Romila Thapar

Photo credit: Outlook!Gireesh G.V.

 Interpretations of Indian History
Romila Thapar in dialogue with Kunal
Chakrabarti and Geeti Sen

Geeti Sen: May I begin by asking you, Romila, about whether there exists an

essentially different point of view taken by western historians when

they are looking at Indian history. And, as a corollary to this, to what
extent has their reading of Indian history influenced, affected and

maybe compromised our own readings of our history?

Romila Thapar: I would like to start by saying that there isn't a uniform

approach. I don't think one can talk about a western

interpretation or an Indian interpretation. There is a distinct

difference, for example, in the way in which early German
philologists in the nineteenth century looked at Indian material
and the way in which scholars from England, most of who were

actually working as administrators with the East India Com

pany—looked at the same material.

Secondly, I would also like
to emphasise that the same holds for the Indian interpretation
of Indian history, that there is a difference between the

interpretation that was current in the 1920s, the 1950s and that
which is current now.
In all of this there is a context to the interpretation which is

extremely important: obviously there is the intellectual

background of the societies from which these scholars emerge.

Therefore, European intellectual perceptions in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries become extremely important to

understanding why particular analyses were picked up and

developed, in the interpretation of early Indian history.
88 / The IIC Interviews

GS: You make a distinction between the German philologists and

indologists and the British. By the British I presume you mean Prinsep
and others who began the actual work in India.
Would the difference be suggested by an armchair-reading say, by
Max Mueller sitting in a room in Germany, and the down-to-earth

archaeology being done here in India?

RT: Well, I think that that is a very essential difference. The

intellectualtraining which German scholars had was different
from the intellectual training of a number of British scholars at
the time. This is proved true even if one looks at German and
British scholarship in other areas as, for example, in relation to
classical history; the Fall of Rome and the period after the Fall
of Rome is treated very differently by these two groups. The
other aspect which is equally important, as you were saying, is
that there are people in the field and there are others who remain
in Europe—for example, Franz Bopp or Max Mueller or even
James Mill. The important thing is not that none of them actually
had any first-hand experience of India; but if one can quote
James Mill, the attitude was one of, "we don't need to have that

experience". There was such a premium on the discovery of

knowledge in itself and on information that, it was argued,

anyone can sit in London in a good library and comment at

great length about India or China, or any other part of the world.

GS: This attitude persists. A certain scholar from the United States visited
the American Academy at Benares in 1967 when I was there as a

young researcher. Although he had written the standard book on Indian

art and architecture, he actually mentioned that he had never been to
Sanchi or Sarnath—long after he had written his authoritative text!

RT: I think this is a double barrelled attitude:one is that knowledge

consists of information in places such as libraries and archives;
and therefore if you have access to these sources, that is
sufficient. Parallel to this is the question, of whether it is really

necessary to go out into the field, to actually look at things or

meet people. Is it not enough if one just uses printed texts and
material?
This raises yet another question relating to the sociology of

knowledge. Those working in India such as William Jones,

Colebrook, Wilson, Princep, Cunningham, and so on until
 Romila Thapar / 89

Vincent Smith, were not only approaching their study as the

excavation of knowledge, but were certainly influenced by
colonial attitudes to India. This results in a continual shifting
of the position, with a persistent imperialist attitude towards

objects Indian and things Indian. By this I mean that initially

there is much sympathetic curiosity; and then, when there is a
shift to establishing a colonial empire and the need for

legislation, there is a perceptible concern with the idea that India

is a backward, stagnant society, and has to be changed.

GS: Would you say that this is about Macaulay's time?

RT: Well, mid-nineteenth

yes, century. On this question of the

sociology of knowledge, what always interests me enormously

is that if one takes someone like William Jones and his

contemporaries, they are willing to sit with the pundits, read

the texts with the pundits and make their notes and get their
information; but they don't record any conversations in which

they enquired of the pundits as to what was their world view,

or how did they explain these texts? Colonial scholars presumed
that they could explain the texts in exactly the way which they
had been trained to look at other texts.

