Romila Thapar > Quotes

“The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.”
― Romila Thapar, A History of India: Volume 1

“It must be said here that ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an attribute of patriotism, but of deep patriarchy. Extreme mother-love is a camouflage for extreme misogyny. Over the past few years in India, the nature of the violence inflicted on women during rapes, riots and caste retributions is of an order seldom witnessed before in any part of the world, except perhaps, in Bosnia during the civil war, or in the Congo, or in Sri Lanka during the final moments of the pogrom against the civilian Tamil population there. From the barbarity of the jawans of the Assam Rifles on Manorama Devi, to incessant mass rapes by soldiers in Kashmir, to the graphic and horrific brutalities (that were videotaped) on even pregnant women in Gujarat in 2002, to the Nirbhaya case in Delhi, there is no evidence to prove that devotion towards an abstract ‘Bharat Mata’ translates into even a semblance of affection or respect for real flesh-and-blood women. Indeed, here it is only literally the flesh and blood that seems to matter. Add”
― Romila Thapar, On Nationalism

“Some have argued that as language is the medium of knowledge, that which comes in the form of language constitutes a text; since language is interpreted by the individual, the reading by the individual gives meaning to the text; therefore each time a text is read by a different individual it acquires a fresh meaning. Taken to its logical conclusion, this denies any generally accepted meaning of a text and is implicitly a denial of attempts at historical representation or claims to relative objectivity, since the meaning would change with each reading. However, the prevalent views are more subtle.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Gardizi mentions the seven divisions of Indian society, almost echoing Megasthenes who had visited India in the fourth century BC in the Mauryan period. Unlike Megasthenes, this account refers to two divisions at the lowest social level, that of the Chandala and the Domb. And, echoing the description of Fa Hsien who came to India in Gupta times, he states that the Chandala have to announce their presence by striking wooden clappers, so that the ‘pure’ castes could keep at a distance from them. In the description of religion, apart from the names of various deities, there is some attempt to describe avataras, the doctrine of karma, and the nature of the divine.”
― Romila Thapar, Somanatha

“The eating of beef was reserved for specific occasions, such as rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status. This is a common practice in other cattle-keeping cultures as well.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Strangely, Indians travelling outside the subcontinent do not seem to have left itineraries of where they went or descriptions of what they saw. Distant places enter the narratives of storytelling only very occasionally. Notions”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“National-ism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Intensely devotional poetry was written by poets, some of whom were born Muslim but worshipped Hindu deities. One of the best known among them was Sayyad Ibrahim, popularly referred to as Raskhan, whose dohas and bhajans dedicated to the deity Krishna were widely recited in the sixteenth century and are still remembered by devotees of Krishna and others.”
― Romila Thapar, On Nationalism

“It is said that the Hindus must have been upset at seeing Turkish and Mongol soldiers in their heavy boots trampling the floors of the temples. The question is, which Hindus? For, the same temple if it was now entered by mleccha soldiers was open only to upper-caste Hindus and its sanctum was in any case barred to the majority of the population who were regarded as the indigenous mleccha. The trauma was therefore more in the notion of the temple being polluted rather than the confrontation of one religion with another.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Democracy ceases to be so if it is governed by permanent majoritarian identities of any kind.”
― Romila Thapar, The Public Intellectual in India

“If the shar’ia required that a woman suspected of adultery should be stoned to death, the Bhagvad Gita establishes a mindset by referring to women and low castes as sinfully born, and khap panchayats do the rest.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Tolerance does not grow with banning what is thought to be unpalatable; it grows with arguing and talking about it; for that which is unpalatable gets discarded.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The occasional woman philosopher such as Gargi, who is often quoted to prove the high status of women in ancient times, is actually the proverbial swallow and does not make a summer.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Nations are not easily forged since many identities have to be coalesced.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Nations have to be built on an inclusive identity.”
― Romila Thapar, The Public Intellectual in India

“The alienation implicit in modernization is sought to be assuaged by the creation of a past and of ideologies that legitimize the present.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Putting wives through fire has continued since ancient times, from Sita to sati to dowry deaths. It is a curious aspect of our social culture.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Nationalism may begin with ideas among the elite but its propagation involves having mass support. Initially, anti-colonial”
― Romila Thapar, On Nationalism

“What is of interest in the history of the term Hindu, is that its origin lies in its being a geographical name.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The decline of Buddhism in the Ganges heartland and the peninsula occurred before the Turkish conquest.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The act of immolation is first described in Greek texts, quoting from earlier accounts referring to incidents of the fourth century BC. Widows are burnt on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands among the Katheae (Kshatriya or khattiya) in the Punjab. Unable to explain this practice the author remarks that it was an attempt to prevent wives from poisoning their husbands!”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“On a universal scale the civilized were the colonizers and the uncivilized were the colonized.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“analysis. The focus on culture, beliefs and ideologies could be a necessary addition to the earlier historical emphases on politics and the economy, but it is not in itself definitive history since history requires a correlation between the reading of a text and its multi-layered historical contexts. This enables an understanding of what is directly stated in a text and, equally important, that which is implied.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Historically the interesting question is when and why did the prohibition on eating beef become the requirement of a good Hindu.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Colonial historians drew on texts encapsulating the upper-caste perspectives of Indian society and extended it to the whole of society.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“In contemporary times we not only reconstruct the past but we also use it to give legitimacy to the way in which we order our own society.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Political ideologies focusing in particular on what they call ‘cultural nationalism’—and this is common to many societies apart from the Indian—blatantly exploit history.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“To conclude on a personal note, these thoughts came to me again and again in the past few months. There has been so much talk about who is national and who is anti-national and those in authority insist that it is all about the kinds of slogans that one has to shout to avoid being called anti-national. But slogans do not make for nationalism or anti-nationalism. There has to be something more substantial to give hope to those that live at the edge of nowhere, that there is a reality that makes up a nation, and that this reality will take them away from the edge and bring them to the centre and make life worthwhile. It can be done but there has to be a will to do it. There has to be a reordering of priorities.”
― Romila Thapar, On Nationalism