Book: SPEAKING OF HISTORY: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT INDIA’S PAST AND PRESENT
Authors: Romila Thapar and Namit Arora
Published by: Allen Lane
Price: Rs 699
Romila Thapar’s essay, “In Defence of History”, part of her 2014 book, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History, began with a premonition: “From 1999 to 2004, when a BJP government was in power, there were repeated attempts to silence historians. Similar happenings could occur again.” She was prophetic. The ‘happenings’ since that book have been far worse, with a combination of ignorance, hatred, and pernicious falsifications taking increasing hold over the collective imagination. As most academic historians keep scoffing at this burgeoning beast and huffing and puffing within their eco-chamber, it falls upon a seasoned and ceaseless warrior like Thapar, yet again, to hold fort against the tsunami of drivel that goes by the name of ‘history’ in these times.
Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present — a dialogue between Thapar and the journalist-writer-cultural commentator, Namit Arora — is the product of that rejoinder. As one of India’s most eloquent and exacting interpreters of the subcontinent’s long past, Thapar has repeatedly insisted that history be treated not as a repository of certainties but as a set of questions and critical practices. The book places that insistence at its very centre.
The book’s timeliness is unmissable. In an era when history in India has become a minefield of divisive perspectives, the book asks urgent questions about how we construct and consume history, and why doing so matters now more than ever. At its core, it’s a conversation on the historian’s craft, reclaiming history as an evidence-based discipline, one that weighs sources, interrogates assumptions, and grapples with uncertainty. In the process, Thapar and Arora illuminate the intellectual tools that distinguish sound scholarship from myth-making. Their focus on method is nothing short of an act of resistance against the contemporary politics of historical distortion.
The conversations cover a broad range of subjects, including, among others, the nature and the practice of history, historiography and methodology, caste, class, gender, and patriarchy in Indian history, religion and mythology, pluralism, identity, nationalism, and public history. They delineate the continuities between the communalist periodisation of Indian history in the colonial era and the rise of the modern Hindutva view of history. While gliding through all of these seamlessly, Thapar and Arora consistently reject simplistic, reductionist accounts, and remind us that historical thinking requires nuance, context and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. In an era when historical interpretation has impacted Indian civic life through shady textbook revisions and polarising nationalist iconography, their insistence on evidence, argument, and critical inquiry serves as a compelling defence of scholarship itself.
The book’s chief strength lies in its dialogic format. Thapar speaks — with a combination of patience, erudition, and plainspoken clarity, occasionally spiced with a wry humour (for instance, her suggestion to fresh JNU students to go read Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile to learn about the historian’s method of deduction) — on topics that range from the methodological to the moral. Arora is the ideal interlocutor and foil, posing questions that are informed, judicious, and occasionally mildly provocative, teasing out Thapar’s positions, pressing for clarifications, and situating her comments within contemporary flashpoints. Their interplay produces a text that is discursive and personal, rather than strident or polemical.
Parts of the book exude an autobiographical flavour. Thapar reflects on her own training and the evolution of Indian historiography, from nationalist and colonial-era narratives to the more decentred, interdisciplinary approaches that emerged in the late-20thcentury. Episodes from her career also illuminate her intellectual temperament — an insistence on evidence, a preference for inquiry over certitude, and a belief in the historian’s duty to resist reductive myths. This humanises a venerated scholar, showing how commitments forged in seminar rooms and archives can matter deeply in the public square. At the same time, it also provides an illuminating map of how historical interpretations have shifted and why those shifts matter.
In today’s India, where competing visions of the past are rampantly weaponised to drive political agendas, this book’s relevance can hardly be overstated. Breaking out of the confines of what they call “the silence of the academic lambs” while foregrounding the historian’s responsibility to truth and complexity, Thapar and Arora offer a compelling counter-narrative to reductive depictions of India’s past. Speaking of History does not pretend to offer solutions to the many institutional and political pressures bearing upon Indian historical scholarship today. It most definitely isn’t a battle-cry, and its self-assumed mandate is modest enough — a defence of a plural, evidence-based public culture in which history helps citizens understand complexity rather than manufacture homogeneity. Thapar and Arora offer a template of how a historian can speak to the public without surrendering the discipline’s rigour. Needless to say, it will not convert every sceptic. But it offers a clear, humane case for why historical thinking should remain part of democratic conversation. In a climate of noisy assertions and truncated memories, that itself is a supreme gift.