GS: In your books you have mentioned that these scholars relied always
on Brahmanical learning and that this produced a certain bias. I don't
know if this was consciously done (they obviously thought that the

repository of knowledge lay with the pundits) or done for reasons of a

deliberate hierarchy, but it certainly circumscribed their

understanding. This bias exists in art history: where you find that a
western scholar will not interpret anything unless there is access to a
text to back it up, some shastric information. Classical civilisations
were also identified by the texts associated with them.

RT: Yes, there was a tendency to classify civilisations—even in the

twentieth century. Historians write texts on world civilisations
and split them up neatly into 21 or whatever the figure might
be. Therefore India is classified as the civilisation which is

represented in the Sanskrit texts. The more significant questions

about the texts are less frequently asked: who are the authors
of these texts, what was their purpose in writing these texts,
what is the kind of society they come from. These were really
90 / The IIC Interviews

not questions that interested these early scholars; but these are
fundamental issues today.
The question then is why did they select certain texts? Their

primary interests were to try and discover what were the laws
of India before
they came to administer the legal system; so

they were interested in the Dharma Shastras, treating them as

legal texts per se without understanding that they had a different
role in the Indian context. Or they were interested in religion,
and they set about constructing a religion which they called
Hinduism on the basis of these texts. It is not until much later
in the nineteenth century that there is a concern with looking
at other categories of literature, what were called the second
order texts, such as the Puranas, Buddhist texts and so on. So
even among texts there was a distinction between what were

regarded as primary and important, typifying a certain

civilisation, and others which were regarded as second order
texts.

Kunal Chakrabarti: One might make a distinction even among the scholars
who were in India, between the orientalists of the Asiatic society project
and the administrators who were getting down to the nitty gritty of

history. To what wouldyou attribute the difference in attitude?

Obviously when Warren Hastings was talking to the pundits he was
trying to get down to the operational aspects of laws, and when William
James for example was talking to the pundits he was inspired by a
healthy curiosity about India... Wouldn't you go beyond that into the
colonial project as a whole? Or did they constitute two facets of the
same project.

RT: As I mentioned was extremely

earlier, the context of colonialism
important. Initially a there
curiositywas to know more, the
attitude was that this is a different civilisation with which we
are unfamiliar and we have to understand it. The way to
understand anything in the late eighteenth and nineteenth

century was through writing the history of that particular object,

discipline, discourse, whatever it may be. Now as the colonial
state comes to be established and as it moves from a colonial
state to an imperial state, obviously the attitudes change: they
were not only finding out about Indian culture which was
different, but evaluations had also to be made. In the ranking
of civilisations by then, the cultures colonised are ranked low,
 Romila Thapar / 91

there is a tendency to stress the fact that they were unable to

compete with the rising capitalist powers of Europe; and this

becomes a major issue in assessing the local culture. But in the
late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the growth of
nationalism adds another dimension to the historical approach.

KG: These colonial historians

were obviously affected by the idea of
superiority; but even those who were somewhat sympathetic, as for
instance, Havell, had sympathy but not empathy for India. There was
no participation; there was an inherent judgment involved.

RT: Yes, there is certainly the feeling that this is the 'other'—an
attitude which comes through very strongly, for example in the

writings of Karl Marx and of Max Weber.

GS: To ask what extent was the nationalist historian affected or influenced
in his own thinking by what had been said? They also accepted certain

stereotypes because it was to their convenience, as for example, the

idea that there was an unchanging value system acceptable to the
nationalists.

RT: I think the nationalist response is very interesting because in

fact the nationalists do not replace existing theories of

explanation with a new theory of explanation. This is the

greatest weakness of the debate: the nationalists shift emphases

and they negate those aspects which they regard as unfair
judgments.

GS: Who, for instance, would you say is a nationalist historian?

RT: There were a large number of historians writing in the early

decades of the twentieth century, pre-eminently people like K.P.
Jaiswal, H.C. Ray Chaudhuri, R.K. Mookerji....

GS: Who pushed everything back further into antiquity?

