This conversation was part of the History for Peace conference titled 'The Idea of Democracy' hosted at Delhi Public School, Ludhiana on November 12 and 13, 2022.

Arvind Narrain: Working as a lawyer, particularly as a lawyer focusing on human rights issues, the Constitution is the document we go back to. During conversations with Dr Thapar in the past, she has very clearly indicated that the Constitution is a document for and to which she has a great deal of concern and attachment. I was fascinated by the idea of having a conversation with Dr Thapar because her work, her career and her life have spanned the history of this country in an incredible way. If you want an insight into any dimension of the past from either her work or her life, you will get a view that you will not have anywhere else. In her work, she has indicated that there are many things which are in the past as far as we are concerned. There is a really moving, beautiful question which she asks of this past: What in the past becomes a part of our history?

Professor Thapar, what was your experience of colonial rule? Could you tell us what it was like, at the time, to be a part of British India?

Romila Thapar: Thank you very much for this invitation. I must say that I am delighted, partly because I have a soft spot for Ludhiana. Why? It was one of the earlier garhs (abode) of the Thapars, who were traders who came from Afghanistan and brought with them two bricks from the samadhi of the pir they worshipped, Baba Gajju. On my first visit to Ludhiana, I went to the shrine and paid my respects to this pir that my ancestral family seemed to worship. One of the advantages of growing old and having an old age is that you do cover a large span of history and therefore your life in a sense becomes history and you become a natural historian, as it were. But nevertheless, going back to colonial times, which are really my earliest memories having been born in 1931. I have a vague memory of when I was 4 or 5 and my father was a doctor in the army. He was posted to the Thal Fort in the North-West Frontier Province as it was then called, which was halfway between Peshawar and the road to Khyber Pass that goes into Afghanistan. It was a very typical British fort built on the frontier zones of British India and what lay beyond the Pathan country. So, life was regulated by all the discipline of the fort—you woke up at a certain time, the suryagraha. My brothers and sisters were in boarding school since they were all much older than me. I was not in school, so it was a marvelous life and it was play from eight in the morning to six in the evening as it were, and running around in a space that we knew quite well. Then we got to know everybody who lived in the fort, the whole regiment, and everybody made a great fuss of us because we were the only children there. There must have been a dozen of us. So, that was one aspect of colonial life.

If I may now expand just a little bit on that: Why was it a fort? The British had a frontier policy—every now and again they would go and create some trouble among the Pathans, just to make sure that they had control over the region. Why were they worried about it? They were worried because the Russians had a desire to move into this area. They were already in Central Asia and they were pushing down towards what was called the North-West Frontier Province. Therefore, there would be these little shootouts every now and again, and if there were any people wounded or injured among the Pathans, they would immediately call the office of the fort the next day and send for the doctor—the only doctor on the premises was my father. My father had a convertible Ford which he would drive with my mother sitting at the front—his medical box at the back and I would be sitting with it—and we would drive through this Pathan countryside to the fort. My father would be taken off to attend to the wounded and my mother and I would go into the zenana. There were these beautiful Pathan women who wore these maroon and black scarves with dangling silver jewellery around their ears and necks and silver rings on their fingers. My mother always teased me that when I grew up, I would wear no jewellery but silver rings, which I am still doing—I had this obsession with silver rings—she would say that this is from the imprint of the Pathan women on me.

So, it was a kind of a mixed life. One did not really understand what colonialism was at that age. I really began to understand colonial life later when my father was posted to Peshawar, then Rawalpindi and finally to Pune. Pune was where I had the longest stretch, about eight years, and the major part of my schooling was there. That was a cantonment society and that was truly colonial in a much more everyday sense of the word. What was a cantonment? It was an area that was adjacent to the city, not part of it but side by side. So, for trains and railway stations you always had Firozpur city junction and Firozpur cantonment—these were two separate stops and you got off at the cantonment stop. The cantonment was much more open. Remember, that the British had this obsession that if you don’t have enough air and space you get diseases. Malaria, which is ‘mal’ and ‘aria’ meaning bad air, was a great fear. So, cantonments were very open. Every cantonment house, I think, was set in about an acre of land with a tiny garden but a huge open space and consequently lots of snakes. Childhood was constantly about being warned: when you walk across the grass, be sure you look at what you are walking on because you may be stepping on a snake. I was absolutely petrified, as I am to this day, of the snake—whatever Freud may say is another matter.

So, what was the cantonment life? It was this very well laid out area—the same patterned houses in rows. You could predict that when you entered there would be the corridor leading to the bedrooms, living rooms and so on, a little annexe at the back with the kitchen and the store room. The store room was very important because that was where all your provisions for the week were brought and then the housewife doled them out every morning with very careful control over provision. That was at an age when one started going to school. Was school close enough to walk? Sometimes it was, as in Peshawar for example or to cycle to, as it was in Rawalpindi when we were posted there. Or did one have to take a little school bus? There were usually station wagons, as they were called in those days; SUVs with eight or ten seats that stopped at various places and picked us up. School, of course, was largely fun because school children were completely mixed in the cantonment—you had some children from the city side, like rich merchants, and others working in the city would send their children to these largely convent schools which were chosen because they had a fairly uniform education right through the country. Otherwise, it would be disastrous if your father was transferred from Peshawar to Pune and the school system was completely different. Then you’d get totally knocked out. But the convents ensured a certain kind of similarity, so that it wasn’t a disaster and you didn’t change schools and sob like mad because you couldn’t cope with the changed curriculum and you’d left all your friends behind and so on.

So, there was school that was close enough to home and there was always a Sadar Bazaar as it was called—the bazaar or the market where one did one’s normal usual shopping. Special shops were very difficult to come across—they were all in the city and one never got to the city very much. In terms of entertainment, you socialized with the children who lived in the cantonment because their parents would be known to your parents and it was a kind of bubble society where everybody knew everybody and that was really nice. Remember, that was not just cantonment living but childhood generally at that time because we had none of the gadgets that children have today. We were never on any kind of gadgets, not even the radio. We were always inventing games by ourselves—the most popular child would be the child who was capable of inventing a game of their own.

