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Historian Romila Thapar reflects on a rich, path-breaking life—and the ideas, friendships, and journeys that shaped her.

In Just Being, historian Romila Thapar invites us into her illustrious world—a rich, extensive memoir from a scholar who has profoundly shaped our understanding of India’s past and present.

From her childhood growing up in British India, through her years of education in London, her extensive travels to archaeological sites across Asia and beyond, and her trailblazing role in shaping the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Thapar reflects on a life lived in the service of inquiry and education. Composed over the past few years, Just Being is a testimony to Thapar’s ability to view herself within the larger flow of history, and to illumine it with a scholar’s depth and a storyteller’s sensitivity. It reveals not only an extraordinary, boundary-defying life but a profound conviction that understanding our past in the light of irrefutable evidence is essential to an insight into the present and to shaping a more thoughtful future.

An overview of nationalism and its impact on the study of history from one of India’s most prominent historians.
 
In this timely book, historian Romila Thapar delves into the complex world of nationalism and its impact on the interpretations of the past and on the discipline of history itself. History, she expounds, is no mere collection of information and chronology, and its purpose extends well beyond storytelling.
 
Recognizing nationalism as a powerful force that gives rise to various narratives that provide ancestry to communities and shape the direction of societies, Thapar explores how, in India, two conflicting notions of nationalism have evolved and shaped the idea of the nation. Today, one such nationalistic theory claims the victimization of one religious community by another through centuries of “misrule.” Such a claim willfully ignores ample evidence to the contrary to suit a particular political and ideological purpose. Thapar counters such attempts at misrepresentation by citing several historical instances of the nuanced interface and intermingling of cultures, as well as by showing how today’s conflicts have their roots in the British colonial construction of India’s history. She also addresses the recent controversy surrounding the deletions of sections of Indian history textbooks published by NCERT, the Indian educational council, and suggests that the intention is more likely to be the promotion of a particular reading of history that conforms to the ideology of those in power.
 
Engaging and thought-provoking, Our History, Their History, Whose History? invites readers to question the authenticity of historical narratives touted by one group of nationalists, and it explores the clash between professional historians who study the past to understand our inherited present and fabricators who wield history for political gain.

A lively discussion between two eminent Indian academics that examines what it means to be an Indian.
 
Through a stimulating dialogue, two old friends trace the history of the idea of India through digressions, anecdotes, and observations. Historian Romila Thapar and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reflect on the challenges posed by essentialism and exclusion whenever cultures attempt to define and assert themselves. They also emphasize the role of education in fostering a more inclusive and accurate understanding of the nation’s complex history. Their conversation revolves around the narratives that have shaped Indian identity—from Vedic times to the present—and those whose voices and visions for this land remain unheard and unseen.
 
Ranging from nationalism to religion and beyond, TheIdea of India discusses an urgent question: What does it mean to be an Indian in contemporary society?

Short, rigorous intervention on history-writing in public life.

How does the present reshape what a society chooses to remember as its past? Recent interpretations of India's history have replaced careful inquiry with narratives that mirror contemporary anxieties and ambitions, sidelining the evidence, debate, and plurality that once characterized India’s long intellectual tradition. At stake is a shift from understanding history as a method to treating it as a tool of identity and authority. In The Present Colonizes the Past, Romila Thapar asks: How have cultural and religious identities evolved through interaction rather than isolation? How have dissent and accommodation shaped social change? How have education and public discourse influenced what is accepted as knowledge? And, most urgently, how might weakened institutions and selective pasts redefine our heritage and citizenship?

Written by one of India’s best-known public intellectuals,  this book is essential reading for anyone interested in India’s fascinating history as well as the direction in which the nation is headed.

People have argued since time immemorial. Disagreement is a part of life, of human experience. But we now live in times when any form of protest in India is marked as anti-Indian and met with arguments that the very concept of dissent was imported into India from the West. As Romila Thapar explores in her timely historical essay, however, dissent has a long history in the subcontinent, even if its forms have evolved through the centuries.
 
In Voices of Dissent: An Essay, Thapar looks at the articulation of nonviolent dissent and relates it to various pivotal moments throughout India’s history. Beginning with Vedic times, she takes us from the second to the first millennium BCE, to the emergence of groups that were jointly called the Shramanas—the Jainas, Buddhists, and Ajivikas. Going forward in time, she also explores the views of the Bhakti sants and others of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and brings us to a major moment of dissent that helped to establish a free and democratic India: Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha. Then Thapar places in context the recent peaceful protests against India’s new, controversial citizenship law, maintaining that dissent in our time must be opposed to injustice and supportive of democratic rights so that society may change for the better.