RT: Well, that was one concern. European nationalism did that with
the Greek civilisation;
they pushed it back as far as possible.
Where there is a revival of nationalistic historical writing, as
for example today in India in certain circles, there is again this
tendency to say that we were the originators and it all started

way back in antiquity—irrespective of what the evidence may

suggest. But also, there was an emphasis on reacting against
the value judgments of the West, by insisting that ours was a
92 / The IIC Interviews

spiritual civilisation, as against the colonial culture which is

the materialist culture. Certainly Vivekananda, a few others,
and even a number of historians were of this view when it came
to what they call "cultural history".
I would like to cite just two instances as to how Indian
nationalist historians reacted to the western tradition. One is,
of course, that when they consider the writings of orientalists
like Max Mueller, they accept his theories. The theory of Aryan
race, for example, as applied to early India, comes directly out
of Max Mueller's writings as well as the ambience of intellectual

thought in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. This theory

is accepted, appropriated and becomes a part of the Indian view;
and few today recognise that this is essentially an inheritance
from the European tradition, that it doesn't exist in the Indian
tradition. Similarly, most Indian historians accept the

periodisation of Indian history into Hindu and Muslim periods,

as according to James Mill.

GS: Did the nationalists, when they were writing in the 1880s and 1890s,
make the division between Hindu and Muslim?

RT: Yes, the nationalists accepted that periodisation. The argument

used for making the distinction was that there was a Hindu

society and a Muslim society, and they were monolithic societies

that confronted each other. The basis of this argument is again
Mill and that tradition of scholarship. It is not as if this had

emerged out of fresh nationalist thinking; it was simply the

taking over of a certain intellectual baggage from western

scholarship.

GS: An important point brought up in your writings is that Hinduism as

a monolithic religion did not exist: it was really invented.

RT: What I mean by that, of course, is that one of the problems of

what we call Hinduism is that it has been treated like a Semitic

religion; because
the initial approach was from those who were
familiar with only the Semitic religions. This is of course prior
to anthropology, it is prior to Durkheim, it is prior to all the

explorations of religion that have gone on since the late

nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
The position I would take is that there were Hindu religions
(in the plural), using Hindu simply as a term that defines an
 Romila Thapar / 93

area, and possibly up to a point, defines the culture but not

completely. But the attempt then in the nineteenth century by
western scholarship, and by Indian scholarship was to try to

put all these segments that constituted this vast mass of Hindu

religions into one structure which was then called Hinduism, a

desperate attempt to fit in the texts, fit in the rituals and the
cults, to give it some semblance of order on the basis recognised
as existing in the Semitic religions.

KC: You have called this Hindu religion a construction. Now there was
one motivation that made the European historians look at Hinduism
as one category, and quite another motivation for the nationalists.
But it did help the nationalist agenda, didn't it? When you are talking

of the imagined community then it is not merely the historians who

are imagining, but the community as a whole who is also imagining.

RT: O yes, I think this is initially an intellectual idea, but with wide
social ramifications. It doesnot affect just the historians and
scholars but by the early twentieth century, the community also
sees itself more clearly in these terms. What interests me is
whether one can trace the points in history when the term Hindu
comes to be used by what we today call Hindus for themselves.
Now I haven't been able to take it further back than about the
fourteenth century; which means that two or three centuries
after the arrival of Islam, people are still not seeing themselves
as or calling themselves Hindus. This really becomes current
after the fifteenth century, and even then it occurs in the texts
but not as frequently as we imagine it does. So I think that this

self-perception of a community in terms of a religious identity

also changes over time, and this is partly due to the effect of

scholarship.
The expediency of the moment perhaps compelled some
nationalist historians to see it as being to their benefit: to
channelise forces and energy together into a monolithic society.
But perhaps today in 1993 we need not perceive it in that way...
I would just like to add a little footnote because I don't want
to condemn the nationalist historians out of hand. There was a

very articulate group in the '30s and the '40s who supported an
alternative periodisation in terms of nomenclature. This was
when references were made to the ancient, medieval and
modern periods of Indian history—as a very deliberate move
94 / The IIC Interviews

away from the Hindu-Muslim confrontation in history.