There was a certain routine or discipline that one could recognize as the cantonment discipline. The social hub was what was called the club, and it was generally a gymkhana club but nevertheless it was a club. Everybody’s parents were members of the club and that was where you went swimming or played badminton or tennis, and the elders would go there for their Sunday morning beers or go in the evening to play bridge and canasta and what not. One did not really know or enjoy the club until one grew up into one’s late teens. When you turned 17 or 18, there was of course this great worry that all parents had—and not just those living in the cantonment but certainly in the cantonment. If you were a girl and you were 18, then they had to find you a husband and that became a great problem. People making subtle enquiries because you must not do it very obviously: What is your son doing? Oh, I see, he is 20 years old. What does he study? What does he hope to be? There was all that floating around with the elder siblings of the family which was a source of great fun because we, the younger ones, would take little bets on ‘who do you think is going to get hitched up to who?’ What I am trying to suggest is that the scope of cantonment society socially was larger than the city society. I remember the girls who came from the city to the school. We would chat with them and they would always talk about how closed families were. They were closed because you had extended families and it was family relationships that mattered. Or you had the baradari (the community) groups of people that somehow were linked together that mattered. The contrast with the cantonment zone was that everybody under the sun who had parents working for the colonial system were coming to the school. So, we had our own Hindu-Muslim groups, we had Anglo-Indians—a few of them—and some children of British officers. In those days, there were Anglo-Indians—it is strange how they have got completely washed out of Indian society today. In a place like Pune, we had a number of Bene Israeli children—Jewish children whose parents, as soon as Israel was founded, went off to Israel and became what the Israelis called Oriental Jews. What I am trying to suggest is that it was a very mixed society, much more so perhaps than in the city schools. So, we grew up in this mixture where you made friends with anybody and everybody you liked.

AN: Thank you, Dr Thapar, for sharing so much about your past. I can imagine that the students listening to this are wondering how this connects to the story of history. What of this can become a part of the history of the colonial period, as it were? What you shared might not become a part of the larger national past in our imagination but your later stories about the coming of independence and the imprint that left on you are so fascinating to me. In particular, you must share with our young friends here the story of your encounters with both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Both are really beautiful stories.

RT: Behind this cantonment culture that I have been talking about, we were very aware of the fact that there was a national movement because it was a conversation that parents had with all their friends with every passing day. The ’40s, which is when I moved to Pune and joined school there, was a great period with the naval mutiny, the Quit India movement, Gandhi’s fast and so on. My generation grew up on the cusp of independence—nationalism at its height, just about to take over. So, we were very aware of it. Conversations in school were very much about ‘When you British children go away, this is what we are going to do. India is ours, not yours,' kind of thing. In a place like Pune, Gandhi was constantly being put under arrest and let out and then put under arrest again. His big fasts took place when he was under arrest in Pune. The periods when he was not under arrest, he would hold prayer meetings—as he called them—in a huge compound of a house that belonged to a nature cure clinic of a Dr Mehta—I still remember. We would rush home from school, quickly do our homework and three or four of us would go to these prayer meetings——it wasn’t too far from the cantonment. There we sat, evening after evening, maybe not fully understanding what the conversation was about. Nevertheless, there was the feeling that we have got to be a part of this. On one occasion, someone said to me, ‘Since you are so hung up on these prayer meetings, why don’t you ask Gandhiji to give you his signature in your autograph album?’ In those days, we didn’t have cell phones for selfies of course, every school child had little  four-inch-by-two inch books called autograph albums. The deal was that you pay 5 rupees into the National Congress Fund and if you had a chance, you went up to him and he signed it. One evening, I picked up courage, went and paid my 5 rupees and I stood there gingerly and edged my way until someone asked me, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said I wanted a signature. So, they pushed me forward. I must say he was extraordinarily nice, he smiled, took the book and signed it. As he was giving it back to me, he looked at me and he said: But you’re wearing mill-made clothes. I was wearing a churidar that was clearly mill-made, so I said yes. He said, ‘Never wear mill-made clothes, only wear khadi. Now, go home and tell your parents to get khadi clothes.’ And I said, ‘Haan Gandhiji, zaroor.’ I rushed home and told my mother I am not going to wear any of these clothes, I want only khadi clothes. My mother sighed and said, ‘This means that for the next two months, you will wear khadi clothes and then come back to the normal ones after that’, and that is exactly what happened. In some ways, this is a silly little incident but it does make an imprint in the mind of a young teenager—I don’t know if it would today but it certainly did for me. It was a kind of a little bond with someone one revered.

With Nehru, it was different. I met him much later when I was a student at Delhi University briefly and part of some students’ association. They had a meeting—a reception where they had invited Nehru. This was in the early ’50s and he came. The thing that struck me most was that any one of us could go up to him, ask him a question and get into a conversation and he would talk to us. Somehow, that feeling that here is a man that everyone reveres, puts on a pedestal and almost treats like a deity, answering me when I am asking him a question, treating me as a normal human being in a normal human exchange, is unparalleled. This was very impressive and I must say that altogether, one misses in the politicians thereafter that fantastic human quality that people like Gandhi and Nehru had—simply reaching out to people and chatting with them and behaving normally, as one would, person to person. I think this is a quality we have completely lost now, what with politicians being surrounded by Black Cats, security and guns, which is totally uncalled for. Politicians should mingle and merge with people like everyone else—they are supposed to represent everybody else. I must say this is a very striking difference that has always come back to me over the years when I see these bullet-proof shields and barriers that politicians stand behind now when they speak.    

AN: One more dimension you spoke about with reference to Nehru is his interest in history and the way he responded to your book. Could you share that story?

RT: That was a later event. This was after my thesis got published as a book in 1961. In those days, there was no such thing as a book launch. All the publicity that goes with every Tom, Dick and Harry book today was non-existent—you published a book so you published a book, finished. Maybe some newspapers would review it but otherwise you waited for reviews in academic journals and that was where the debate and the discussion took place. So, I published this book and was waiting for reviews. About six months later, I met somebody who said to me: You know, you have published this book on Ashoka and Nehru is deeply impressed with the edicts. I asked if he had spoken to him about it. He said, yes, in fact, we had a conversation the other day when the subject came up and I mentioned that there was a new book on Ashoka that had come out by a young historian. He said that he would be very interested to see it because it is a subject that does interest him immensely. So, this gentleman suggested I send Nehru a copy of my book, which is something I dislike doing. But when he had said that Nehru was interested in the subject, that he liked and read the edicts, I thought this is slightly different. So, I sent him a copy of the book. I was absolutely blown because a week later I got a letter from him saying: Dear so and so, I have received a copy of your book, titled such and such. I haven’t had the time to read it but I have flipped through it and it sounds very interesting. After I have read it, if I have any comments, I will get in touch with you. Signed, J. Nehru.

I just looked at this letter and thought, he is the prime minister of the country and he has got the time to write a letter to someone who sends him a little book on a subject that he is vaguely interested in. I was deeply impressed, I must say.

