Making her mark on history

AR Venkatachalapathy

Most scholars would be gratified to have one festschrift dedicated to them. In 1996, the Oxford University Press published a volume of 12 essays, titled Tradition, Dissent and Ideology in honour of Romila Thapar. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later appears an even more sumptuous volume celebrating her works.

The only other historian to be so honoured is perhaps DD Kosambi, though in his case the two festschrifts were divided between the two worlds that he straddled — of history and the sciences. Further, comparisons between these two arguably most important historians of the 20th century can provide more illumination. 

While Kosambi’s historical oeuvre was a clutch of books, Thapar’s output is staggering. What she has published post-retirement alone could well outstrip the production of history departments in most Indian universities. In a brilliant assessment of Kosambi, Thapar used the term ‘paradigm shift’ to describe his work. In contrast, Thapar’s own work is best characterised as incremental change. Since her first book published in 1961, she has consistently chipped away at the many pieties of Indian historiography. 

Though keeping up with the Joneses of academic theory, her work has, nevertheless, been solidly grounded in a close reading of sources. If Kosambi was combative, often adopting a polemical tone, Thapar has preferred to practise cautious understatement. Neither of the two are ivory-tower intellectuals, taking public and unpopular positions. 

If Kosambi was never offered prizes, despite the many academic distinctions won, Thapar has steadfastly refused every honour bestowed by the state. Her blue-blooded background notwithstanding, what Thapar has achieved in an unfeeling misogynist academic world is truly remarkable.

All these and more evidently weigh down on the 27 contributors who have been included in this volume. In her long career, Thapar has considered many themes, and the essays in the volume engage with her scholarship, celebrating her contribution, acknowledging the questions her work has triggered, and debating her conclusions. A short review can do little justice to such a rich volume.

The first section is devoted to an abiding theme of her work: on state formation, and the transition from lineage to state in early India. Patrick Olivelle and Susmita Basu Majumdar study the Asokan edicts. While the former considers the absence of terms such as varna and karma, the latter looks at how Asoka’s message was communicated and miscommunicated. Using the copious inscriptional evidence, R. Champakalakshmi zeroes in on the political processes in medieval South India. Hermann Kulke considers the magnificence of Odisha temples in the context of the political competition between rulers of the Chola empire and Orissa. 

The shortest section of the book, on the symbolic and the social, consist of three essays. Charles Malamoud’s is a highly technical study of the sacrificial pole in Vedic rituals, while Aloka Parasher-Sen and Uma Chakravarti, respectively, consider the Thapar’s pioneering work on environment in ancient India, and study the figure of Sita in the light of her work on the many iterations of the Sakuntala story.

A running interest in Thapar’s work has been on historical consciousness, or the lack thereof, in pre-medieval Indian society. Posterity might judge The Past Before Us as her magnum opus. And therefore not surprisingly this section is the largest. Robert Goldman, Alf Hiltebeitel and Naina Dayal engage with the epic texts while Kunal Chakrabarti adopts similar methods to the much reviled puranas. Sunil Kumar deconstructs metanarratives about Delhi’s history while Gananath Obeyesekere and Kesavan Veluthat focus on the deep south and beyond.

Thapar always situated the study of Indian history in a larger world, and fittingly the penultiamte section is devoted to the Aryan question and India’s trade connections with the Hellenistic world. Thomas Trautmann’s masterly survey of the Aryan question deserves separate mention. The final section concerns contemporary debates in terms of the writing of textbooks and the present climate of intellectual intolerance. 

The volume, the result of a three-day conference in 2017, ends with a considered response by Thapar. One can only imagine the scowl on Kosambi’s face if he were to be in a similar situation. Despite the scholarly nature of the essays the volume has much to offer to the general reader can learn from the book. Festschrifts invariably tend to be holdall bags. Kumkum Roy and Naina Dayal have evidently paid extraordinary attention to make the papers speak to each other, and to the overall scholarship of Thapar.

The world of Indian scholarship would be truly fortunate if it can produce the like of Romila Thapar in this century. Salutations, Historian Thapar!