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Lunch with BS: Romila ThaparA question of learning

Rrishi Raote & Kanika Datta / New Delhi March 17, 2009, 0:36 IST

The Kluge Prize winner isnt fazed by the questioning of her views on

Hinduism.

Entire blogs have been devoted to Romila Thapar describing her as, amongother things, the High Priestess of Indian Marxism and a flat-earth type anda deeply mendacious enemy of the Hindus.

Vituperative anti-blogs, most of it of a saffron shade, about Thapars pinkoviews on ancient Indian history leave her wryly amused. Shes had her fill of public opprobrium,

including threatening late night phone calls suggesting she alter her views on Indian history orface the worst, she tellsRrishi Raote andKanika Datta. They stopped after a while when I toldthem there were many people who thought like me, she says.

We are dining at Sakura, a tony Japanese restaurant in Hotel Metropolitan in central Delhi, thatThapar has chosen. She belies her 78 years with a healthy appreciation for food and drink and,for such a towering figure in academia, displays a comforting lack of gravitas.

Dressed simply in a sari and warm pheran, a trendily outsized amber and silver ring is her onlyjewellery. Shes surprised when she learns thatits the height of fashion now. I didnt knowthat, she says, slipping if off to allow us a closer inspection, This is an old one that I bought in

St Petersburg years ago. Its just a very solid piece of Baltic amber. My rings are all solid and

bulky because thats the only jewellery I wear.

Having arrived early, weve ordered two glasses of the moderately drinkable Riviera Red, and

Thapar adds to that after the waiter says her first choice of an Australian Chardonnay isntavailable by the glass. I suggest ordering a bottle, but Thapar declines, saying she prefers hotsake, that deceptively innocuous Japanese rice wine, with the meal.

In December, Thapar was honoured with the prestigious $1 million Kluge Prize for the Study ofHumanity in 2008, an endowment from a benefactor who made his money in Hollywood, whichshe shared with an old friend, Peter Brown, an equally towering historian who specialised inpost-Roman and Byzantine history.

The Kluge prize is regarded as a sort of Nobel for disciplines such as history, philosophy,politics, anthropology, sociology, religion and so on. Its a fitting tribute for an academic whosesecular and scholarly approach reoriented the study of ancient Indian history from both western,Orientalist and robust nationalist traditions.

Her 1960s book, the Penguin companion to Percival Spears history of medieval India and now a

standard university text book, broke important new ground by studying primary sources


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archeology, books, epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), numismatics (the study of coins)topresent a shift from the muscular Golden Age interpretation of teaching and research.

Thapars was among the first, for instance, to counter the conventional oriental despot view of

Indian monarchy and demonstrate that the Aryan was a linguistic grouping, not a fair-skinned

master race, that migrated to, and did not invade, north India and occasionally ate beef (thislast point exercising Hindutva votaries the most).

Her reputation, though, was mostly confined to academic circles and generations of appreciativestudents at Jawaharlal Nehru University. It was only in the nineties after the destruction of theBabri Masjid, when she and several historians started criticising the communal interpretation

of Indian history as a monolithic conflict between Hindus and Muslims that she attracted widerpublic attention.

The controversy stretched to the US where in 2004, strong letters of protest were written againsther appointment as the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South by

the US Library of Congress.

For Thapar, accepting the Kluge Prize is not without its ironies. In 2005, Thapar declined toaccept a Padma Bhushan award, explaining in a letter to (then) President Abdul Kalam that shedid not accept state awards but only those from academic institutions or those associated with herprofessional work.

The menus are handed out but were engrossed in conversation. We re talking about thepluralism of Indian traditionsBuddhist, Jain, Brahmanicaland how they spread to south-east Asia through trade routes and other ways. As a historian, she instinctively looks forhistorical trends in the mundane. She was telling us, for instance, about how the Wayang

shadow puppet shows in Indonesia weave different local legends into the basic story of the rama-katha .

One of the most interesting things Ive found is the way this story lends itself to being the

recipient of local cultures. It creates different cultures, so you have what we call manyRamayanas, with the changing adaptation of the stories.

Her regret, she says, is that so much emphasis in modern times is put only on the Valmiki

version both in India and outside, that weve forgotten the fact that there were and are multiple

versions. What is interesting is not just that the Valmiki version travelled all over but howpeople varied the story to express their concerns in their own versions.