AN: That is really an incredible story—the connection to Nehru and the fact that he is interested in ideas, in books and in people. It is very important to share this also because there is so much of an overlay on Nehru now that we don’t know the real person. That is why individual memory becomes a way of recovering the Nehru we should know about.

RT: I think it is terribly important and it speaks of the man and the politics of that time too. This was considered the appropriate thing to do where you are interested as a politician in a subject. My goodness! Politicians in those days read—they were well-read people. Perhaps it was because they were in jail for so long and they had nothing else to do except read books. But they read and they thought. Today’s vacuous remarks didn’t suit any of them, they didn’t make them. They were different people and that I think is very important.

AN: To take a step back, Dr Thapar, we are talking about the arrival of independence and the fact that both Gandhi and Nehru left an imprint upon you, as you described it. You also mentioned to me earlier about the hoisting of the national flag and the little speech that you gave during that moment. I want to take you to a later point: What drew you to history? Why did you decide to study history and become a historian?

R.T.: I think there were two things. One was something that I was not conscious of but I became conscious of it afterwards. As I said, we lived on the cusp of independence and the height of Indian nationalism. It affected me, not only in terms of the fact that we are a country seeking independence but asking the basic question of who are we as a people who are seeking independence? What does independence mean? What is nationalism all about? What is our identity? That little speech I had made in school on Independence Day after having run around in circles tearing my hair apart, saying ‘What am I going to say’—at the age of 15, you don’t make public speeches—finally, ending up with the two questions that have bugged me all my life: What is our identity as Indians? What kind of society do we want to build? This comes into the issue of History—although I didn’t opt for History right away, my first option was Philosophy. When that misfired, I did Literature. Then, the third time around when I was doing my BA in London, I opted for ancient history. That was very much a case of curiosity about identity, the culture that I belong to, the nationalist thinking that I had been through and the whole business of what is the Indian identity. But even at that stage, doing a very serious undergraduate degree in ancient Indian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I wasn’t quite sure of my future. I was desperately anxious to stay on in London because the independence that I had hankered for from my teenage up was there—I never got in any other place. There I was, all on my own, making up my mind, taking my own decisions and being what for me was the ideal: the autonomous woman. I had the right to make decisions about my life which I could do in London that I couldn’t do anywhere else. But how was I to stay on? I had done my BA, and my father said quite rightly: look, I told you I can finance you for two years and you do your BA and then you have to come back because I don’t have the money thereafter. I remember going up to my tutor, Professor A. L. Basham, asking if there was any way I could stay on. He said that there was only one way: you apply for a fellowship and if you get the fellowship, then you can stay on. I looked at him absolutely aghast and said, that means I have to become an academic and a historian! He said, I’m afraid so, if you get the fellowship then you’ll have to do that. So, very reluctantly I applied for the fellowship because I had no idea I wanted to become an academic and I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to be a professional historian. I was so surprised when I got the fellowship. So, I stayed on and did a PhD. It was that period of doing a PhD that made me realize that there were questions about the Indian past that I was interested in, that I wanted answers to and that it might be intellectually very exciting to search for these answers. So, that converted me into being a historian. Purely accidental. If I hadn’t got that fellowship, I would have, by now, been a grandmother with lots of grandchildren.        

AN: That sounds very difficult to imagine! What we learn from reading your work and listening to you is the fact that for you, history is your discipline with certain kinds of frameworks within which it functions. There is a certain rigour to the craft you speak about that stands in contrast to popular history, which is very much around us—with a range of works that say this is history and that is history. Then suddenly, you come in with a certain kind of rigour and sense of the craft, which is really fantastic. As a lawyer, I look at that and say: historians have a craft, historians have a discipline and not everybody can say that they are historians because there is a certain kind of rigour and work you need to do to become a historian—that is something we have heard from you over and over again in your interviews and writings. Could you tell us a little bit about what you think for you is the historian’s craft? What is the discipline of being a historian? Why is it that, borrowing from your phrase, not every Tom, Dick and Harry can be a historian?

