“I WANT TO BE AN AUTONOMOUS WOMAN,’ I KEPT SAYING TO EVERYBODY”: ROMILA THAPAR ON LIFE, TEACHING AND WHAT LED HER TO HISTORY
Hartosh Singh Bal
In the historian Romila Thapar’s extensive new memoir, Just Being, published by Seagull Books, she looks back at her childhood, education in London, decades of teaching, travels to archaeological sites in Asia and beyond, and much else. Hartosh Singh Bal, The Caravan’s executive editor, speaks to Thapar in this interview about the book, her early years, teaching at the Centre for Historical Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, reactions to her work as a public intellectual, and her approach to history.
Over the last few years, you have been actively engaged in public debate on our times. This is your most personal book. How did it come into being? What led you to write this memoir?
Well, it took a long period of gestation, because I really kept feeling I was incompetent to write a memoir, as I had become so used to writing academic books on academic subjects. Every time I sat down to write something, it would be the academic style that would surface. And I would read it and say, “Oh, no. People are going to be bored by this.”
It took a long persuasion as well. And the big debate I had with the publishers was “Do we publish it now or do we publish it after I’ve passed away?” And I kept saying, “Do it after I’ve passed away.” I’m not ready for reactions to what I say about myself at all. And then I just got steamrolled by friends, family, publishers. And then, of course, with COVID and the lockdown, it was an ideal time to sit and just write endlessly, which I started doing. It became a much bigger book than this. Everybody said, “You can break it into two volumes.” And I said, “But few read the second volume. They read the first and they drop the book.”
When I started writing it, then it started in the usual kind of the way: I was born here, and this happened, and I was brought up by a family, and descriptions of my education. On re-reading it, I thought, “No, this is not right. I must try and capture something else.” So what I’ve tried to do in this book is to make a statement about the almost one century that I have lived. From the time of the pre-Independence national movement into Independence, into the kind of society we had under various prime ministers, into Emergency, into the post-Emergency situation, and then the last ten years or so, which have been very, very different from what happened earlier. I hope that what comes through in the book is a vignette of my little commentary of scattered people in the midst of whom I lived and on the changes I experienced, and a presentation of what living in India has been for me.
In this process of going back—because to look back at your life is also, like history, to reconstruct it in some ways—did you end up thinking anew about the many things that we often take for granted but have shaped you?
Well, a little bit. For example, I wasn’t really fully aware of how all pervasive cantonment culture—the culture I grew up in—was in those days. I just took it for granted that this was the culture that was not just the one that I was brought up in but it was the culture that prevailed. Now of course, one sees it as only one segment of a huge and complex set of cultures. One also now has a much more incisive understanding of what cantonment culture meant in those times, when there was a colonial power ruling. And what of it may have continued after Independence.
If I may take you back right to the beginning, it starts in Lahore and then you end up in what is, for any childhood, an exceptional place: a British fort in the North West Frontier Province, with actual skirmishes and battles going on outside, and your father is the doctor attending to all.
Both for real, and for the silent film my father made as a hobby, there was a little bit of make-up in our activities, but, yes, the skirmishes between the Pathan tribesmen and the British regiment living in their vicinity were certainly very real, and I must say that as a child hanging on to my mother’s thumb and saying, “Where are we going?” and “Why are we going there?” and so on, I thoroughly enjoyed those visits to the Pathan forts, because the Pathan women would make such a fuss of me, and I’ve never been fussed over like that at any time in my life.
A sense of hierarchies and interactions between the Indian and the British—between Indians themselves, the officer class and others—comes through. Was that awareness always there for you?
The awareness was there, yes. Sometimes I think that hierarchy was almost inbred. You couldn’t avoid it. It was not just the difference between them and us—the colonial power and the colonised—but it was all the elements of racism: they’re white, we’re dark; they speak a language which is internationally spoken, we speak a very local language; and so on. All these little differences kept coming in all the time. The differences between my father as an officer and the subedars and jamadars and other ranks, as the soldiers were called, also reflected the hierarchy. There was a lot of hierarchy, except on occasions like Diwali. It was a very hierarchical society, as it still is.