Unfortunately only the nomenclature changed, for the actual

points of periodisation remained the same. So that very soon

people fell into this lazy habit of saying ancient, that is Hindu,
medieval, that is Muslim, modern, that is British. So in effect

they went back to the other periodisation; but nevertheless some

attempt was made.

KC: Also, in all fairness, although the nationalist historians had borrowed
this cultural baggage they turned it upside down, didn't they? Many

of them were very good historians. They were not obscurantists; they
were at worst anachronistic. Even ivhen Jaiswal is speaking of the

republics and of the democratic traditions in ancient India, he is

borrowing terms and concepts from the western experience, but he is

also getting down to the evidence. The existence of democracy may
not be in the sense of the Greek city states but nevertheless they are
still speaking in terms of a republican structure as opposed to

monarchy.

GS: One tends to draw parallels... One parallel comes immediately to mind
which is another myth that, Romila, you have blown away in your
book on Ashoka. There has been a tendency to say, well, Ashoka was
converted overnight to Buddhism. As you have carefully demonstrated,
it was not just after the battle ofKalinga but a gradual phase-out to
come to terms with Buddhism as the most acceptable, most beneficial
means to consolidate an empire. How do you come to the conclusion
that it is with the twelfth year of his reign that he effected the official
conversion ?

RT: It was made a little easier by the fact that Ashoka was so prolific
in issuing edicts and proclamations. Data relating directly from
him can be juxtaposed with the Buddhist version from a variety
of sources. If one does that, what certainly emerges very strongly
is that there was a mythology about Ashoka required by the
Buddhist tradition for purposes of legitimising its own history
of the evolution of the sangha.... What comes through in the
edictsis that the king acknowledges that he is a Buddhist but
more than that he is also using his links with a religious ideology
and a broad-based ethical code on a much wider scale as a
statesman.
 Rom/la Thapar / 95

KC: I am interested to know to what degree would you attribute the

intentionality on the part of Ashoka in making this innovation. Did

he consciously use Buddhism as a tool of hegemonic control for the
creation of an empire?

RT: I think it was certainly not as intentional as, for example, the
Din-i-Ilahi of Akbar—the kind of comparison commonly made

by people. Ashoka called himself the beloved of the gods, but

there is also the recognition of an ideology which is personally

extremely appealing, as well as a mechanism of persuasion.

When he issues a similar set of edicts in the north-west and in
the south, in the north-west he issues them in Aramaic and
Greek using the idiom of Zoroastrianism, in one case in an
Aramaic inscription, and
using terms that are familiar to
Helenised Greeks in the area. In the south he used his standard
Prakrit texts as edicts, with instructions to his officers that they
be read out....

KC: Your book suggests a distinct shift in emphasis from earlier studies on
Ashoka by, for example, Smith, R.K. Mookerji, etc. At what point do

you think this disjunction between that kind of historiography and

what may be called the modern historiography occurs?

RT: I think the major change that came after '47, or during the peak
of nationalist ideology—that is a better way of putting it than
after '47—was that taking issue with imperialist historians
becomes less central. The direction which historical analysis
takes thereafter is an attempt to reach out to the fundamentals
of what was happening in the past. There was less concern with
either the niceties and details of personalities or directly political
issues. I think this turning towards looking at social history,
and at economic history is a major shift in emphasis, even if the

political project was not forgotten.

A significant impact was made, although it is not always

recognised, through the writings of D.D. Kosambi—when he

begins to write his earlier articlespublished in journals, is

invited to London University to give a course of ten lectures on
Hinduism which are dramatically different from anything on
Hinduism that anyone had heard before, and with the

publication of his first book. Kosambi's was not the kind of

mind that merely took a formula and applied it. I think that the
96 / The IIC Interviews

biggest impact that his writing has made is not that he found
the answer to historical problems, but he raised relevant

questions. And these are questions which direct our attention

to areas that had never before been thought of as history.

GS: For example, if you look at the granary at Harappa and from the size

roughly estimate the population... Likewise when Kosambi deals with

Krishna, he suggests a connection with the Ahirs.