RT: I think the discipline of history as such, particularly the discipline of Indian history undergoes a very big change in the middle of the twentieth century. History was all along treated as a narrative of the past. You collected information from all kinds of sources and you linked up the information into a story of what happened—that was basically all that history was about. If you were a good historian, you wrote it out with intelligence and analysed what happened. If you were a bad historian, you simply told the story and said, that’s enough. Indian history had always been treated as part of Indology i.e. a study of India, that tells you a little more about what happened in the past again back as a narrative. The change is what happens in the middle of the twentieth century, when Indian history began to transform with the shift happening all around the world with history becoming a social science. What do I mean by history becoming a social science? The social sciences accept the ‘fact’ and that is why they are called social science—there is a methodology of investigation; it is not arbitrary. You don’t just come across bits of information that you then stitch together into a story. You have to look for information, which you have to then organize and understand. This historical method, as it were, was in its early stages in the early twentieth century and got more developed in the mid-twentieth century because it also became interdisciplinary. So, the kinds of questions you were asking, for example, if you were doing history as I was doing there when writing a thesis on Ashoka, was taught to me and was part of my training at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Much had been written on Ashoka before. In fact, when I said to the history board at SOAS that I was going to write a thesis on Ashoka, they groaned and said: ‘Not another one! Every ancient historian cuts his or her teeth on the subject and now you are going to do the same.’ But the difference was that I was asking a different set of questions. What was this different set of questions? Firstly, I was saying that there were a variety of different sources: there are the edicts of the king, the descriptions of his reign from Buddhist sources and Sanskrit sources that supposedly pertain to the Mauryan period. Previously, you just listed the sources. Then what you started doing was asking, why were they different? Why are the edicts of the king different from what the Buddhist sources are telling us about him? The edicts of the king are pronouncements of the individual about himself: how he sees himself; how he sees what he wants to do; how he is projecting himself; how he is seeing the world. The edicts, therefore, are a statement from him as a person in a particular historical position—namely the emperor of the Mauryan empire. The Buddhist sources are taking up this man who became a Buddhist, converting him into a cult hero and imbuing him with certain events that make him out to be a very good Buddhist. For example, there is a story in one of the Buddhist sources about how he was a very wicked person in his early life— Caṇḍāśoka as he was called, Dhammāsoka, a very moral and good person after his conversion to Buddhism. He had 99 brothers whom he put to death in order to become king. It is a preposterous story: a person cannot have 99 brothers—at least it is very unlikely. But you don’t take the story very literally. You go behind the story and try to understand what it is that the author is trying to project about the subject. So, this going behind the story and trying to understand the different meanings of the story becomes an important part of historical investigation. Then you come to the Sanskrit sources, where the striking feature is that they do not mention Ashoka in any lengthy way. There is a tendency to ignore the king. What does that mean? What does it mean when you read his edicts and ask what was going on in the country at that time that you get these different interpretations? These are only the beginnings of it and so you continue. You look at the language that is used and analyse that very carefully. What are the words that are used? What is the meaning of dhamma? We’ve gone around in circles and there has been volume after volume written on the meaning of dharma and dhamma—is it the same thing or is it different? Why is it different? This is all part of the study, not just of language studies but also bringing in things like linguistics, historical linguistics—why do words change their meaning? Why does the word pasanda mean a sect in the Ashokan edicts and pakhanda, which comes out of that word later on, become a fake sect and is to be looked down upon? This change of meaning of words is terribly important. All of these are techniques by which you analyse your sources. And the sources also increase—you have archaeology coming in, ecology on which there is a lot of emphasis these days. You have a huge empire. Was it governed in the same way everywhere? But the regions were all different ecologically, so are there differences in the different ecological regions? These are all questions that come up when you cease treating history as only a narrative and you start saying that we have to understand that moment in time in a world which is different from ours and try and understand what is being said. So,  this is part of the reason why a historical method emerges. The problem today is that the general public is unaware that there is a historical method. On occasions of public lectures that I have given, I have frequently faced somebody from the audience getting up and saying: but you see, we all know history is made up of facts. You have historical facts from the past and the facts don’t differ—the facts are there. So why do you say historical interpretation differs? Then I have to tell them the story of the film, Rashomon, where one person is put out of commission and there are six different versions of what actually happened. This, in a sense, is what the historian is doing, I say. The historian is looking at each of these different versions, trying to understand why they differ—why is the version that comes after the brahmanical tradition different from what comes out of the Buddhist tradition? There are many historical reasons and you, as a historian, have to point out the differences. You can’t pull them all together and say, yes, this happened and make one story out of it. You have to say that there are different versions and explain why there are different versions. The crisis in history today is that you have a confrontation between the professional historian, who is using this historical method and exploring history and finding out a variety of reasons—some of which are very praiseworthy by our standards and some of which are not so praiseworthy by our standards. Sometimes, a king may act very ethically and sometimes, a king may act immorally and the historian has to explain why there is this difference. You cannot say, wipe out this immorality because we like this king and we will only project him in a positive way, which is what is being done today by popular historians. The totality of the personality is not projected, nor is the totality of a given moment in space, which is what history is all about. There is a moment in time where events are happening and we are trying to understand that moment. That has to have as wide an explanation as possible—good, bad and different reasons have to come in to be considered. You cannot have a professional history that is then cut off from popular history because popular history is insisting on treating history as it was treated a hundred years ago.

AN: The other point that you make is that popular history does not seem to take the question of evidence or proof seriously. So, the question of proof and evidence being integral to your craft as a historian is worth stressing again and again because your point is not an ideological point. Your point is not that you disagree with the fact that (you keep referring to this) the airplane was not there in ancient India. Your point is simply: ‘Give me the source which shows the presence of airplanes and I am very happy to accept it’. So, I think the approach you have is as a professional, a refreshing approach that almost cuts through the ideological baggage as it were although you have been accused of being a leftist or a Marxist historian. The question that you have a certain integrity as a historian or the fact that you believe in the integrity of a historian’s craft actually cuts through that, to me at least, in the way that I think about your work.

RT: One of the resulting differences of this new approach of history being a social science is that you are not concerned merely with telling a narrative. Our concern now, as historians, is analysing and explaining the past: What happened? Why did it happen? How did it happen? When did it happen? These are the kinds of questions we are concerned with. So, that explanation can only hold if you are trying to explain something, you have to have proven reliable evidence to support your explanation. This is basic to any explanation in any field of knowledge—be it science, non-science or anything. If you say that this is my explanation of something that has happened, ‘What is the evidence?’ is the counter question and you have to produce evidence that is reliable and proven. You cannot say because it is written in such and such old text, I believe it—because the son of Shiva and Parvati has an elephant head and there is this whole story of his head being chopped off and an elephant’s head being planted, it means we had plastic surgery. This is absolutely abominable to a historian because a historian will immediately turn around and say: What is your evidence for saying we had the technology, information and understanding, and is it feasible that an elephant’s head would go on a human body? At one level, it is intelligent common sense but at another level, when you get into more complicated issues about explanation, the question of proven evidence is absolutely necessary. This is where another issue, which some of us have been addressing and exploring becomes important: How does knowledge advance? Knowledge advances not because it is static and it is there and it somehow manages to advance. Knowledge advances because when you ask questions of all existing knowledge, the answers to the question sometimes require you to do further investigations and it is in those further investigations that knowledge advances. This is as true of history, archaeology and the sciences as it is of sociology, economics and so on. The interesting thing to why there is this confrontation between professional and popular history: Popular history is, of course, very important to the making of mythology and the making of identity—who are we as Indians? For this, we reach out to mythology and popular history. We very seldom reach out to professional history because professional history is much more to the point, you have to be much clearer in terms of what you are talking about and that really does become extremely important in this discussion.

AN: Thank you, Dr Thapar. But even taking on board the idea of the historian as a professional, there are ways in which your concerns seem to be connected with the concerns of the contemporary. I was thinking about your book on dissent, for example, where you have gone back to history to look at what are the dissenting strands of Indian cultures—trying to tell us what those strands are. Do you want to tell us a little about what you think are the dissenting strands of Indian culture? Also, why would you choose to pick up on that today?