And there was a background of a sense of some change lurking in the air. Your father is friends with an array of people, some supporting Pakistan. There is the larger-than-life figure of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan that you mentioned.
Yes. But there was a difference, at that time. For example, Sikandar Mirza was a neighbour in Peshawar in the 1930s, and I was inseparable from his children. There was no talk of Pakistan—it was all pointing towards Independence. There was a slight sense of the difference between those who were members of the national movement and those who were not, but there was a much greater quiet sense of Indianness and being together and so on. But the second time round in the ’40s, when my father was posted in Rawalpindi, and work took him to Delhi sometimes, he would meet Sikandar Mirza who was in Delhi. Sikandar Mirza was supporting Pakistan, and very heavily so, and my father was dead against Partition, and they had severe differences and disagreements, despite having been close friends.
You mention an early train journey, where there is a crowd outside and you hear sounds of “Inquilab Zindabad.”
We would go to Lahore, but my mother’s parents lived in Ferozepur, which is about a three-hour train journey from Lahore. It is now very close to the border, but it wasn’t then, when there was no border. And I remember one occasion when we were on the train going to Ferozepur and it stopped in a little wayside station, and stopped for longer than it usually did. And then we saw this group of people coming down the platform handcuffed, with the police around them. They were shouting “Inquilab Zindabad” and “Azadi.” And for me, as a child, that was the call I recognised of the national movement. Inside the compartment, I started muttering “Inquilab Zindabad.” My mother told me to be quiet and explained to me why, and she kept using the words, “Hamein ghulam bana diya in logon ne.” [They have enslaved us.] I didn’t know what a ghulam was, so that had to be explained to me. I remember my great excitement that, even though they were all handcuffed and were being sort of pushed out of the station and were obviously being taken to jail, I had a feeling that I’d come close to something that our elders called Indian nationalism and the fight for freedom, which no one defined for me and nor could I define it—at least not until I was a little older.
And, of course, it’s only today that we need a reminder of this, but this sense of Indian nationalism extended up till Peshawar.
Oh yes, and beyond. I remember the border between Afghanistan and India, at the Khyber Pass. There was a small little stone- and brick-built, semi half-pillar, painted with a whitewash, on which was written “the limits of British India.” And now when I look at the picture that I have of it, it makes me laugh to think that this is all that marked the limits of British India.
From here, you move to Pune.
Well, we spent three years in Peshawar and then almost three years in Rawalpindi, when my father was then posted to Pune. It became a long stretch in Pune because, when he was posted to Delhi for a year in 1946, I was sitting for the Senior Cambridge school-leaving exam, which was a big marker and which was due in December 1947. I refused to go to Delhi because I insisted that, with my Senior Cambridge exam coming up, I could not at this point change school and start all over again. So I was left behind in Pune in school. It became a long stretch of eight years, which I’m very grateful for because that taught me that when one talks about India, one isn’t just talking about the Punjab and Peshawar and Lahore. And it was very simulating for me even as a teenager that I had this exposure to Maharashtrian culture at that point.
This is also the age when you start reading, exploring. You talk about sort of a nascent atheism, which was rather early for most people. What was the intellectual life that was shaping you at this point of time?
Not consciously very much, a little bit in school. I was becoming passionate about botany, because we spent hours painting, colouring little pictures of flowers and leaves, and I loved that because it wasn’t a boring lecture. It was actually doing something. We had quite a bit of reading to do. It used to be called, curiously, “silent reading,” even if it was not so silent! And there was a lot of consciousness about reading outside school hours. I went through a phase of being passionately fond of detective novels. But those were what my mother liked to call “old dreadful story books,” and asked me why I was not reading something really sensible and serious? And I would say, “No, no, we do all that in school.”