RT: His is a framework influenced deeply by Marxism, but he was

familiar with other ideologies then prevalent. He was well read
in the classical history of Europe and contemporary scholarships
in that field. Out of all that, he constructs his own framework....

KC: This connection with the Ahirs was noted much before Kosambi by
historians like Bhandarkar. So it is not the substance of what he was

saying but the method. The publication of "An Introduction to the

Study of Indian History" in 1956 clearly makes a difference in Indian

historiography. Moving on to this question of where he destroys so
many cultural stereotypes that were created over the last hundred
years, I would like to have your reaction to that; the historian and the
myth-making process.

RT: Let me try and illustrate this by taking up a specific example of

something that I have worked on, the Ramayana. Having read

about the similarities of texts recalling the Ram story from all
over India
and South-East Asia, I began to ask myself the

question, that although at some levels some texts are similar,

are there any dissimilarities? And when one starts looking at
the texts more analytically, it is possible to see that there are

many differences which have been overlooked; and that these

differences are reflective of a certain historical context. Out of
these variationsemerge...
The next question of course is, why do they differ? Why
aren't identical texts repeated in every language? Why are there
digressions? This is one of the most interesting aspect of looking
at myth in terms of history: how certain themes get picked up
and woven into local stories which are serving local regional
needs because that is really where they are rooted. In today's
context the use of both the Valmiki Ramayana and the Tulsi

Ramayana has become a very sensitive subject.

 Romila Thapar / 97

KC: In your analysis of the Ramayana and the regional appropriation of

the Valmiki text, you point to certain bipolarities such as the kingdom
and the forest, the caste and the tribe, the making of the state and the
dissolution of tribal territories which are the basic themes of the Valmiki

Ramayana. How do you see the emergence of the regional traditions

when these may not be the most important points in those contexts?
One point that you have made very strongly is the end of the fertility

goddess Sita.Now in the Bengal version of the Kirtivas, which is

important, it is the goddess Durga zvho comes to help Ram in the final
battle against Ravan which is not mentioned at all in the Valmiki

Ramayana; and this is how the entire calendar of Durga worship is

derived. How do you make this distinction between one of the

paradigmatic texts of our tradition and the regional appropriation of

these which are turned upside doivn? Where does the historian stand
in between the national text as it were and the regional text?

RT: I have problems with describing it as the national text, because

I think that national texts are also constructions. The group that
is dominant chooses its text and projects it as the 'national text'.
Therefore, I think that the Valmiki text can never be taken as a
national text; it is certainly true that it is paradigmatic of our
tradition in the sense that there are many other texts which are
to be assessed similarly.
Although the Valmiki
text is after all being held up as the
model, when the regional culture takes over the story it brings
into play its own priorities and hierarchies, and introduces those
into the text. Therefore Durga does become the person who

actually helps Ram in battle. This is why I am very interested,

for example, in some of the other versions with the story of the

chhaya Sita, the shadow Sita. Now why does this come in?
Obviously because there are various traditions which among
other reasons were appalled at the thought of Sita having to go

through an agni pariksha or there are south Indian versions in

which Sita actually goes into battle against Ravan and Ram is
on the sidelines, watching as she defeats Ravan... What is

important is that this story is appropriate and repeated in

different regions, but in different traditions with their own

identities, which identities change the narrative and

characterisation.
98 / The IIC Interviews

From the strictly historical point of view, one of the reasons

why this text was extremely important was because it does

depict a confrontation between what was perceived as civilised

society, and the non-civilised, between the grama and the

aranya—a constant
confrontation between the state systems with
the more open tribal systems as they are called, hunter-gatherers
or primitive agriculturists. The confrontation is then idealised,
as it were, in the two domains of the capital city and the forest.
One reason
why this text is continually reincarnated is because
it does touch on a basic historical change taking place from
literally the first millennium BC until the present, the

juxtaposing of the forest to the settlement and the encroaching,

of the latter onto the former.
In historical studies it is important to attempt critical editions
with an exercise in language and syntax; because we have to
realise that even a text as seemingly uniform as the Ramayana
has gone through many recessions with additions and
subtractions. We are not, in fact, dealing with a single text
written in a single period, which encapsulates a particular

period; this text is an ongoing process...