RT: For the very simple reason again that knowledge does not advance until you question it. Every advancement in knowledge comes with someone asking: But why does it happen like this? How does it happen like this? Then, someone else comes around or the same person sits down and says: I will find the answer to why it happened like this. Questioning is absolutely fundamental. You question something when you think I somehow don’t fully agree with this. Therefore, I ask a question. If you fully agree, then there is no need to ask a question. So, if you are not fully agreeing, it means that there is an element of dissent that may be large or small. Every civilization has dissent at its core. You cannot have civilized, sophisticated living without groups that are questioning what is going on and suggesting better answers. Interestingly, if you look at the philosophical schools in all the great civilizations, there is a stand of what you call the dialectical method. You have a question, you have a point of view, then there is an opposite point of view, the two points of view debate with each other and after that debate, there might emerge a solution. For example, in the Indian philosophical tradition it is very well known that everybody advises that you begin an argument or a discussion by putting forward the point of view of the opponent—the purva paksha—and it says very clearly that you will do it with absolute integrity and represent in a detailed way what your opponent is saying. You, then, put forward your proponent’s point of view—pratipaksha, and you do it the same way in great detail with meticulous care that you represent what is being said. In the discourse between the two, there is no guarantee but there might and hopefully will emerge the siddhanta—the message. This dialectical method is there in the Socratic method, the Chinese—it is there with every civilization and it is essential. My point was that the popular idea of history is that history was static—you once arrived at a certain position like the golden age that kept continuing until these wretched people came from outside and invaded the country and killed the golden age. What is not understood is that it is a continuous process—history is a continuous process in which questions have been asked all the time. New ideas and explorations are emerging which lead to newer questions. The whole point of an exploration is that it leaves you thinking. My question was not as fulsome as it should have been, there are these other questions that also arise. Questioning is very important, which is why I am so worried about this New Education Policy in the curriculum where children in schools are not going to be encouraged to ask questions of what they are being taught. The questions are all objective type: Did this happen in this year or this year? Yes or no? Knowledge doesn’t go like that, knowledge is not a ‘yes or no’ thing. Knowledge is something you discuss and discourse over—where you say, it could be this, it could be that, if it was that then this could have happened. It is really an investigation into why we doubt and why we dissent. Therefore, I think dissent is an absolutely fundamental procedure—almost an ethical value of any kind of civilizational approach.

AN: From there, if you think of it in terms of the contemporary, we can argue that one of the crises of the contemporary moment is the absolute salience of dominant religious identities. People see their sense of self and identity within a larger religious framework. As a historian, how would you respond to this particular crisis? Would there be something in the past that we can use to challenge this today, or are there stories from other parts of the world or even from the Indian past which say that this form of religious nationalism or religious identity is a short-lived phenomenon, there are gaps in it? There are ways in which the challenge to this can’t possibly begin because the point about all of us is that we are stuck in the contemporary, so we don’t necessarily have a historian’s perspective. That is why your viewpoint is so valuable. You look at the contemporary and say, no, we are in the moment but you can also look at it with a larger frame. It would be lovely to hear your thoughts on that.

RT: It’s a complicated question you ask me. One of the important aspects, if one is to try and answer this question, is to ask another question: Why, at this point of time, is there a suggestion that there is a religious resurgence? I have chosen the word ‘suggestion’ rather carefully because firstly, we have to prove that there is in fact a religious upsurge. Not simply that there are more temples being built, more pujas being conducted, more festivals honoured. What does a resurgence of religion mean? First of all, religion is not static. There is a history of every religion: it has a beginning, it has a continuity and the continuity goes on changing. If you take the majority religion in the country—we don’t know exactly what the Harappan religion was but if you start with the brahmanical Vedic religion: It lasts for many centuries at the brahmanical and elite levels but we don’t know what the rest of the society is doing at that level because we have no texts—oral or written, from the rest of the society. Gradually, this Vedic religion becomes the monopoly of one section of society and is in some ways slightly segregated and you get what is called Puranic Hinduism turning up—the worship of Shiva and Vishnu who were not major deities in the Vedic age. Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktism are all major forms of the articulation of Hinduism in a slightly later period—that is one phase. Then you have the Bhakti movement. The bhakti movement turns around, says you can worship any god you like, choose your own ritual, choose your own teacher, compose your own hymns and have your gatherings where you are sitting and doing what you like—much more personalized and decentralized. What would the Vedic brahmana make of Krishna bhakti? They are really rather different but we pool them all together because the colonial scholars were looking for a monolithic religion and everything had to be pooled together into one category called Hinduism. I think the greatness, the richness of the Hindu religion is precisely that it was not a monolithic religion. It was a religion that consisted of many sects which sprang up on their own or broke off and so on. It was not a religion like the Abrahamic religions that go back to a historical founder and their sects in dissent. These are sects that grow up as and when they like and they attach or detach themselves to something and they go on on their own. This, I think, is absolutely magnificent. In terms of religious expression, this is really quite different from the Abrahamic religions but we haven’t quite understood that. So, when you ask the question ‘Is there a resurgence of religion today?’, you have to sit around and say, what are the characteristic features we associate with religion. We associate worship, belief, ethics—ethics are a very strong feature. Do we have a resurgence of ethics in Indian society today? Hardly, in fact, it is the reverse. So, one is a little careful. Then, you start asking the second question which is very fundamental: If there is a resurgence, what form does it take and why is there a resurgence? You suddenly find that in Indian society today, the form it takes is a very ostensible form. You must not kill the cow because of religious reasons and if you are suspected of killing the cow, then you go and lynch that man. These are very open expressions of religion. There is no such thing as saying quietly that I will teach the person to honour the cow and not kill it. No, I will go out and kill the man who does this. Secondly, does it come into authoritarian systems today? Politics today is full of religious identities and religious ideas. Is it politics playing religion or religion playing politics? Is it politics using religion as a channel to increase its own standing/ authority/ power—what you will? It is a very complicated question that has to be answered at all these levels. It’s not simply that we have become more religious because I doubt very much that we have become more religious. My gut feeling is that we are much less religious now because the ethics has gone out of our religion and ethics is very fundamentally important. We all happily swear on the Bhagvad Gita on every occasion—not only us but also the prime minister of England. But do we really understand what ethics the Gita is teaching? There are multiple interpretations of those teachings. Are we familiar with them? Do we discuss and debate them? It is not enough to take a simplistic statement and say that it is religion that has entered our lives. Yes, the ostensible articulation of religion has entered our lives, in the sense that there are many more occasions for demonstrating it. But essentially, what is meant by religion in terms of belief and behaviour—has that increased in a positive way? That is a question mark.

AN: Thank you for providing that nuance and distinction between religion vis a vis religious nationalism and the sense that there is something in religion that should be recovered. You can’t give up on that space saying it is a problematic space. The last part of the conversation that I want to take you to, Dr Thapar, is really quite unique to your work: your role as a public intellectual. This includes the fact that you have spoken to concerns which are part of the public domain. I think, one part that appeals greatly to me is that you have rejected awards given by the state. We can think back, in a global context, to the fact that Sartre rejected the Nobel Peace Prize. There is a tradition of intellectuals who have said that they will not be subordinated to the interests of the state. In that sense, you seem to be following that trajectory. But I will leave it to you rather than put words into your mouth to talk about what compelled you to reject awards given by the state.

