found both history and freedom. Her father had set aside some funds for her future — either for her wedding or for an education. She chose the latter.
Studying for a BA (Hons) in Ancient Indian History under the legendary Indologist AL Basham, Thapar later chose to do her Ph.D dissertation on Ashoka, looking to place him in the context of his times. It was later published in 1961 as Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas.
“Professionally, when I started out, I wouldn’t say history was an unlikely choice, but it was a hesitant choice in those days as history was treated as a narrative of what happened. History was learnt mostly by rote in my times in school… But when we became teachers of history and researchers of history, we were much more interested in the new kinds of questions that historians were beginning to ask, such as, if an event happens, why does it happen and how does it happen? And the why and the how become very fundamental questions of history.”
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Thapar’s resea- rch into early Indian history was part of a movement that helped establish history as a social science. “One has to do ancient history in order to learn something about later history. This notion of continuity was beginning to be debated by historians at that time and it threw up some interesting ideas. What continues? Why do some things just die out, whereas others hang on and are present in even writing of a much later period,” says Thapar, who has authored over two dozen books, including A History of India: Volume 1 (1966), Early India (2002) and The Past as Present (2017). She was awarded the prestigious Kluge Prize by the US Library of Congress in 2008.
Thapar has grappled with questions through her life, a trait she always encouraged in her students, first at Kurukshetra University where she began her teaching career in India, then at Delhi University and later at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where under the guidance of Satish Chandra, Sarvepalli Gopal, Bipin Chandra and her, the Centre for Historical Studies came up. Thapar, who retired in 1991, was subsequently appointed Professor Emerita at JNU. The university has been in the crosshairs of the government in recent years. “It breaks my heart when I see JNU in the condition in which it is now. I feel you cannot build an institution which ranks among the top institutions in your own country and abroad, and then systematically break it up, and more so intellectually. There’s something peculiar about such an attitude that I don’t understand. You may be committed to an ideology, but surely your ideology doesn’t need you to destroy an institution?” she asks.
With the suppression of dissent on campuses reshaping the very character of universities, Thapar reflects on what a university really means. “A university was seen as a safe place and it was seen as a place that provided you with answers to problems, with explanations. But in the US as well as here, and in many other countries, which have had this problem of their educational institutions being maltreated, that confidence that people had that educational institutions will give you the answers, or encourage you in the direction of finding answers, that confidence has faded out,” she says.
In a world where even leading universities in the US are finding it difficult to withstand pressure, how does one firewall the world of ideas? “Well, the world of ideas, of course, is a world that is absolutely necessary. It has to be encouraged and cultivated, because otherwise life becomes worthless. But because it is so important, it is equally necessary that there be extensive discussion on what form the state should take, what should be the agencies of society which are the most productive. I mean, take an example like caste. We all talk about caste. But the point is that in a free society, there are aspects of caste which really cannot exist in contemporary times. You have to face inequalities of Indian society much more frontally if you’re going to be talking about the modernisation of society. And this is something which we’re not doing.”
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From the day that she hoisted the flag in 1947 in a school in Pune to the India of today, both Thapar and the country have travelled a fair distance. In the intervening years, history has become a site of conflict and contestation, the past being recalled often to validate and justify the politics of the present. Thapar has often been target — for debunking the colonial segregation of Indian history as Muslim history and Hindu history and for her stand on the Aryan debate.
As someone who lived through Partition and its bloody aftermath, does the polarisation of society decades later surprise her? “What surprises me is that with all these changes that have been going on, there hasn’t been more public reaction to what’s happening. It’s true that public reaction is stymied by the fact that if you react too publicly, you may be forced to be silenced. This is a bit like colonial times when people were advised to be quiet, and not talk about certain topics. We may call ourselves a democracy, but I think that’s becoming a misnomer now,” says Thapar, who declined the Padma Bhushan in 2005 saying she didn’t accept state awards.
Thapar, however, has not shied away from speaking. Her book-lined study that lies beyond the living room and hosts old issues of Seminar, the magazine her brother Romesh and his wife Raj founded in 1959 and NCERT text books that she has authored, bears signs of her intellectual activity. From writing papers to delivering lectures to calling out the revision of history text books, Thapar has ensured her voice is heard. But in a social media landscape buzzing with theories about the past, how does a historian deal with the constant pressure to respond?
“As a professional historian, one tends to move away and say, all right, you do your thing, just leave me alone to do my thing. And you go on writing your history. Currently this is, in a sense, a limitation because this will not succeed in changing the comprehension of the larger prevalent history. On the other hand, if one starts questioning what the social media is saying about history, one will never get to write any good professional history. One will just spend all one’s time saying, no, you’re wrong and this is why you’re wrong. So, many of us have taken a very conscious decision that we will focus on professional history and let the social media people go on doing their own thing. If they come our way and we have to take a position, we’ll take a position,” she says.
In her long career, Thapar has received much acclaim and some criticism. Thapar and other Marxist historians have often been accused of academic gatekeeping and not allowing other voices, especially those from the Right, to come up. “That, I think, is largely make-believe.
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Nobody ever stopped anybody’s voice. We might have said that some theories on social media were not tenable. I mean, for instance, there is one ongoing debate about whether the Aryans were indigenous to India or did they come from outside. Professional historians, by and large, say that they came from Central Asia, and they settled in a wide geographical area. But according to those writing in social media, the Aryans are entirely indigenous, and that Hinduism derives from Aryanism. And then when evidence is required to support the claim that they were indigenous, the evidence is not forthcoming,” she says.
Book cover of Romila Thapar’s memoir, Just Being
Looking back, Thapar says she has few regrets. Her days are now spent in reading, some writing, listening to music in the evenings, to songs of Talat Mahmood among others, and meeting friends and family.
Is there anything she would have done differently? She answers after some reflection. “I could have gone a little more into the kind of history that is being officially taught today. It is hard to understand why the Mughal period was taken out of the curriculum of Indian history but you are still calling it Indian history. At one level, it is playing around with history to make it suit a particular ideology. I think one could have done a little more — one can still do it — in terms of asking why this was necessary and discussing the reasons that are largely political. It’s not enough that these major changes in the teaching of history can be made without there being more discussion of its implications. The implications are very serious. If you remove large chunks of history, then how do you explain the presence of this history which is visible in the world in which you live? How will there be an explanation of why we are surrounded by the Mughal presence in many parts of northern India,” she asks.
Looking ahead, in addition to social media, historians are increasingly grappling with yet another challenge in the shape of Artificial Intelligence (AI). “Artificial Intelligence is going to make it worse because those who will use AI will use it arbitrarily and put what they wish into it. I am anxious about Artificial Intelligence and what it’s going to do to the intellectual life of this country, or any country. But it’s a technology that everybody will be using and that may make it less terrifying. I will hopefully die before this technology becomes professional,” she laughs. “But the question is what kind of knowledge will it spread — one has to be aware of the pluses and the minuses of this new technology and that’s going to be tough,” she says.
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But then, Thapar has never turned her back on a challenge.