The waiters roll up with barely concealed impatience to take our orders. Having had a chance tostudy the menu before, we choose pork and lamb dishes, too complex to pronounce so we readout the numbers. Thapar, who jokingly declares herself strictly non-vegetarian, chooses a fishdish (titled Chahan Non-Veg) and we agree on a sushi platterto start with (inexplicably, thewaiter tells us it costs Rs 3,400).


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The sushia giant thali of 23 piecesand sake arrive. Sushi has become common fashionfood in Delhi, but Sakuras platter lives up to the restaurants reputation. All of us eat withappetite, despite some manful struggles with chopsticks. Thapar has no such problems but wiselyignores the wasabi, the accompanying pungent green ginger paste that inevitably causes muchembarrassed sniffling (as it did to one of us).

Since shes a controversial historian in a country that is witnessing a resurgence of muscular

patriotism we feel compelled to ask her views on India as a future superpower and the rise of

Hindutva.

On the first, she says, I think weve got a long way to go. But more to the point, America has

behaved so outrageously in matters concerning the rest of the world that if this is written intobeing a superpower, one would not wish it for India.

And Hindutva? I think it has its roots in a certain extremist trend in Hindu religious nationalism,parallel to similar trends in some other religions. It was less anti-colonial and one concern was

with propagating the greatness of the Hindu past and Hindus to the exclusion of all else. Whatdisturbs her is the fact that this view of Hinduism has had to be given a certain shape and formas Hindutva that I think is not something that belongs to the Hindu tradition. But interestingly,few Hindus who belong to the Hindu tradition object to the activities of Hindutva publicly.

The problem began with the British periodising Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and Britishand maintaining that Hindus and Muslims were always antagonistic towards each other. This

cannot be sustained historically. But now this ideology is used for mobilising political power.Basically, the mobilisation is through appealing to Hindu sentiment.

Which raises the issue of her rebuttal of the Golden Age theory another point that rankled

with historians of a religious nationalist persuasion. Golden ages all over world in varioushistories were a fashion among nineteenth-century historians. Most historians of present timeshave given up the idea. Nationalist thinking didnt pay enough attention to the implications of the

description nor was any attempt made to define it in detail. They just went on saying it was amarvellous age of harmony and prosperity. Its like today when one hears talk about India

Shining; few analyse what it means and what the implications are for the Indian citizen.

Given all this, how does she feel about the way history is taught in schools? I think its dreadfulin most schools. Ive been arguing for a long time that we need an enormous improvement in the

textbooks and these should be vetted by a national body of historians. Not just history, the samegoes for other subjects. Quality control of textbooks is essential. Equally important is the traininggiven to school teachers.

But every time textbooks are vetted, controversy erupts. Controversy is a part of theadvancement of knowledge. There wouldnt have been an advance of knowledge unless therehad been controversylook at Galileo, for example, what he propounded was hugelycontroversial but it led to an advance in knowledge. Questioning is essential to teaching, and wedont have enough of that. Instead, we treat information as knowledge and the child is told, Now

you learn this and repeat it in the exam.


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Our main courses arrive. Thapar looks dubiously at her patently inadequate dish, a tiny piece offish and sticky rice, and we add a cod dish to supplement it. As we tuck into our meals we chatabout her childhood. Her fathers job as an army doctor took her all over India. She reminiscesabout meeting Gandhi in Pune and, amusingly, how the Great Soul charged Rs 5 for anautograph, a practice now common among celebrities, and admonished her for wearing silk

instead of khadi.

Our conversation and the foodall Japanese lightness and subtleness of tasteis absorbingenough to make us linger (and Sakuras staff is keen to remind us of this by pacing near ourtable). Thapar talks about the historians craft, which involves much more than the conventional

reading and interpreting reams of old documents. For instance, she tells us how she participatedin the excavations of the Harappan site at Kalibangan (Rajasthan) for three years the better tounderstand archeological reports.

She did a six-month course in pottery as part of a fellowship in London to understand thetechnology of pottery so central to archaeological artifacts.