KC\ To get back to the question of evidence. Many students of history feel
a little uncomfortable with archaeology because texts are so explicit.
The archaeological evidence also speaks, but in a different language.
Where does the historian stand in relation to the archaeological
evidence?

RT: A competence in the history of the first millennium BC requires

some training in archaeology, preferably by joining an

archaeological excavation. Even the reading of archaeological

reports does not make much sense unless one has been through
the mill of digging. This is very important because after all,

archaeology is now going to be the sole source of major new

evidence.

GS: Why is the discipline of art history minimalised in its importance? I

came back to India with the full conviction that this was for me, and

for a number of us, a valid means to giving a different dimension to

history, a dimension that is less self-conscious. Why is it that the
Indian historian today gives short shrift to art history?
 Romila Thapar / 99

RT: Well, I think it is tied into archaeology, and the hesitation in

trying to 'read' an object. The archaeological excavation is

extremely important to the study of what we broadly call social

and economic history, because it provides you a dimension
totally different from the textual. The textual dimension is

precise; it zeroes in on a particular social group and is generally

the articulation of the upper levels of society. Archaeology to
that extent is relatively value-free because it is often exposing
the way of life of people of other levels of society as well. I
think that the language and concepts of archaeology are
different from the kind of language used for art history in India.
The language of art history tends to focus on iconography, as is
often the case with studies of sculpture; the concern has been

essentially with the 'one unique image'. The historian, therefore,

is unable to introduce that as social data into the wider context
of what is happening.
It is true that there has been very little conversation between
historians and art historians in any essential sense. Objects of
art history are always listed as part of the sources and it is

virtually left at that. But I think there will be a change now in

the sense that historians are becoming much more conscious of
the fact that there is data than iconographic
other data in an

object of art history It can be seen in terms of its technology,

what it implies for artisan groups; it can also be viewed in terms
of patronage. There has been some quite interesting work done
on different categories of patronage. So I think that the greater
awareness of the historian now to such processes will
reintroduce these objects into the central concern of history.

GS: I do agree with you that Indian art history has been an exercise of

limiting the whole significance of a piece of sculpture to the fact of

what it means in terms of iconography or aesthetics; that with painting
also there has been a quibbling of dates and chronology, and you know
that this particular turban is worn between the years such and such.
These are not the essential factors. But I do believe that there are a
number of art historians who are beginning to explore other more
vital aspects. The problem has arisen partly because art history is
seen as a separate discipline, whereas the way it should be taught is as
an interdisciplinary area which bridges anthropology, folklore, myth,
100 / The IIC Interviews

ecology... Then a whole new dimension opens up, if one sees art history
as a source material for explaining many other factors.

KC: If one looks at the shifts in the study of Indian art one notices that
there was no distinction made between important icons and their
aesthetic value. Even before these questions were sorted out,

Coomaraswamy and Zimmer were going into the philosophical and

cosmological aspects, almost the mystical approaches to the

understanding of art. After this there was a kind of reaction, and one

finds a very empirical, dry, descriptive classification. But the one aspect
which is steadily neglected is the study ofform, and its significance in
a historical context. Would you attribute this to thefact that art history
is really treated as a separate sub-discipline rather than an integral

part of history?

RT: I agree with you. There has been a change in art history from
the highly mystical to the highly empirical. There is a hesitation
on the part of historians precisely because there has been, over
time, perhaps too great an emphasis on the mystical, and the
historian doesn't know quite how to handle this because he or
she is dealing here with a category which until recently was
outside the concerns of the historian.
One problem is that there are, at the moment, no
major
historicalquestions that would be dependent for an answer on
data from art history. I am referring here to major theoretical

questions which doubtless will arise once there is an intellectual

exchange between historians and art-historians. Let me illustrate

this by going back to history and archaeology and popular

perceptions in the past of the theory of the Aryan race. The

questioning of that stereotype, the theory of the Aryan race, is
partly due to new work in linguistics; but to a substantial extent
it is also due to the archaeology of northern and north-western
India, western Asia and central Asia—which has exposed a
whole range of new evidence which goes contrary to the theory.
A category such as the Aryan referring to a race is incorrect,
because Aryan is a linguistic category. There can only be an
Aryan-speaking person. Enthusiasm has led to a range of

archaeological cultures being identified as Aryan, forgetting that

an archaeological culture cannot be equated with a language.