But the slight consciousness of an intellectual influence began really in Pune. And it began partly with readings that my parents were doing, which were not very extensive. But my brother, Romesh, ten years older than me, had a job as a journalist in Bombay. And of course, the elders of the family objected to this as a profession, and said, “How can he become a journalist? That’s such an ordinary profession, and it’s all gossip.” Government service was their ideal. He was working with the Times of India in Bombay, so when we were posted to Pune, he and his wife would come for weekends or I would insist on going for weekends to Bombay. And that was when I started talking to them and asking them what they were reading, and meeting people in their home who were so different from those I met in Poona Cantonment! You know, the early IPTA [Indian People’s Theatre Association] crowd, for example. Others, like Mulk Raj Anand and his friends and followers. And, as Romesh turned more leftwards, there were people from the Left such as Mohan Kumaramangalam. And I found Bombay absolutely fascinating, because that was when I became very conscious of the fact that, in Pune, I was living in a cantonment culture which had its limitations as far as reading and thinking was concerned. But Bombay was a universe in itself. It was so open.
When you look back at it today, do you have more of a realisation that actually this was quite extraordinary? The people you were meeting, the access you had—some of it from family, some of it from a brother and some of it in a larger sense of a certain class of India that was at a certain elite level. How much of that has shaped you?
Oh, I think quite a bit. To give you an example of that, 1947 was my last year in school. And I was due to take the Senior Cambridge exam in December. This was a convent I was in, so Sister Superior sent for me and she said, “15 August is Independence Day. We’re going to have a little ceremony where you, the Indian prefect, will pull down the Union Jack and raise the national flag. And then all the prefects will plant a sapling, and you will make a speech.”
And I said, “Me? Make a speech?” And she said, “Yes dear, for ten–fifteen minutes, just tell us what it means to you.” So I said, “No, I can’t do that. I’ll be too terrified.” And I was absolutely petrified for fifteen days. I couldn’t sleep at night. I was constantly thinking, “What shall I say? How will people take it? Will I understand them? Will they understand me? I’m only a school girl.” And I discussed it with my favourite teacher, who happened to be the teacher who taught us history and literature. And she said, “Don’t be silly. You’re discussing nationalism with all your friends. Doesn’t matter how foolish your ideas are. You put them across. Say something about what you expect from Independence?” What did I expect from Independence? I expected, first of all, to be free. This was going to be a new experience, and freedom was very, very important because everybody was talking about freedom then. And the other was: what kind of society will we have? This was something that some of us did ask casually. And this became the core of my little speech. Now, when I think back on it, these were childish questions in a way, but somehow they have stayed with me, virtually all my working life. I mean, they’ve been basic to a lot of thought that has gone into my work, into my thinking, and so on. So, perhaps it wasn’t quite as wild and distraught as I thought it might be.
So would it be fair to say, these questions, which you have engaged with, are questions that led you to history rather than questions that emerge out of history at some point?
Well, maybe subconsciously. I went to history in a very roundabout way. Before I joined college, I was sitting around, saying, “What shall I study?” Because botany was out, and someone mentioned history, someone mentioned philosophy. And I went around talking to all these friends—my “intellectual friends,” as my father would teasingly refer to them—and they said, “History or philosophy? Do either.” And I’d never done philosophy in my life. So, when I joined college, I took up philosophy, and I loved it.
At the same time, another experience drove me closer to history, and that was what I read in a six-month break, when I had nothing to do between the end of school and starting in college. My father went to Madras on tour. He said to somebody, “What shall I do this afternoon? I have the afternoon free.” And they said, “Why don’t you go to the museum?” And my father said, “Museums are such dull places.” And they said, “No, they have a nice gallery of Chola bronzes. Go there.” He went. He was taken aback by the beauty of the Chola bronzes. So he decided he had to learn about them. The next morning, he picked up piles of books on Indian iconography, Indian images, Indian icons and came back to Pune and started reading them.
Then, he said, one evening, “I am reading them and learning something, but I’d like one person from the family to also read them, because I’d like to discuss the reading.” My mother and my sister both said, “Not me, I’ve got the baby [my sister’s child] to look after and I’m very tied up.” So my father looked at me and said, “You’re doing nothing.” So there I was, stuck with Hindu iconography. Slowly and gradually, it seeped into my consciousness.
