Romila Thapar’s Life, History and the Strange Death of Liberal India

[Razi Raziuddin]

https://thewire.in/books/romila-thapars-life-history-and-the-strange-death-of-liberal-india  

Romila Thapar’s Life, History and the Strange Death of Liberal India

Narayani Gupta

19/Jun/2026

5 min read

Thirty-year old Romila Thapar, a newcomer to the city, joined those whom Khushwant Singh invited for Sunday walks and picnics at the sites of older cities.

Romila Thapar. Photo: mender re/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Just Being? A publisher might have hesitated before accepting such a tepid title but this book is already flying off the shelves because of the person who is narrating her life-story. It could well have been called The Autobiography of the Most Well-Known Indian Historian.

At no point does the narrative flag. If the incarceration of the lockdown gave Romila Thapar the time, it was matched by the granular memory of someone determined to live every moment fully.

Her style has the confidence of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya’s in Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces, the nationalism-induced excitement of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography, and the lively energy of Prakash Tandon’s Punjabi Century. 

We read about a childhood with her parents in Indian cantonments, her college years in Pune, studying history and doing research in London, then her return in 1961 to India where she has been based since. Her teaching career in Delhi (1963-91) was interspersed by spells as visiting scholar in foreign universities, and in writing school textbooks. This last enterprise is what was to make her famous to a degree no other Indian historian has achieved. 

Just Being is memoir about New Delhi, complementing the writings of Sharada Prasad, the two Nayantaras (Sahgal and Pothen), Khushwant Singh, and Nirad Chaudhuri. 

Cover of ‘Just Being’, a memoir by Romila Thapar. Published by Seagull Books.

Thirty-year old Romila Thapar, a newcomer to the city, joined those whom Khushwant Singh invited for Sunday walks and picnics at the sites of older cities. For west Punjabis, Delhi could never be a substitute for Lahore (both cities were mourning those snatched from them). New Delhi was the first modern Indian city, a magnet that attracted people from all over India, a launching-pad connecting to other cultures and other young nations. Careers and networks were being built, as were habitats, fields being transformed into spacious enclaves, peripheral spaces becoming precarious homes for hundreds of construction workers. Thapar’s own assessment was cryptic: “As a capital, Delhi attracted the best and the worst”. (p.133).  

For newcomers, this patchwork-quilt landscape polarised into mental geographies, snobberies and senses of envy – not of ‘Purani Dilli’ and its Urdu culture that linked it to Lahore, but of ‘Lutyens’ Delhi’, seen as a self-regarding remnant of imperialism. Romila Thapar was located in “Lutyens’ Delhi” but she was also part of another constituency, that of academia.

In the aftermath of Partition, Delhi had little of the intellectual vibrancy of Calcutta, Bombay or Madras University. The year 1857 had seen the founding of the three Presidency universities, followed by that of Lahore’s Punjab University in 1882. Delhi was known more by its undergraduate colleges (St. Stephens 1881, Hindu 1899, rather than by the University which was constituted in 1924.

Delhi University did not have the equivalent of the Calcutta coffee-house or the Madras beach. Its sparse campus was a footnote to the new capital city, locationally a modification of what had been Delhi cantonment. 

After a brief spell at the new Kurukshetra University, Thapar joined the DU history faculty in 1963.The contrast with the other history teachers was marked – they were very senior, their lectures laid-back. She missed the atmosphere of London. 

The university began to change shortly after, opening gates to new disciplines – economics, sociology, anthropology. These, as well as the department of history, attracted scholars who had just returned from European and American universities. 

And the arts faculty coffee house became the place to be seen in – until it had a competitor in the new one at the Delhi School of Economics.

There were also winds of intellectual change blowing in from overseas. In a world just recovering from six years of war, it was as natural for historians to reassess the past as it was for rulers to plan the future. Indian scholars, excited by the newly-achieved independence, drew inspiration from both their own ‘traditions’, and from European scholars of the social sciences, and from the slogans of the 1968 students’ agitation.

Within a few years, in 1971, there would be another vast new campus that colonised the southern Ridge, like the new redbrick universities in England challenging Oxbridge in the ‘60s. Now JNU’s Ganga Dhaba was the place to be seen in. 

Many teachers from DU and its colleges, including Romila Thapar, happily migrated south.

The next 40 years were occupied in building up the History department in JNU, and in exhilarating spells in western universities. 

Romila Thapar reminds us that she is a “professional historian”. This was the reason she declined an official honour like the Padma Bhushan, and accepted the Kluge Prize conferred by the American Library of Congress. At some point she began to be referred to as a “public intellectual”, the term she herself used for Nikhil Chakravarty in 2014. 

Also read: Breaking up History is ‘Absurd’, Says Romila Thapar at Kerala Lit Fest 2026

Her books, and recordings of her lectures and interviews, are available elsewhere but this life story is important, for it is the chain that links and contextualises the discussions on Indian historiography. This is important for readers who are too young to have followed them through the half-century when they kept surfacing, tellingly in tandem with political swings.   