RT: Now that you have brought Sartre into the picture, let me say just as an aside—when I first read Simone de Beauvoir, I was completely blown away. I thought this was the most magnificent thing on feminism and gender that I had read because in a sense, it helped me say ‘well, she has written it all out so beautifully, this is the way I feel too. I couldn’t have written it like this but she has written it’. Simone and Sartre were big figures in my generation—they were the big intellectual figures who we all read, studied and debated. It is interesting that you raised this comparison of Sartre and the Nobel Prize. Never had this crossed my mind that I was imitating Sartre and the Nobel Prize when I rejected the Padma twice. Rejection is perhaps too strong a word. My disinclination to accept a state award arises from two things. One is that state awards are no longer awards that are given by a government out of respect for an intellectual or for whatever activity it is being given for. I think they are very political. Whichever government gives them chooses the people it wishes to endorse as their supporters. I can’t imagine the BJP government giving me a Padma award. In a sense, that sums up that these awards are really not state awards in the sense they should be: they are government awards with the government endorsing the work that their supporters are doing, at one level. At a broader level, yes, they are state awards.

My second problem is that there has not been, to date, a government who has truly respected intellectuals in this country. There’ve always been marginal reasons why intellectuals are pushed aside. We keep talking about rishi munis of olden times who were vastly respected—nobody treats any intellectual as a rishi muni these days! Intellectuals are not respected. I think that until such a time comes when there is a public respect for what intellectuals are doing and saying, people like me will go on saying that we are disinclined to accept these rewards. I am perfectly inclined to accept—as I have accepted—rewards from my peers, i.e. academics and academic institutions of various kinds because my peers are complimenting me and I am delighted and happy. But when it comes to government awards—I see them very much as government and not as state awards (I think it is a misnomer to call them state awards)—I do feel that until such a time when academics and intellectuals have a high status in this society, I don’t see why we should accept these awards and allow ourselves to endorse whatever government is in power.

AN: I want to link it up to the other dimension of your work as a public intellectual in recent times, which is the Bhima Koregaon case in which you were the lead petitioner—Romila Thapar vs Union of India, in which you challenged the arrest of activists Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bhardwaj and others. The majority did not concede to the view point that they were illegally arrested but a very powerful stand was taken by Justice Chandrachud, who is currently the chief justice. Interestingly enough, in his dissenting opinion he said ‘Dissent is a safety valve of a democracy’, which summarizes a lot of what we spoke about till now. I think that is a very important point because we have not necessarily seen intellectuals or academics come forward and articulate or speak in favour of public causes. Again, the Sartre analogy comes in because he of course, spoke out against the Vietnam War, the Algerian War etc. There is a way intellectuals can be involved in the public while being professional—there is no ambiguity on that point. The way intellectuals, as citizens, respond to issues of their time is something that has marked out your engagement. We see it as a model—as something we should strive towards as well. I want to thank you for that but also invite your comments and thoughts on that, and particularly I’d like to know, how did the petition come about? How did you end up filing the petition challenging those particular arrests?

RT: Let me, first of all, clarify that the idea did not come from me. It is really incorrect to say ‘Romila Thapar vs the State of India’. The other four are equally important if not more: Prabhat Patnaik, Satish Deshpande, Devaki Jain and Maja Dharuwala. I have been feeling very unhappy about the fact that dissent was not being given space and allowed. You see, I agree that dissent is a safety valve of democracy because the alternative is revolution, isn’t it? If people object, how do they express their objection? So, it is terribly important that dissent be allowed because dissent is not always what people try and pretend it is: terrorism. The people that they picked up on the Bhima Koregaon case, and the 15 that have survived—one of them unfortunately passed away—are not the kind of people who are terrorists. The government does not seem to make that distinction; anybody against the government is a terrorist or anti-national! There are degrees to dissent. There is some dissent that is quite minor, there is other dissent that is much more pertinent and important leading up to the extreme dissent that could be or need be terrorist. These are not the kind of people going around assassinating prime ministers and that kind of thing. I think it is a complete lack of understanding of other human beings and people: you put them into categories and you want to arrest them, so you say they are terrorists and you put them into jail. So, when I was told that there was this petition and asked to join it, I said yes because I am very much in favour of there being healthy dissent in the country. We should be allowed to talk about different forms of dissent—the milder and the more severe forms—because it is only by talking about these things and discussing them that you clarify your ideas about them. If you keep suppressing them, then quietly the bubble grows, getting stronger and stronger and one of these days it will burst. This is the problem. Good governance means a certain accommodation of dissent. Two reasons: one was that I believe very much that a degree of dissent should be allowed. Secondly, I believe very strongly that the kind of people they picked up on this case were certainly not the kind of people who can be called terrorists by any means and I was angry about that because these are intellectuals. In a sense, the Bhima Koregaon case is a demonstration of anti-intellectualism. I may be wrong but that is my opinion. So, I will stand by the fact that five of us got together and put in this petition.

AN: Thank you for sharing that and I also tend to agree with the point of view that you put forward—that the Bhima Koregaon-16 are intellectuals—they are lawyers, civil rights activists, Dalit rights activists, Adivasi rights activists and writers. As Justice Chandrachud’s dissenting opinion indicates, there is no evidence to make the case about a plot to assassinate the prime minister, etc. It is based on complete fabrication, is the sense that you get when you read the dissenting opinion. So, we just hope that one day the dissenting opinion will again become the majority opinion. Dissent, as Justice Khanna puts it, is the intelligence of a future day and we hope that one day dissent will become the majority opinion. That’s the hope we have. Thank you so much for the entire conversation and for sharing so many thoughts on so many issues. I can’t tell you what an absolute pleasure and privilege it has been to talk to you, Dr Thapar.

RT: My pleasure and privilege too, thank you so much Arvind!

Question and Answer Session

Audience member 1: How can history help us to understand modern politics and influence the politics of modern times?

RT: The study of history helps us understand modern politics better because if you ask the kinds of questions that you ask of politics, you might get some answers from history: Who are the people that want authority in a society—have you thought of asking that question? Every society has people who desire authority, who have authority. Why are there some people who have authority? Who are the people that have authority? What does history tell us? Who are the people? Who are the elites and how do they become the elites? What is the basis for being an elite? That is the same thing that carries forward into today. I would also like to say that it is not just a question of how history helps us understand politics, which is a legitimate question. But we should also demand that those who go into politics should know some history—that would be a tremendous help. Politicians would realize that some of the issues they are dealing with, some of the activities they are indulging in are all known to have happened in the past and there have been consequences that are not always the most acceptable consequences for society. So, I think politicians should also study history. It should not be one sided. Historians are certainly there to explain history to politicians but politicians should study history.

