Romila Thapar

Boreth Ly, a 2004-2005 Rockefeller Residential Fellow in Critical Asian Studies at the Center, and Miriam Bartha, the Center’s Assistant Director, took the opportunity to speak with Professor Thapar informally on themes relevant to interdisciplinary and humanistic study.

Boreth: Your works are read by scholars from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Why do you think your writings have an appeal that transcends academic boundaries?

Romila: I think this is part of the very act of writing history. History as a discipline transcends boundaries because every subject has a history. And colonial administrators working in India were dead right when they said that if you know the history of a subject then you can control it! Those who work in the Humanities and the Social Sciences do tend to read histories—and especially histories that attempt to cut a wide swathe through a culture. And that is something which I have been attempting to do. Making connections is very important in any advance in knowledge and we are all trying to do that with greater or lesser success.

It also has to do with my attempt in the History of India, Vol. I (published in 1966), to move beyond the then limited political and dynastic histories and to integrate a variety of human activities—economic, social, technological, religious, literary, artistic—the lot. The insistence on looking for the connections in these activities meant that one had to read rather widely. Writing, thinking about and discussing history in the 1960s and 1970s in India was an exhilarating experience since history was undergoing a paradigm shift from Indology towards the Social Sciences and this shift is reflected in the histories written at that time.

My initiation into interdisciplinary history was the realization that there was a remarkable new source of evidence on early India in the archaeological data that was being retrieved and I spent quite a while digging at various excavation sites in order to understand what was being said in excavation reports. And archaeology is both tactile and abstract and one can touch the past.

My second realization was that if one tried to understand how societies at various stages of evolution functioned or if one studied possible parallels in other societies then one might start asking more incisive questions of one’s own society. Since the end purpose of the exercise was to explain what happened in the past and how it happened, a framework of questions became essential. This led me to read some social and economic anthropology. This I suppose is evident from my analysis of early historical society in the Ganges plain—From Lineage to State—which is described by some historians as more anthropology than history! Asking a variety of new questions meant handling a range of new evidence, and making causal connections of a complicated sort.

Boreth: Can you say more about what you see literature or a literary sensibility contributing to your work as a historian?

Marguerite Yourcenar’s book on Hadrian made a deep impression on me even thought she is not a historian per se and her recreation of Hadrian is somewhat quizzical. For me it represents something else—a parallel problem that historians face in their struggle to understand the past. This may sometimes require a momentary dislocation from historicity in order to get an insight or glimpse into such an understanding. I am not suggesting that one should move away from the rigor of historical method or discard historicity. Not at all. But at the same time a momentary insight could be illuminating, even if eventually it has to be sieved through a method of analysis. It is sometimes necessary to break the boundaries of history and explore what lies beyond them, if only to return to history with a greater understanding.

Miriam: I hear you talking about the need to engage the past through multiple modes of inquiry, both historical and extra-historical—Is this part of your interdisciplinary reach, too?

Romila: Yes, it does tie in with interdisciplinary work where one is using the experience of other societies in a comparative way.

Boreth: You are considered by many to be one of the public intellectuals in India. In your mind, what constitutes a ‘public intellectual’? How do you define public intellectual in the Indian context?

Romila: I find the use of this term rather puzzling, as puzzling as when I am called an ‘activist.’ What does it mean? I like to think of myself as an intellectual and I know that professionally I am an academic. As an intellectual I have an audience beyond the academy—but then one is also a part of that very same audience. Outside my field of expertise, I want to know how others more competent than I are thinking about the questions they are asking, because their answers impinge on my life as well.

Part of the reason I don’t see the ‘public intellectual’ as a new phenomena may be because in the years I was becoming a historian we were all well aware of the wider meaning of researching into the past, namely recognizing the presence of the past in the present and understanding that this would give us a better understanding of the present. History was a mix of intellectual curiosity about the past but also not without a concern for the present. Perhaps the most telling concerns have been questions relating to identities and traditions, where ideologues see them as permanent but historians argue that they are continually being redefined.