Raghu Karnad, 50 years younger than Thapar, recently claimed her as belonging to the same class as he – the “English-speaking leftish liberals – as an effigy of a subversive ‘anti-national’ elite”.

Labels for political ideologies (like ‘leftish’) are derived from the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ used in the 1790s by the harassed president of the unruly Assembly of what is called the French Revolution. Among those exhilarated by that Revolution was young William Wordsworth, who, after the Revolution had run its course, wrote “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ And to be young was very heaven”. 

These lines were then quoted by a schoolgirl in Poona during a speech on August 15, 1947. 

That girl was the product of a British-Indian culture, a child of British India, of an imperial landscape – living in cantonments, which generated a pan-Indian nationalism. Her father had a medical degree from Edinburgh. She studied in a ‘convent school’. Gandhiji inspired a patriotism that went beyond nationalism. 

Duo-cultural people like her would never have imagined that half a century later, they would be honoured with the label “Macaulay ke aulad”. 

To understand this, we have to go back to the era before JNU, when the issue of an acceptable history of India became a matter of debate. A young nation finds strength in making history a reference-point. In 1963, Professor R.C. Majumdar (a historian of early India, then an active 75-year old) invited young Romila Thapar to write two of the three text books on Indian history for the NCERT (p. 219). Within a few years, he was to be claimed by the ‘right’ as one of their stalwarts, and Thapar was lambasted as a sympathiser of the ‘left’. 

The general sense of having to replace British textbooks was acceptable, but was overtaken by a subset of objections to the contents of the new book on ancient India. These continue to simmer 60 years later. From the present century, the luxury of social media has stoked the fire. 

The divergent views on what constituted Indian nationalism has been read as tension between generations, or as a clash of ideologies. Either way, it could perhaps have been opened up by face-to-face debates rather than sharpened by jibes and threats. This never happened.

Those critical of Thapar kept up an offensive marked by an embarrassing lack of rigorous research. This spurred her on to retorts in arguments later published as essays, most impressively those in The Past Before Us, 2013 (supplemented by those of Professor Amartya Sen in The Argumentative Indian, 2005) on dissent in India’s intellectual traditions. Thapar comments that “Their utilisation of history was of no use to professional departments…given that we were emphasizing proven evidence and sustainable explanation. The very premises differed” (p. 242).

A side-product (not quoted in this book) was the use of metaphors like ‘urban Naxals’. From the 2010s, for some individuals, Lutyens ceased to be an architect, and became a pejorative (and mispronounced) adjective. Light relief is provided by the comic invocation of an architecturally unremarkable shopping complex – Khan Market – to symbolise/fantasise where the gown met the town (i.e. academics and “intellectuals” met journalists and artists) for tea and anti-establishment conversations.

Also read: Nonviolence and Tolerance in Early India

As opinions became more polarised, liberal India sank without a trace – and nobody noticed. 

Raghu Karnad’s explanation is that “What we embody is a contradiction, an identity crisis, or – in the reigning discourse in India – a kind of betrayal…” 

Thapar has never paused her writing. Her strengths have been her eagerness to learn from other disciplines, her self-confidence, her sense of humour. Her detractors are many, as are her admirers. 

Scores of academics from all over the world – many very well-known – bow in and out of her life. Friends give her joy, as do cuisines (Lobster thermidor appears more than once in her book), and her journeys to every continent (maybe not Antarctica).

Her anecdotes of home and family, particularly of her parents and siblings, are very moving. The book ends on a celebratory note – of her 90th birthday/, a moving feast of flowers and music spread over a week.

My favourites among her books are two –  the published version of the diary of her journey to China in 1957, a travelogue by a carefree young woman (Gazing Eastwards, 2020); and  the Pelican History of India, vol. 1,1966, which narrated the story till the coming of the Timurids (I was surprised and disappointed when it was replaced by another bird, the Penguin History of Early India, 2003, a somewhat more ponderous volume which stopped short at 1300). 

Podcasts have made scholars into film-stars. Thapar’s large rings, her scarlet wing-chair, her dachshund, are familiar to all of us, thanks to YouTube.  

Some of us can pull out older memories which are as vivid as recent podcasts. One such in my mental album is from 1963, at Delhi University. We had noticed a young woman in a brown cotton sari, walking briskly, a bulky brief-bag tucked under her arm. Later we observed other details – she took notes on 4’x8′ cards, not “registers”, she had a disconcertingly deep voice and a ‘BBC’ accent – one that reverberates 70 years later – that of an “autonomous woman” and, more importantly, of the best-known historian in India.  

The only caveat is that the publishers would have served her better if they had added a comprehensive index of people and places; a dozen more pages would not have added weight to the present 710, but would certainly have added substance.

Narayani Gupta is a historian.