Even though I didn’t actually take up history, somewhere it sat at the back of my mind that this was really something quite interesting. So, when I decided to go abroad, I opted for the School of Oriental and African Studies, because I could take the option to study ancient Indian history, which had a lot to do with the kind of reading I was doing. Actually, when I took up the course in ancient history, it turned out that I was not so interested in iconography and sculpture. I was more interested in history. That’s when it gripped me.
This journey to Britain, to SOAS, till this point, were you expected to be an academic? How did your gender play a role—were you just supposed to grow up and get married? What were the expectations? How did that play out?
That was what my parents kept saying. My father said to me, “I have enough money to either give you a dowry or to finance two years in an educational institution abroad. You choose.” So I said, “No question, I am going abroad,” because by then I was full of all my intellectual reading. More than that, I was full of wanting to be on my own. “I want to be an autonomous woman,” I kept saying to everybody, so there was no question of the dowry. But they would every now and again say, “Don’t take too long over it. Come back, because it’ll be impossible to find you a husband if you’re too old.” And I would say, “Don’t worry, I won’t let you down, and maybe I’ll find my own husband”—which frightened them even more. So, no, I was not going to be an academic. I was going to do this degree in history and do odd bits of writing here and there. When I finished my BA, I desperately wanted to stay on in London. The freedom and the independence of making decisions on your own, about yourself, was just so intoxicating. And I wrote to my parents and said, “You know, I’d like to stay on for a bit longer and so on,” and they said, “You decide, but remember, if you stay on then don’t later turn around to us and say, ‘Find me a husband.’ That won’t be possible. And I can’t finance you any further. I’m sorry, I don’t have the money.”
My tutor at SOAS was [Arthur Llewelyn] Basham, and he said, “Well, why don’t we try and find you a part-time job somewhere as a research assistant, and you can do your PhD alongside?” And I said, “I don’t want to be an academic.” He said to me, “Well, there’s some scholarships and fellowships going. Apply and see.” So, I applied for a fellowship at London University, and I was interviewed at length, and to my great surprise, three weeks later, I got a letter saying that I had been awarded a fellowship. I walked into Basham’s room and said, “Yes, I’ll have to become an academic.” And he said, “It’s not so bad after all, and we are all academics. We’re alright people.” So, that’s how I became an academic.
Today, in an era where institutions are breaking down, how much does this shape individuals? If you had done the same course in India, what would have been the difference, in your India?
The difference is that I wouldn’t be thinking so analytically. The other thing is interdisciplinary research, which was barely beginning in Indian history. Prior to that, history was Indology. It was a narrative, and as long as you knew the narrative, that was good enough. The change came with exploring the questions asked by other disciplines which might help to clarify the reason for some historical activities and also working out a methodology using some of these questions or working out fresh ones. It was a narrative but, in addition to a narrative, you were also asked to answer questions—like, why did an event happen? How did an event happen? This led to theories that tried to explain what happened.
If you’re going to talk about why did an event happen, you have to go into the question of what was actually happening, why was it happening, who was making it happen, what was the end purpose, how did it happen, did it happen through textual education? Disciplines like archaeology were most helpful in providing a different kind of data focussing on objects. These could back up what you were trying to say from the text or to question what you were saying from the text. And disciplines like linguistics were again most helpful when you’re studying a language in order to know whether that language had contact with other languages. So then you ask the question of what was the degree to which there was an interface between the two language speakers? One language became dominant, but how much of the other language did it carry? And, once you start asking those questions, then you go on to questions such as, if there was a language interface, there would also have been a cultural interface. What was that cultural interface? Were there objects or ways of living, patterns of life that came from one culture and were introduced into the other, or not? It opened up history in a way in which our teaching of history back home didn’t do.
You mention figures who probably had their own strong interpretations of what had happened but, in their teaching, were interested first in methodology.
