Nationalism Hides India’s Complex Past

Romila Thapar, a pre-eminent historian of ancient India, has emerged as the bête noire of the Hindu right wing. She has been called a Marxist historian who “undervalued and consciously rejected many of the achievements of ancient India.” At 92, Thapar habitually ignores the personal attacks but once in a while stands up to defend her craft (she was honored by the US Library of Congress for her lifetime achievement) and points to the fantasy that her critics present as glorious Indian history.

A lecture she delivered in 2021, now expanded as a book, offers a stout defense of her position that Indian history is more complex than a mere Hindumuslim binary as presented by the ruling dispensation in India today: a thousand years of glorious Hindu India followed by 800 years of slavery under villainous Muslims. In a tightly argued essay that resembles a lawyer’s brief, Thapar shows how Hindu nationalism is being advanced based on fanciful claims about the Indian origin of the Aryans and the denial of facts ascertained by proven scientific methods from philology to archaeology to genetics.

The Hindu right has embraced the 19th-century colonial historians who presented India as essentially two nations, the Hindu and Muslim, separate and constantly in conflict. A plethora of sources that have since become available reveals a more complex interaction between the two communities. “To describe the entire range of relations as invariably the victimization of the Hindus by the Muslim is not born out by evidence,” Thapar writes. This slim volume is a masterclass on how nationalism poisons history.

Our History, Their History, Whose History? By Romila Thapar

Seagull Books, 2024, 164 pages, $19.00 (Hardcover)