Romila Thapar Quotes

• “The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.”

  Romila Thapar

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “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

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “The secular critique of communalism is not an opposition to religion but to the abuse of religion.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Communalism is the political exploitation of a religious ideology.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “The second assertion was that the pre-colonial political economy conformed to the model of what was called Oriental Despotism.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “The Mahabharata can be viewed as a civilizational text not because it reflects the propagation of a particular view of these dharmas but because, among other things, it speaks to the debate on social ethics, especially between the brahmanical perspective and those that question it—a debate that has continued over many centuries.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Nations have to be built on an inclusive identity.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Democracy ceases to be so if it is governed by permanent majoritarian identities of any kind.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “National-ism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Nations are not easily forged since many identities have to be coalesced.”

  Romila Thapar

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “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

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “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

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “The second trial for sedition was in 1908 before Justice D. D. Davar, who had been his counsel in the first trial, and a jury of which seven Europeans returned a verdict of guilty while the two Indians, both Parsis, returned a verdict of not guilty. Justice Davar sentenced Tilak to six years’ transportation. At his third and last trial for sedition in 1916, he was successfully defended by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Tilak had been ordered to execute a bond for Rs 20,000 ‘for good behaviour’ for ‘disseminating seditious matter’. Justices Batchelor and Shah quashed the order.”

  Romila Thapar

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “One could well ask if there is some subconscious link in the patriarchal mind between the agni-pariksha, fire-ordeal of Sita; the encouraging of women to become satis, the practice of entering the fire jointly in a jauhar when a Rajput raja was defeated in a campaign; and the frequency of dowry deaths in recent times.”

  Romila Thapar

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “The history of India was constructed in accordance with nineteenth century European views on what history should be and what was thought to be Indian history.”

  Romila Thapar

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “A number of families constituted a grama, a word used later for village, suggesting that the families in the early settlements were related. Another view holds that grama was the formation made up of wagons used by the mobile pastoralists”

  Romila Thapar

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “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

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Nationalism may begin with ideas among the elite but its propagation involves having mass support. Initially, anti-colonial”

  Romila Thapar

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “The flesh of the ox was medically prescribed to enhance vigour.”

  Romila Thapar

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement