India's best students: Professor Romila Thapar

SOLID, is the word that comes to mind, quite often when one thinks about Prof. Thapar. This daughter of an army doctor, spent her childhood all over India, and has even met Mahatma Gandhi.

In an interaction with Business Standard, she reminisced about meeting Gandhiji in Pune and how the Father of the Nation charged his usual Rs. 5 for an autograph.

Her keen interest in understanding how societies disintegrate or integrate and how relationships change over time, led her to history and historiography, and she went on a scholarship to School Of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Working with the famous indologist  Dr. Al Bhasham, she earned a PhD on the   Mauryan era, in 1958.

The work also led to her first tome “Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas." An interesting aspect of Prof. Thapar’s work spanning four decades is her ability to constantly expand the horizons of her concerns, but still produce a consistently high quality of research output, as Sanjay Subhramaniam, a Professor at Oxford comments.

A teacher throughout her life, generations of historians underwent rigourous training at Delhi University and later for two fulfulling decades at JNU. One of the founder members of the JNU’s famed Centre for Historical Studies, Prof. Thapar, along with a galaxy of historians was able to expand the quests and concerns of History and move it beyond the narrow confines of chronicling events.

In her own words, the tenure at JNU led her, “To think of new ways of projecting history, where our courses would reflect interdisciplinary methods of investigating the past. If at all I can take credit for anything, it is for those students who are now teaching history and conducting historical research themselves,” she said in an interaction with SACW. Students of vouch for it. It is like entering the tiger’s den, says one. But if you are good, she is the greatest ally you could have, says one who did her PhD, under Thapar.

Being an academic, in the old school mould, standing up to one’s own beliefs comes naturally to Prof. Thapar. Threats, online campaigns, insinuations, nothing could deter her from standing up for scientific historiography, when a section of the establishment attacked her views on Hinduism, Aryans, etc. To Prof. Thapar, it is this narrowing of Indian identity at the popular level, a matter of serious concern.  Her world view is summed best by a quote from her lecture in 2002. She said, “To comprehend the present and move towards the future requires an understanding of the past, an understanding that is sensitive, analytical and open to critical enquiry.”