Montgomery Fellow Romila Thapar, the preeminent historian of ancient India, fought against Indian nationalism and death threats to chronicle her country's intricate multicultural history. Author of the much-lauded book Early India, she will give a lecture entitled "Interpretations on Early Indian History" at 4:30 p.m. today in Filene Auditorium.
Thapar's contributions to the study of Indian history have raised the ire of Indian nationalists, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, which champions socio-religious cultural views and conservative politics and governed India until 2004. She combined forces with other historians to halt the BJP's revision of Indian history, which the Indian media referred to as "saffronisation."
The BJP attempted to institute a type of communal education that injected religious bias into textbooks to encourage conversion to Hinduism and emphasize Hindu superiority.
"It's different between those who are interdisciplinary and use a method of research and analysis and those who simply fantasize about the past," she said.
BJP's manipulation of history was a way of furthering a certain kind of religious nationalism based on the need for a common identity and a common history, according to Thapar.
"We were all brought up on the colonial and nationalist views of Indian history," Thapar said.
In 2003, Thapar became the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress, the United States' oldest federal cultural institution. She faced not only renewed criticism from the nationalist BJP, but also threats on her life from its supporters in response to the appointment.
Thapar, who required bodyguards to ensure her safety in public, speculated that they may have chosen her because of her unique combination of being a modern historian and a woman in a field dominated by men.
"In those days, one really had to be twice as good as the men to be taken seriously, at least for the first few years," Thapar said.
There was a sense that if someone was going to challenge the conventional views of the ancient past, it should not be a woman, she said.
Thapar, who identifies herself as a Marxist, watched as political parties manipulated history so that it supported their respective ideologies. She called history "a weapon of political mobilization" when used negligently and said historians' roles have evolved since she began working in the field.
"The emphasis has changed from knowing what happened in the past to explaining what happened in the past and understanding it," Thapar said. "It's not just facts."
Her childhood experiences in contrasting cultures helped spur Thapar to investigate the interactions between the religious and cultural groups in India's history.
Thapar spent her childhood in the area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was often fraught with tribal rivalry. She described her secondary schooling in the Pune region of Bombay as a "well-established society of people with strong cultural tradition who would not understand tribal society."
"The greatness of Indian civilization lies in its multicultural and pluralist past," Thapar said.
Thapar's wide-ranging interests, voracious reading habits and natural inquisitiveness have helped her see interdisciplinary connections that she says "come leaping out" at her during research.
Once she realized that the major untapped source of ancient Indian history was archaeology, she spent three consecutive winters learning about archaeology at the excavation site of the famed city Kalibangan. She said her newfound archaeological knowledge has added greater depth and a new perspective to her reconstructions of history.
"As a historian you cannot stop at saying 'This is how it was,'" she said.