It’s the teaching of the methodology of history which is very important. I remember, [in] the first year, I took up a course on European studies of political thought, and we had a delightful tutor who was actually a specialist in Chinese history and who used to amuse us every tutorial meeting by imitating the Marx brothers. He did one thing, which was absolutely fundamental to my knowledge of history. He said, “For this paper on political thought, you must attend the lectures of Eric Hobsbawm, which he’s giving in the college next door.” So first I thought, “My goodness, another set of lectures.” But I went along, and I was floored. I mean, it was the most brilliant set of lectures that I have ever attended, and I would religiously go to every lecture he gave. And I slowly began to realise what history really was, what comparative history really was. And that was a tremendous gift not directly connected with the courses I was taking but fundamental to my understanding of history.
When you started your PhD on ancient India, what was the landscape of Indian history? We’ve just come through Independence, looking back at the past. What already existed at that point of time?
The landscape was still very quiet. It was very exciting politically, because many of my generation were Nehruites by then, and I must say that he did take on policies that many of us found tremendously exciting. For example, the debate on adult franchise. When he introduced it, there were many people in politics and otherwise who opposed it and said, “How can you have illiterate people voting?” And the arguments that were made to explain that it’s not a question of literacy. Literacy anybody can pick up. It’s a question of the right of the citizens to vote. It’s a question of democracy, and it’s a question of secularism as well, and the national movement is tied into democracy and secularism. Whether they were all secular or not is yet another matter.
And history itself, in its understanding, was still shaped by narratives?
It was still largely shaped by narratives. We were beginning to feel our way into interdisciplinary research, asking different kinds of questions. But largely, there was a certain comfortable feeling if you were narrating a narrative about the past.
I ask this because yours was the generation that shapes our understanding of India, its history, and then passes it on. But at that time, where did a conscious realisation of that history, its methods, a look at what has been done so far, have to be broadened come in?
I think it was the combination of regarding history as central to the understanding of society. We cannot understand our society and how it’s come to this until we understand the history that occurred, which gradually took us in this direction. So, history takes on a different kind of contour. And then, once I was into my thesis on Ashoka, I became very conscious of the fact that here was somebody who did contribute to what we call Indian culture today and, however much one may go back to the Hindu-nationalist historians of the earlier period—who emphasised Hinduism and the activities of Hindu rulers and so on—one couldn’t lay aside the fact that there were other features as well which had to be located in the general historical picture. They were not emphasised as much as we emphasised them later on, but at least we were conscious of the fact that they were there and needed to be investigated.
As you write the story of early India, you would have had to engage with whatever existed at that point of time. What was it that you were bringing to that subject that was new? You were also writing for a general audience. How was that different from a thesis?
It was very different because, for one thing, one’s style has to be easier. One has to keep on asking the question: will this paragraph be understood? And if you feel it’s not going to be understood, you try and tease it out a little bit. I was also obsessed by the fact that I was not writing only for learned people, that this book had to reach out to ordinary people. I still regarded myself as reasonably ordinary and not learned enough, so it was easier for me to write it. And I quite deliberately wrote it in a comfortable way, so that people would understand what was being said. Even though it was not written for academics, many academics did read it. And there were some younger historians who were interested in the fact that I was not staying with writing about the usual themes, but I was bringing in other things, society, economy, literature.
A lot of the people who are reacting to this current history are people who were educated at a time when we thought this country was secular. Was there a failure in the Nehruvian or post-Nehruvian generation in education or its expansion or its teaching?
I think it didn’t go far enough. I wouldn’t say that education itself had a failing, but what needed to be pushed was not pushed sufficiently. I think the problem was that we hadn’t recognised that secularism was not going to be solved by simply saying that all religions are equal.
At this point, was writing also driven by one’s own vision of nationalism, of what India is?
Yes, obviously, a little. I do believe very much in what EH Carr said, that the best historians are those who write about the past but keep an eye over their shoulder at the present. The present comes in—it’s inevitable—but the good historian says, “Uh-uh, that’s the present. I don’t use that as an argument. I stick to what I think is the past, knowing perfectly well that my definition of the past is very much conditioned by my understanding of history.” But having, at the same time, the right and the sense of being able to explain why I’m explaining the past in a particular way.