Audience member 2: I have two questions. You mentioned that history isn’t a narrative, it is a social science. Here, I would like to draw a comparison with natural sciences where they seem to find factors behind development of a phenomenon. So, shouldn’t history also have a similar aim? That is, to find factors—what actually drives social development as such? My second question is: after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a rising idea in the political circles which argues for this idea called ‘the end of history’—how humans supposedly reached the end of their ideological evolution and how history, as proposed by many people, is a linear progression. What are your comments on this? If it is a linear progression, with the current state of the world, do you think there is a change coming? A revolution of some sort?

RT: Please remember that social sciences are not natural sciences. There are two distinctions. One is that the data and the material of natural sciences are more predictable than the social sciences. Social sciences deal with human conditions and human conditions are largely predictable but not entirely so—and there are some situations when they are not at all predictable. Natural sciences, on the other hand, are largely predictable. This was brought home to me, quite interestingly, once when I was giving a talk at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore where one of the students said: In science, when an experiment fails, it fails and is done away with. What happens in history if what you say, your generalization doesn’t work? I said that this very nicely and neatly sums up the difference—there is much more exactitude and precision in measuring sources and success and failure in science. We don’t say that my generalization has collapsed and therefore the experiment has failed. We argue the generalization and wait and see whether it is accepted or not. If it is not accepted by others in the course of a debate and I lose the debate, then I gracefully withdraw that generalization. So, there is a slight difference in procedure and because there is a slight difference, it is not exactly the same. The point that I was trying to make was that the social sciences resort to the basic methods of the natural sciences, which is: examine your data carefully; ask what the data means—the different meanings of the data; see how the data applies; see whether there are causal relationships between different aspects of your data; and then argue for a rational reliable explanation of your data. These are very basic scientific principles which the social sciences adapt and obviously, there are differences, as indeed there are differences in the social sciences—the historical method is not exactly the same as the sociological method or the demographic method. So, there are these little differences and these differences have been discussed and talked about by historians who deal with historiography and historical method. Therefore, one has to understand that in order to do history, it is not enough to merely know what the data is and to create a narrative. It is necessary also to know historiography. By this I mean how a historian or a scholar or a thinker represents the past is very important because this involves not only the past and the data of the past but another topic which I didn’t touch on, which is: What goes into the making of the historian? Arvind mentioned about the attack on Marxist historical writing earlier on. I think this kind of thinking where one says that they don’t accept someone’s history writing because she is a Marxist, is usually said by people who don’t know the first thing about Marxism—not that one says that everyone has to be a Marxist but please remember, that there are two levels in all explanations. One is a general willingness to use the theory that is being expounded: Am I willing to consider Marxist historical writings, which is that history is not static, history changes—history changes because of social and economic reasons; when society changes the attitudes of people looking at their past will also change? The other level is: How do we examine what a society is? Do we, for example, talk about economic determinism, social determinism, religious determinism, or do we talk about an amalgam of all this or do we not talk about determinism at all? What does analysis mean? Analysis means looking at the data, considering how it relates one piece to another—causality which is important, and then drawing a conclusion from it. All theories have a point of view in the way in which they analyse data, whether it is Marxism, theories of Max Weber who was the other great thinker who put across explanations, Emile Durkheim and further, or in the Indian case, people like G. S. Ghurye, M. N. Srinivas and historians like H. C. Raychaudhuri, R. C. Majumdar and so on. It is the historian’s business to look at that point of view and discuss the viability of that point of view and the way that the analysis is made. So, in all these series of explanations, it is not enough to dismiss a person just because they are Marxist or Weberian or Durkheimian or whatever they may be. It is necessary to see what they are arguing on the basis of, how reliable their evidence is and what kind of causal linkages they are making. These have to be rational, logical, and based on refutable debates, if necessary, when someone debates them. There is a difference between the social and natural sciences but the methodologies, up to a point, are similar and that is what I have been trying to argue.

The end of history—there is no end of history, it’s absolute nonsense to talk about it. I had major problems with Francis Fukuyama’s work when he talked about the fall of the Soviet–Berlin Wall being the end of history. History carries on—as long as there are human beings, there is history. Some people will say that as long as there is life, there is history because even if you take something as concise and compartmentalized as Marxist modes of production: there is capitalism after feudalism, capitalism continues into what Marx envisaged as a kind of communism—real communism. But the thing is that these modes of production carry on. They come to an end and give way to something else. I do not see that there will be an end of history as long as human beings are alive. History will carry on.

Audience member 3: During the course of the conversation, you mentioned the difference between popular history and professional history. Could you please elaborate on it with an example?

RT: I should have thought that the difference would be fairly obvious after all that I’ve been saying. Professional history requires training and method. If you were to talk about ancient Indian history as a historian, you have to know first of all what sources you are using. If you are using the Kautilya Arthashastra and the Buddhist canon and the Indica of Megasthenes, you become a professional historian if you understand the language in which these sources are written. One of the big shortfalls that all of us suffer from is that we don’t know Greek and yet we use Megasthenes’ Indica as a very basic source of the Mauryan period. The reason why I am stressing on language is because language changes, language is not static. The meaning of language changes from period to period. If you look at the three quotations of Megasthenes’ Indica in Greek sources from the second century BC to the second century AD, they are using different words for social divisions, occupations and so on. The historian has to answer the question: Why are they using different words and not the same words? How has that word changed in meaning? All words, up to a point, change to some degree in what they are connoting when they are placed in sentences. The professional historian must: know the sources, be trained to examine the sources, use a method of analysis, be open to debating the generalization and the statements he or she makes at the end of the analysis. The evidence has to be proven and reliable. You can’t get up and say that I am quoting so and so without having read so and so in the original, without having understood what the person has been saying, what the debates have been on that text because every text has been heavily debated in the last hundred years or so. A professional historian has to know the script in which inscriptions are written—if it is brahmi for the Ashokan inscriptions, then what kind of brahmi—and the dialect in which they are written. All this takes time and training. You can’t read six books and say I am a historian. You have to be trained. Let me say that the training is arduous and difficult. It is really tough—you have to sweat your guts out in order to really understand the sources that you are using—that is one very basic thing. The professional historian is also concerned with trying to explain the past and not use the past politically for contemporary problems whereas the politicians and pop history are concerned with converting the past into something that they can use for ideological reasons in the present for legitimizing the ideologies of the present. That is a very major difference in purpose and enterprise between the professional and pop historian even when the pop or the public historian has not gone through the training that the professional historian has gone through. Broadly speaking, these are the major differences. The public historian has a very definitive, contemporary purpose in mind whereas the professional historian’s very definitive purpose is to explain and understand the past.