She is currently working on historiography or history writing in the ancient period, in which shehas always been interested. The generalisation that has been put forward is that Indiancivilisation is unique because it doesnt have a sense of history. And I used to wonderthiswas 40 or 50 years agohow it was possible for a complex and sophisticated civilisation not tohave a sense of history. It kept bothering me and I decided to work on it.

It turned out to be a long-term project because it required reading a range of texts. I keptworking on other themes but every time I got a fellowship or a scholarship I would take upanother body of texts as a historiographical exercise and I made my notes, and kept them aside.About two or three years ago I felt that with increasing age I might not be around in the next

year. So Ive done a rough first draft and Im now working further on it.

Right now, though, Thapar shows no signs of not being around. Weve been chatting almosttwo and half hours, but shes still full of lively talk and turns mildly professorial to ask us aboutourselves, two former history graduates in the unlikely world of business journalism. It takes usall of 15 seconds to fill her in. As for her full life, weve barely had a taste.

The Future of Indian Democracy

Vinay Lal

[First published as Can Democracy Survive?, inIndia Today, 13 December 2006, pp. 32, 34.]

For a country with a very long past, many in India now seem to be resolutely focused, when theyare not consumed by the demands of daily living, on the future. Indeed, one of the many reasonswhy the BJP and their allies may have lost the last general election in 2004 is that the advocatesof Hindutva, in particular, have been obsessed with ideas about the gloriousness of the Indian


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and specifically Hindu past, though the obsessions of the young are doubtless very different.With a campaign revolving around the idea of India Shining, one might have thought that the

BJP was poised to prevail. Certainly, if the persistent invocations of the new India, the roaringeconomy, and the entrepreneurial and aggressively capitalist spirit of India are any guide, at leastthe Indian middle classes have signified their assent to the idea that an economic rather than a

political conception of democracy will drive the Indian future.

Democracies everywhere present a complex scenario of tensions between constraints and liberty,unfreedom and freedom, the imperatives of the modern national security state and the aspirationsof a free citizenry, but perhaps nowhere more so than in India. The very fact that India hasrepeatedly been able to mount general elections, and on a scale nowhere else witnessed inhistory, is adduced as evidence of the strength of Indian democracy -- an accomplishment thatseems all the more remarkable given the precarious state of democracy in most of the world. Notall institutions of civil society are equally robust, but it is an indisputable fact that there arestrong peoples and grassroots movements. The same Supreme Court that sentenced MohammedAfzal to death, notwithstanding the failure of the state to produce decisive evidence against the

condemned man, also acquitted other men for want of evidence. Similarly, if the press has oftenbeen a bulwark of support to lites, the vigilance of the English-language press during the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 cannot be denied. There have been important legislativegains for ordinary people, including the passage of the National Rural Employment GuaranteeAct, the Forest Peoples Land Rights Bill, the Right to Information Act, and the Protection of

Women from Domestic Violence Act, but it is also widely conceded that progressive legislation,for example on the practice of dowry, can coexist alongside a resolute determination to preventits implementation. The law can obfuscate problems as much as it can help to relieve them, anoutcome all but assured when the state has no substantive commitment to the idea of an opensociety and distributive equality.

In thinking about Indian democracy and its future prospects, commentators have lavished far toomuch attention on politics in the narrowest conception of the term. There is much speculation,

for example, on whether India might move towards a two-party system or some variation of it,with the Congress and the left parties constituting one bloc and the other bloc being constitutedby BJP and its allies. But this kind of scenario has little room for parties such as the BahujanSamaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP), which together dominate politics in UttarPradesh, where efforts by the Congress to reinvent itself do not hold much promise of success. Inthe General Elections of 2004, the Left Front won 60 seats and came to hold the decisive swingvote. While so far the left has show little inclination to revolt, and West Bengal is rapidlyretooling itself to become attractive to the corporate world and foreign investors, the possibilityof genuine and irreconcilable differences developing between the Congress and the Left Frontshould never be minimized.

Consequently, in addressing the question of the future of Indian democracy, one is asked to thinkwell beyond political parties, regionalism, the two party-system, and other like considerations. Ifthere is still considerable hope for Indian democracy, it is because it still has several distinctsources of renewal. First, and foremost, there is the peoples wisdom. Time after time the

illiterate electorates of India have shown better judgment than the educated, though whether thelikes of Chandrababu Naidu, the former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh who fancied himself a


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