I also meant in terms of the selection, because this is an argument that comes today: that people like Ashoka and Akbar symbolise a certain kind of idea. And today, the argument is that we could have chosen figures to give a different idea. So these choices, the omissions, the inclusions—were they also formed by what we call the Nehruvian vision, what the country was?
Not entirely. The Nehruvian vision, or similar visions, are very minor. It’s the sources; the sources are very important. If you use one kind of source, if you use only textual sources—for example, as early history was first written on the basis of Sanskrit texts, everything followed a familiar pattern, which was formulated in familiar forms and was well presented. It was claimed that people lived happy lives in those times, and so on. When you start looking at the archaeology, in the same period as the texts, you say, “But wait a minute, there was also this, and this and this,” pointing to what the artefacts of the period suggest and which, if it doesn’t tie up with the text, then you start asking searching questions, which lead you further in your exploration.
There is, for example, the perennial Aryan question concerning the origin of the Aryans. There is something of a crisis when one talks about whether the Aryans were indigenous or did they come from Central Asia. Some of us have been arguing on the basis of texts and archaeology that they came from Central Asia, settled, spread, had an interface with a local population, and so on. But there are those who say, “No, they were entirely indigenous,” and then you have to say, “What are your sources for saying that?” The sources provide the evidence, which in turn has to be reliable and proven. I know this sounds very old-fashioned, but the reliability of evidence is foundational and is something that continues to this day.
But we have reached a point where—in the context of DNA research, as just a journalist examining it—we are now seeing some of the top researchers in the field say one thing to us in private and one thing in their papers and one thing in their popular writing or press conferences. They’re literally splitting themselves up into two different people and contradicting themselves on some of the very basic essentials that should form history.
What does one do with that? I don’t know. It’s a human problem. And you ask the question why they are doing it, and the answer that you get is that that’s the way the world is now. This enables them to get on, and they assume that they won’t be threatened. The threat is a very big thing, by the way.
The opportunity to go to Jawaharlal Nehru University was something that came unexpectedly, as you said.
Unexpectedly, yes. We were trying out Delhi University. We were trying to bring in this different kind of history, but it didn’t quite work. I still had in me the feeling that somewhere some pioneering work needed to be done. All right, in my case, it didn’t work out in Kurukshetra, which I had tried. And so maybe JNU. And I did what is usually not done, which is that I asked to speak with the vice chancellor, which he was kind enough to concede, to ask him how he visualised what the emphasis would be in the new university. I just went along and I said, “I’m sorry. I just want to know how serious this university is going to be about encouraging pioneering subjects and new forms of research, suggestive of new approaches to the subject taught.” And he convinced me that there was a great deal of seriousness, that I didn’t need to worry about the fact that if I made an attempt to bring in what we used to in those days call new history, that it would be cleaned out, washed down. So that decided me. I said, “Yes alright, I’ll join JNU.” And I don’t regret it at all.
And what was the idea of this new history?
You know, we now take it for granted that history has to be researched and written through using a historical method. This was vivid in my mind because, as I remember that time, I had been asked to spend a semester in the Indian Institute of Science, in Bangalore, because they wanted to expand the idea of a scientific perception into something pertaining to a knowledge system. And I was asked to give lectures mainly about how one writes history. At one lecture on “What is history?” I was talking about the historical method, and a student got up and said, “We all know about the scientific method and we know what it is. Who knows about the historical method? Is there such a thing, about which you’re trying to convince us?” I said, “Yes,” and then I started all over again. So, there was a great awareness of that at the time, about how theories explaining the structure of society can be discussed and debated—as, indeed, they were being debated.
Remember, this is a time when Marxism is rife in practically every better university. There were many debates about whether the Marxist formulations about history—as, for instance, in the modes of production—is valid or not, or what it meant for Indian history, and so on. And then, of course, it was not just Marxism that was discussed but others who had theories of explaining how societies function. Max Weber was much studied, as was Louis Dumont, highly popular in Indian academia with his study of Indian society and religion, and the theories of explanation that he supported.