Audience member 4: Did the idea of democracy specific to contemporary India come with the independence movement or was it there in ancient India as well? Arvind referenced the fact that Justice Chandrachud says that dissent is the ‘safety valve of democracy’.

RT: Democracy, as we know and define today, is a product of modern times. It is often said that Athens had a democracy but there is something ironic about that because two-thirds of the people who lived in Athens were slaves and were not free citizens. So, how can you say that those ancient cities were democracies? They were democracies for the elite and the special groups of people who occupied them. Democracy arises largely out of changes that take place in modern society where the large population is given rights. There is a fundamental difference between kingdoms and nation states. Let me try and explain this a little bit. The arrival of nation states in eighteenth–nineteenth century Europe and twentieth–twenty-first centuries elsewhere is a very major shift in history. Previous to this, you had kingdoms ruled by dynasties where people were subjects and please note the word that is used: subjects. The Sanskrit term for subject is praja, which interestingly also means children. So, there is an attitude towards subjects that are being ruled which is similar to attitudes towards subordinates and children. Then comes kingdoms, subjects which continue and you have varieties of kingdoms and kingships and they are all ruling subjects. Then you get colonialism in India. It is a different kind of rule, it is not a local kingdom—it is a distant British or English kingdom where the Indians are all subjects of the British ruler. So, what happens at independence? Indians stop being subjects, they become citizens because India stops being a colonial state and kingdom. It becomes a nation-state. This is a very substantial difference which unfortunately my generation forgot to emphasize enough and they should have after independence. We are dealing with a different category of thought where subjects are no longer subordinate, where citizens are independent and they have rights. That is terribly important. That category of citizens has changed completely from the category of subject. One can only take pride in the fact that in this country, there were a group of people who, on independence, sat down and wrote a constitution which accommodates the rights of the citizen and the new laws that have to be brought in. Bringing in new laws, giving rights to people, changing radically from subjecthood to citizenship is not and cannot be done overnight. We should have done much more to emphasize this. It requires changes in economy, society, rules of equality. Reservation is not going to take away inequality—it is only going to ameliorate it. You require many more stringent social changes to take away the inequality of outcasting and untouchability. It is a very strong inequality and it needs strong measures to change it. Similarly, the economies that we’ve been playing around with since 1947 have not taken away the poverty line—if anything it has gone up. Half the country is suffering from poverty and that has to be changed. Since independence, the citizens’ rights have to be respected by those who are governing. This was not adhered to as much as it should have been. We would have been in a much happier socio-economic situation today had all of this been attended to in the last 75 years. Democracy demands citizenship where everybody is equal, has the same rights, has the same demands on the state and the state is obliged to meet these demands—that is what democracy is about. We inched towards it in the Nehruvian period when we talked about and got adult franchise on which, I remember, there was a huge debate with people saying ‘How can you have illiterates voting?’ There were sensible people who said voting has not to do with literacy, it has to do with opinion, and adult franchise was granted. Similarly, there was a huge debate on the Hindu Code Bill: ‘How can you change the rules of ancient times?’ There were people who changed the rules, unfortunately only for one religious community—possibly it should have been a new set of rules for Indians generally. The point is that democracy comes with these fundamental changes when every citizen is represented by a representative in legislature, executive and judiciary, the three arms of the new system of the nation state. This becomes absolutely essential to democracy. The reason then why dissent is a safety valve is in making these changes. There will be people who will disagree as there were when adult franchise was granted, or when the Hindu Code Bill was being brought in. There will be disagreements and disagreements have to be debated, and you have to decide for the welfare and benefit of the people at large, not just a religious or linguistic or ethnic majority. That is what democracy is about. Therefore, democracy is something that comes with modern times, with history moving into demonstrating living in a way completely different from the way we lived in pre-modern times.

Audience member 5: Social science is based on facts but history is based on evidence and different people have different points of view regarding evidence. So how can we study history under social sciences?

RT: History is not mythology. You don’t just make up a story and say this is history. Some people do but we, professional historians, do not accept that. History is based on facts, on evidence. The interpretation is not something apart—the interpretation grows out of those facts following the evidence. If it doesn’t follow that evidence, it is not history. Our problems with those who popularize history is that they do not base themselves in historical evidence. You tear down a mosque and say there was a temple underneath and then you discover that there was no temple underneath but you go on saying that there was a temple underneath. The professional historian says that there doesn’t seem to have been a temple underneath, we haven’t got the evidence for this. The popular historian will go on saying that there was a temple underneath.

Audience member 6: When your work is called Marxist or leftist, is it convenient and rational for you? My second question is: Will you like for yourself to be called a centrist or a secular historian? Would you prefer to be called a centrist or leftist historian?

RT: I prefer to be called a historian. Full stop. Some Marxist historians are on record saying that I am not a Marxist historian but I am a rational, scientific thinking, secular historian. Then there are these hooligans who keep trolling me and saying: ‘Oh! But she doesn’t know any history, she is a Marxist.’ So, I am in the happy position of saying that the Marxists are not calling me Marxist, the non-Marxists are calling me Marxist and I don’t know whether I am a Marxist or non-Marxist or what! I am a historian. I am a historian who pays attention to evidence, rationality in causation, to generality in causations that are generally set out. I do, on some occasion, borrow some analysis that Marx has made. For example, Marx has a theory that has popularly been referred to by Marxists as base and superstructure. What does base and superstructure mean? It means that some things happen at base which are influenced by the society of the time and the conditions that prevail. I think this is quite useful when one is studying something like the history of religion. For example, why did Buddhism and Jainism and the Ajivikas—whom we refer to as the Shramanas, philosophically and religiously emerge at a particular time in history? Why did they oppose Vedic brahmanism? These are questions that require a very careful consideration of evidence, causality and generalization that follows. These are questions which can have some ideas taken from Marxist analysis, some from Weberian analysis. They may conflict and the historian has to decide which particular analysis the historian wants to go by. The point that I am trying to make is that in every study that involves knowledge—doesn’t matter what it is—there are no either/or answers. Is she a Marxist or is she not; is she a Weberian or is she not—this is nonsense. We are all influenced by different theories of explanation when we are searching for explanations as in everyday life: if you are trying to explain something you don’t just stick to one explanation. In the same way, the historian says that the evidence suggests it could be this and it could be this but the evidence refutes any suggestion of it being that. So, it is a little futile to put people into label boxes and say: Marxist, neo-Marxist, structural Marxist, non-Marxist, etc. You have to see what they are saying, writing and explaining and try and understand what they are arguing, that is the important thing.

Thank you!