Eventually with the inter-related research of archaeology,

 Romila Thapar /101

linguistics and history, the fog might lift. That kind of major

question hasn't come up in relation to art history.

GS: What about the Aligarh scholars group and the work done on what

they term as 'materialist' culture?

RT: We must investigate material culture, but the investigation in

itself doesn't lead to major problematical questions; it is simply
the unravelling of more information. The nature of the questions

posed to this information arise from the intellectual perspective

of the historian.

KC: If I may move on to contemporary issues, what kind of developments

have you seen —both in the discipline and in the country?

GS: What was the shaping of the historian's mind at say, the end of the
40s, and early 50s when you were a teenager, and when you went to
university? Would you say that that vision is different from that of
today?

RT: I was in school

at the time of independence and we were very

deeply influenced by the national movement, very much so. At

a fundamental level there was a concern with the end of
colonialism, and equally a concern with the image of the future.
One felt one had a stake in building that image and that was a

very special vision projected at the time...

In my early twenties I was trained at the University of
London but I chose to come back and teach in India. I thought
this is really where the action is, as indeed I still think so. In a
sense, the wider social responsibilities of a historian can only
be articulated in the society in which he or she is working. But
there is today a noticeable change. I am deeply disturbed by
the fact that the visions which we had of different cultural
strands coming together towards the creation of an identity,
are being torn apart. Today there is not that sense of including

everybody but an obsession with excluding some—those

different from the many—and reinventing an extremely limited
identity and trying to impose that identity on everybody. This
is a tragic oppression by a few over the mulitiplicity of identities
which one had hoped would go towards the working out of a
new kind of Indianness....
102 / The IIC Interviews

GS: It is a problem of schooling also, and that brings us to the whole question

of how textbooks have been rewritten in the last two years in the three
states of U.P., Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Would you have any
comments on that?

RT: Just to go back for a moment to the problem of schooling, it is

not just a problem of the curriculum, but of the demand being
made on a school child today. The demands are that you are

going to school in order to specialise in something, get yourself

a good job, get yourself well established. These are perfectly

legitimate demands and I have nothing against them. But I think

the place of these demands comes much later on in life, whereas
the school child, from primary school onwards, is being pushed
into the insecurity of competition. Where has the wonderland
of exploring knowledge disappeared to? This is due partly to
the demand that is made on the child and it is partly, as you

rightly say, that the standards are abysmally low in most schools
and the textbooks that are used have no business to be called
textbooks. But then we don't have a serious policy towards
textbooks. I think that in teaching history, for example, what
we want is a multiplicity of good history books.... Ministries of
Education are often the least knowledgeable about what should
be included in a textbook.

GS: Going from here to a question which has many dimensions; what do
you see, Romila, as the responsibility today of the Indian historian—
the role that he or she can play in shaping a consciousness of a more
pluralistic society, of understanding history on various levels?

RT: I would say that not just the historians but everybody, every
thinking person has the responsibility of shaping the
consciousness, What is so unfortunate at this moment is that
the consciousness seems, at least in some parts of northern India,
to be shaped by people who are not thinking people, who have
not thought out the kinds of slogans they are shouting and the
actions they are endorsing, People who have thought about
these matters could articulate the fact that this is not the way to

proceed, in building up a consciousness,

One of the
problems really is that we have been too

dependent on the government, or the state, for everything. All

these years, from the 1960s onwards we have blamed all our
 Romila Thapar /103

problems on 'the government' and expected the government

to act. We have never thought in terms of creating a strong civil

society; ultimately it is the nexus of a citizen-to-citizen relation

ship which is crucial.

Interview held at the India International Centre in 1993.