So, these ideas were in the air. And what we decided at JNU was, that the CHS [Centre for Historical Studies], whatever our individual opinions may be, would allow these ideas to be debated, and that’s what the difference was (among others) with good universities in India, where such discussions were not necessarily encouraged.
And you also were sort of the primary driver who insisted on ancient languages.
Yes, I insisted on that—Sanskrit or classical Tamil for those students intending to work on early India—because I think that it’s essential. When your sources involve reading particular texts, it does make a difference if you know something of the language used in the sources. And language was so important in that early period, much more so perhaps than at other times, even though it’s very important for other periods as well. So yes, I insisted on that. And it’s interesting that, quite soon after I retired, the faculty of the CHS remove the compulsory Sanskrit language requirement!
And you would expect that in our times with this government, with this great glory of ancient India…
Maybe the government does not know!
Some of the things you and a number of other historians at that time spoke about—looking at history not as narratives, but in terms of society, of questions of caste and gender and how they have influenced the evolution of society—seem to have today become mainstream.
They have, yes. Why it happened is, again, not a simple answer. There’s a lot of politics in it. I mean caste, for example. You cannot study caste today without the politics. You have to also study the politics and see where you can exclude the politics.
And then the other question of gender itself, because, as you write, there have been occasional—not strong criticism but a demand that you be more feminist in your own writing. How have you reacted to this?
Well, I’ve reacted in the sense that I think that feminist history—that is, history from a feminist perspective—has to be researched and taught, but you have to be trained to think of specific histories not in isolation but as a part of the whole, acting in response to and interacting with the whole. You can make a hash of it if you just say women first in everything. But if you are trained to look at society in terms of gender relations, that’s excellent, because then feminism also comes into it in a way which is worthwhile. And that’s the thing, that the way in which it comes into the study of history must be worthwhile. It can’t be just slapdash, because that ends up in statements such as, “So and so’s a feminist, dismiss her views.”
Given your own status as a public intellectual, you would have invited these attacks, but does part of what the Right react to today have to do with your gender itself?
Of course it has to do with gender. I am convinced of that, because it’s interesting. I have been looking at the history of the attacks on some of us. It begins with the textbooks in the late 1960s and has continued unabated since them. The accusations are that she mentions beef-eating, which she should not have done even if there is evidence to support what she says, why does she say that the Shudras were ill-treated, and she does not say that the Rajputs and Marathas fought valiantly against the Muslims, and other such things, which one answers in a newspaper article and is done with.
Then it becomes a little more pointed: the Morarji Desai government wanted the NCERT text books to be banned. Pratap Chandra Chunder, who was the education minister, set up a committee of historians to assess the NCERT textbooks. We don’t know the names of the committee, but anyway, 11 out of the 12 said, “These books are perfectly alright. They don’t need to be banned.” One said they need certain adjustments and changes and so on. Okay, this went on, and the attacks became sharper and continuous. Wherever any of us, as authors of the textbooks, took a position—as with the issue of the Babri Masjid—the attacks became sharper. And then the NRIs came in, and they conducted a campaign against me in Washington, to which I answered, when asked to speak in the annual meeting of the American [Historical] Association, which I did and I talked about this issue to a huge audience of scholars working on Indian studies. What happens these days in India is that when I and others who are not supporters of Hindutva give a public talk, it is often preceded by a delegation meeting the organisers of the talk and demanding that it be cancelled, or else they are threatened with trouble at the talk. Sometimes, and irrespective of the subject of the talk, it is cancelled, but sometimes it is not. I had the experience of giving a talk in Mumbai not so long ago accompanied by a police escort all evening. It did leave me unhappy that the nation had come to this.
Sometimes, if I’m speaking without it being noted, there’s no reaction from anyone, but if there is a reaction—as, for instance, where YouTube shows the lecture and then they have comments below. Some of the comments are sensible. But those by the multiple trolls run into large figures. These I’ve noticed are comments that are occasionally an abuse of us and the kind of history we write. I am accused of not knowing any history, so how can I be taken seriously? Then suddenly, at a point, ten years ago or so, it started being said that “She is a woman and, therefore, how could she know anything about our ancient religious past?” And then it sometimes becomes really nasty, and pornographic. And that’s the time when I think this is not necessary. You can attack a person for their views. You can say that they don’t know the subject and they don’t know this and that and the other. But to use gender is not on. They never use that against the male historians whom they attack. That’s the point. That there are a number of male historians who say the same things as I say. But the male historians, are just named and left.
