ROMILA  THAPAR

Questioning Paradigms, Constructing Histories: A Festschrift for Romila Thapar; Edited by Kumkum Roy and Naina Dayal;Published by  Aleph; Pages 539 ; Price Rs 999/-

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 During her career, Romila Thapar opened the study of early India to inquiry and conceptual frameworks arising out of the modern social sciences. She asked some original questions about the social development  in two thousand  years of our  history and called in question  current  paradigms of historians from both the colonial era and  recent nationalist era. She  has delineated   interplay among political, economic, social, religious and other factors, and has always taken a holistic approach. Faced with the absence of reliable dating, she has found new information in ancient texts -- Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and Jain -- in Old Tamil traditions and folklore, and correlated  with findings from archaeology, numismatics, linguistics and inscriptions. She has constantly pursued  a history based on evidence drawn from a number of  sources, in many  languages from all levels of society across time. Making innovative use of familiar archaeological and literary sources and mining new data, Thapar has enlarged the world's understanding of India. Thapar has brought out  15 substantial books, beginning  with "Asoka and the Decline of the Maurya" and  the  classic "A History of India" and  "Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300."

She is a  professor of ancient Indian history at the  J N U  and  held visiting posts and received honorary degrees from universities the world over.  Along  with historian Peter Brown, Thapar won  the prestigious Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity.

Romila Thapar has produced a unique body of work. Her original and path-breaking commentaries and essays on ancient Indian history, along with her incisive writings on culture, society, archaeology, philosophy, classical literature and education have inspired a growing number of historians, scholars, public intellectuals and ordinary people alike.

The book under review edited by  Kumkum Roy and Naina Dayal-- two teachers of History--- is a  Festschrift to Romila Thapar’s and her students and colleagues from across the world celebrate her contributions by applying her methods and insights to a range of historical, philosophical, sociological and cultural questions. The volume brings  Thapar and her pioneering work to the attention of a world  audience.

 Romila Thapar declared : “…an enquiry should begin with a question… The question may be something quite simple, the answer to which will further qualify what you are saying. Or it may be a question that gives you the possibility of looking at the event or the person in history from different points of view. And that one question then leads to other questions that reflect these different points of view. So I would say that the fundamental approach to any piece of research or what one is working on grows out of a question.”

The book  takes forward key strands of her contribution to the academic discipline. Twenty-seven scholars, acclaimed for their own contributions to academia, have come together to celebrate the pursuit of knowledge about and scholarship on different facets of the history of early India and their modern narratives and debates. A ‘Response’ by Thapar not only addresses the core issues of the 2018 conference from which this book emerged but also sheds light on some key moments and challenges in her own career even as she evolved over time, not only as an academic but also as a public intellectual.

The essays in the book are organised into five segments reflecting facets of Thapar’s earlier and relatively recent interests: “Political Processes”; “The Symbolic and the Social”; “Historical Consciousness and Reconstructions”; “India and the World Beyond”; and finally, “The Past and the Present: Dialogues and Debates”. They showcase her exceptional achievements as one among the best historians of our time.

Essays in the first section thus interrogate the sound of silence in the Ashokan inscriptions , the pivotal role of communication techniques and networks in Mauryan administration , the complexities of post-Mauryan states and state-formation in early medieval South India , the intersection of state-formation and temple-building activities in the Deccan in the seventh and eighth centuries CE  and in Odisha between the 11th and 13th centuries CE . The articles in the second section devote attention to examine the relationship between the sedentary and the wild through the lens of symbolism. The first of them illustrates how, for instance, a tree, an object of the wilderness, can be transformed into a culturally embedded artefact, the sacrificial post in a Vedic ritual, the yupa  while others underscore the importance of differentiating ‘forests’ and make context-specific readings of habitations, woods and the wild  or explore the various representations of Sita and Shakuntala . Articles in the third section cover a wide spectrum: from exploring the innovative aspects of medieval commentarial traditions on the epics in establishing the authenticity of Valmiki and Vyasa , through contextualising the composition of the Mahabharata within the rubric of the second urbanisation of circa 600 BCE , examining the role of bardic traditions in consolidating Brahmanical order , mapping the contours of socio-religious change in Bengal through the lens of the Puranas , reconstructing a history of the Delhi Sultanate by looking beyond the capitals of the Sultans , reflecting on ‘the indeterminate nature of textual traditions’ by drawing upon a case study of different narratives of the 14th-century king Parakramabahu IV of Sri Lanka , and finally to the pivotal role of public performance as medium of expressing a sense of history . Contributors in the fourth section demonstrate the trans-regional dimension of history contemplating on, for instance, key aspects of the ‘Aryan question’ and especially the different disciplinary practices employed to address the ‘Aryan question’ in our times , relations between ‘Persians and Indians’ in circa sixth to fifth centuries BCE , comparison between Homer’s Iliad and Sanskrit  Mahabharata , ports and forms of exchange between peninsular India and the Graeco-Roman world , and the subcontinent’s maritime interactions with the eastern Mediterranean areas between the late first century BCE and the end of the third century CE . Essays in the fifth section are timely ruminations on the past/present interface. They address issues such as the lineages of inter- and transdisciplinarity and knowledge production , Marxism and nationalism , the disturbing ascent of anti-intellectualism , the writing of children’s textbooks with particular focus on the treatment of food and dietary practices in such books, showing how they re-shape in the process contours of identity , and finally the challenge of redefining heritage .

The beauty of the present collection lies in its sheer richness of themes and the very nature of engagement with South Asia’s many pasts in the crucible of the present, sensitised at once to current debates, controversies and challenges, indeed, to the very importance of social responsibility in the life of an intellectual. 

There is plenty in this book to seriously ponder over. Here is an extract from Prof. Thapar’s response to the essays included in the book. She reiterates that it does not matter how good the textbook is, it still requires the teachers to convey to the school student that the textbook is saying. It is imperative that the teacher be trained to think about the subject and brought up-to-date in their thinking otherwise they will not recognize the changes in disciplines — the paradigm shift. The teachers cannot expect their student to parrot the book to get the requisite grades. “That is not education”.

The editors and the entire team that helped put together this volume should be duly congratulated.This is a fantastic work that calls for careful reading and deep thinking over. 

                                                            

P.P.Ramachandran.

30/06/2019.