Romila Thapar

Her historiography is often associated with Marxist thought. Thapar's special contribution is the use of social-historical methods to understand change in the mid-first millennium BCE in northern India. The epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in her analysis, offer vignettes of how these groups and others negotiated new, more complex, forms of loyalty in which stratification, purity, and exclusion played a greater if still fluid role. The author of From Lineage to State, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Early India: From Origins to AD 1300, and the popular History of India, Part I, Thapar has received honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, the University of Oxford, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, the University of Edinburgh, University of Calcutta, University of Hyderabad, Brown University, and the University of Pretoria. Thapar is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where she also received her Ph.D. in 1958, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, Romila Thapar shared the US Library of Congress's Kluge Prize, for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Romila Thapar studied at Panjab University and SOAS, University of London. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is history. Employment is recorded with Jawaharlal Nehru University. Distinctions recorded are Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize, Kluge Prize, Jawarharlal Nehru Fellowship and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

• Name — Romila Thapar • Born — 30 November 1931 • Birthplace — Lucknow, United Provinces, British India • Known for — Authoring books about Indian history • Father — Daya Ram Thapar • Relatives — Romesh Thapar (brother) Valmik Thapar (nephew) Pran Nath Thapar (uncle) Karan Thapar (cousin) • Occupation — Historian, Writer • Alma Mater — Panjab University SOAS University of London (PhD) • Thesis Title — Asoka and the decline of the Mauryas • Doctoral Advisor — Arthur Llewellyn Basham • Awards — Kluge Prize, 2008.

Romila is the daughter of Lieutenant-General Daya Ram Thapar, CIE, OBE, who served as the Director-General of the British Indian Armed Forces Medical Services. The late journalist Romesh Thapar was her brother. As a child, she attended schools in various cities in India depending on her father's military postings. She is an alumna of the St. Mary's School, Pune. Later she attended intermediate of arts at Wadia College, Pune. After graduating from Panjab University in English literature, Thapar obtained a second bachelor's honours degree and a doctorate in Indian history under A. L. Basham from the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London in 1958.

She was a reader in Ancient Indian History at Kurukshetra University in 1961 and 1962 and held the same position at Delhi University between 1963 and 1970. Later, she worked as Professor of Ancient Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she is now Professor Emerita. As a historian at JNU she was one of very few academics who refused to sign a letter praising Indira Gandhi's administration during the Emergency period of 1975-77, and as a result Thapar "had her income-tax assessments for the previous decade reopened for questioning." Thapar's major works are Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations, Recent Perspectives of Early Indian History (editor), A History of India Volume One, and Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Her historical work portrays the origins of Hinduism as an evolving interplay between social forces. Her 2004 book on Somnath examines the evolution of the historiographies about the legendary Gujarat temple. In her first work, Aśoka and the Decline of the Maurya published in 1961, Thapar situates Ashoka's policy of dhamma in its social and political context, as a non-sectarian civic ethic intended to hold together an empire of diverse ethnicities and cultures. She attributes the decline of the Maurya Empire to its highly centralised administration which called for rulers of exceptional abilities to function well. Thapar's first volume of A History of India is written for a popular audience and encompasses the period from its early history to the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Ancient Indian Social History deals with the period from early times to the end of the first millennium, includes a comparative study of Hindu and Buddhist socio-religious systems, and examines the role of Buddhism in social protest and social mobility in the caste system. From Lineage to State analyses the formation of states in the middle Ganga valley in the first millennium BCE, tracing the process to a change, driven by the use of iron and plough agriculture, from a pastoral and mobile lineage-based society to one of settled peasant holdings, accumulation and increased urbanisation.

Thapar is critical of what she calls a "communal interpretation" of Indian history, in which events in the last thousand years are interpreted solely in terms of a notional continual conflict between monolithic Hindu and Muslim communities. Thapar says this communal history is "extremely selective" in choosing facts, "deliberately partisan" in interpretation and does not follow current methods of analysis using multiple, prioritised causes. In 2002, the Indian coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) changed the school textbooks for social sciences and history, on the grounds that certain passages offended the sensibilities of some religious and caste groups. Romila Thapar, who was the author of the textbook on Ancient India for class VI, objected to the changes made without her permission that, for example, deleted passages on eating of beef in ancient times, and on the formulation of the caste system. She questioned whether the changes were an "attempt to replace mainstream history with a Hindutva version of history", with the view to use the resultant controversy as "election propaganda". Other historians and commentators, including Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar, Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma, Vir Sanghvi, Dileep Padgaonkar and Amartya Sen also protested the changes and published their objections in a compilation titled Communalisation of Education. Writing about the 2006 Californian Hindu textbook controversy, Thapar opposed some of the changes that were proposed by Hindu groups to the coverage of Hinduism and Indian history in school textbooks. She contended that while Hindus have a legitimate right to a fair and culturally sensitive representation, some of the proposed changes included material that pushed a political agenda.

Thapar is frequently classified as a leading figure of the Marxist school of Indian historiography alongside R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib. Tom Bottomore's A Dictionary of Marxist Thought cites Thapar as one of the representatives of Indian Marxist historical thought. The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing entry on Thapar notes that her work is distinct from that of Marxist scholar D.D. Kosambi.

• Communalism and the Writing of Indian History, Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia, Bipan Chandra, 1969 People's Publishing House • Situating Indian History: For Sarvepalli Gopal, 1987; OUP, • Indian Tales, 1991; Puffin, • India: Another Millennium? 2000; Viking,

• "India before and after the Mauryan Empire", in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology, 1980; • "Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity", Paper in Modern Asian Studies, 1989; * • "Somanatha and Mahmud", Frontline, Volume 16 – Issue 8, 10–23 April 1999 • Perceiving the Forest: Early India, Paper in the journal, Studies in History, 2001; • Role of the Army in the Exercise of Power, Essay in Army and Power in the Ancient World, 2002; Franz Steiner Verlag, • The Puranas: Heresy and the Vamsanucarita", Essay in Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power and Community in India, 2009; OUP, • Rāyā Asoko from Kanaganahalli: Some Thoughts, Essay in Airavati, Chennai, 2008; • Was there Historical Writing in Early India?, Essay in Knowing India, 2011; Yoda Press,