Isn’t this sort of inbuilt into Hindutva—their dislike and segregation of Muslims from public life, but they also seem to believe the same thing about women, when you look at questions like love jihad, about their roles in society—to push out prominent people from the public space?
No, there is an element of that. Absolutely. I agree. And I’m in a sense now equally worried about the anti-woman position that these attacks take. Earlier, I was not that worried but still concerned about the anti-history position that the attacks took. And one says if this is allowed to go on unchecked, what will be the next target of attack?
And how much of this anger rises further if one’s stature seems to grow, and the more attention that the person may receive outside India—it’s almost as if the Right is okay with what you are saying in India, but it should be restricted to India.
Well, I am described as anti-national, anti-Hindu and an academic terrorist. This was Murli Manohar Joshi in parliament.
People forget the years of the Vajpayee government were hugely problematic.
Yes, it was then that Murli Manohar Joshi used this term. And I remember thinking, “Yes, I can understand anti-Hindu, I can understand anti-national, but academic terrorist?”
So, when you write Voices of Dissent and The Past as Present, after retirement from JNU, you have become more fecund than you have been in the past. These are both history, but they are also books that also speak about a certain role of a public intellectual or a public historian. And has the post-2014 moment in India, the arrival of this government, changed your engagement with the public sphere?
It hasn’t changed my basic relationship with the public sphere because I’ve always had at the back of my mind this feeling that I owe something to the public sphere. Every human being owes something. It’s not something where they’re out there and I’m here and it’s never the two will meet.
You’ve stepped forward at a time at least in the perception of others, if not yours, at a time when a lot of people are stepping back. Do you see that as a problem, the stepping back?
I do see it as a problem. I understand it. If they take a forward position, they could lose their job or be arrested—as has happened. I mean, when you consider the petitions that I’ve signed for people in jail, what is their crime? Bhima Koregaon … it’s an absurdity to say that they wanted to assassinate the prime minister. They couldn’t care less about the prime minister, or any prime minister for that matter. Their concerns are with the condition of society and how it can be improved.
Yet you’ve done all this without really belonging to a school or a group. You even turned down the Padma Bhushan that the government actually announced for you.
Yeah. I suppose it all goes back to that early wish of mine stating what I wanted to be: an autonomous woman. I didn’t want to belong to any group. I have helped various groups largely through donations. During the lockdown, I did support some religious groups that were trying to help the destitute.
Is that a problem, in times where people talk about coming together to oppose them, so we must not differ among ourselves?
No, if what they’re opposing is an issue I agree with, I say there’s no difference. I’ll join you. But I won’t be called by your name.
Or will also differ with you?
Oh yes. I am a supporter of permitting at least a minimum dissent, and more so if it gives strength where I think strength is required.
In this book—and it’s not in the background, you foreground it often enough—how much of the personal is also part of the story?
It is. It’s a question of how much of the personal is one aware of using and how much of it can one keep away or perhaps even use without being conscious of doing so. Obviously, one cannot be oblivious of the entirety of the personal, but there are some things where one can say, “Well, no, I won’t emphasise that because that’s my personal life”—or my “inner life,” as I prefer to call it!—“It may not be the life for the people I’m talking about.”
Finally, as you have this memoir out, in the course of writing the memoir and as you looked back, were there things you would have done differently, anything that you would have reimagined?
No, there might have been some things I might have done more of. Some things I might have done a little differently. I don’t regret anything I’ve done, which I suppose is an arrogant comment, but then a whiff of arrogance is almost necessary to keep one going in these times.
Hartosh Singh Bal is the executive editor at The Caravan.
[https://caravanmagazine.in/history/romila-thapar-just-being-memoir. Please consider subscribing to and supporting Caravan Magazine.]
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