Speaking of History: Separating myth from fact in India's contested past

Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present

by Romila Thapar and Namit Arora

Published by Penguin Allen Lane

304 pages  ₹699

  India loves history. India hates history. Few subjects in this country generate as much contention, as much passion, as much distortion as history.

 

But what is history? Is it a study of the past, or is it the past itself? We rarely stop to ask, and that confusion sits at the heart of why the country can’t agree on its own story. And so it is that historians who refuse to prop up the myth of a great, undivided civilisation, one supposedly ruined by invaders and foreign religions, are branded anti-nationals.

 

So how does one make sense of a nation’s past in this history-loving, history-hating country? How do you reconcile myth and fact when they are so thoroughly tangled? How do you tell a conspiracy apart from a historical event? And with an alternative history rising frantically in the current socio-cultural milieu, how and where exactly do you search for the truth, whatever that may be?

 

That is the fundamental question that  Speaking of History  by Romila Thapar and Namit Arora seeks to answer. On one side sits a non-historian who has spent years reading and writing about history; on the other, one of the most eminent Indian historians of her generation. Their back-and-forth — mostly Arora asking, Thapar answering — gives the reader a clearer sense of Indian history, of how it should be studied, of what ails mainstream historical discourse today, and of why our very definitions and benchmarks need updating. As Arora writes in the introduction, they wanted to create “the texture of a living room conversation — frank, probing, and centered on a few key issues — rather than a balanced historical survey.” Arora is as skilled an interviewer as Thapar is a historian.

 

The book proceeds chapter by chapter, covering a wide arc of time and subjects: The evolution of historical scholarship, the interdisciplinary demands of the historical method, the residues of colonial historiography, the rise of WhatsApp history and its grip on public discourse, the complicated interplays of caste and class, migrations as cultural interfaces rather than invasions, the dismantling of India’s nonviolent-civilisation myth, the emergence of nationalism and identity, and, through it all, a fuller picture of what India’s past actually looked like.

 

The right-wing project of rewriting history has never been a more dominant, more effective, or more successful project in this country than today, and, naturally, its shadow looms large across the conversation. In this post-truth, myth-as-history world, truth is seldom the concern. Historians are denigrated for pointing toward contradictory research, academics are hounded online and off. As Arora puts it, “this ecosystem alleges that historians have ‘betrayed us,’ claiming that a cabal of ‘Marxist historians’ controls academic discourse on Indian history both in India and abroad.

 

According to this view, such scholars have denigrated Hindu culture and denied it its rightful place in the sun — all while going easy on Islamic culture and whitewashing the violence of “Mughals against Hindus”.

 

But historical scholarship is tricky business. It constantly evolves, and has come a long way from its colonial beginnings, an era of studies often built on lies, imagination, and stereotypes imposed by historians who barely understood the land they were writing about. Thapar explains why: “An essential necessity of historical research is precisely to encourage the asking of questions, especially of existing knowledge, so that if the advancing of knowledge on that theme is required, it can be done.” Yet these lies and imaginations still act as a fuel for the Hindutva mythmaking project.

 

That curiosity — or rather, its absence — is exactly why history remains so maligned and historians so distrusted in Indian society. “Even our so-called educated middle classes, more often than not, lack a basic understanding of any social science discipline. History is still widely seen as a collection of narratives about the past, not as a discipline that explains how societies functioned long ago, how they changed, and so on. History is not understood, nor are economics and sociology (...). There is no emphasis on close reading, questioning, and critical thinking, which is, in fact, what education involves,” Thapar notes.

 

This deficit of critical thinking is why simplistic notions persist: Indigenous Aryans, an absence of casteism, women’s liberation, violent Muslims, an egalitarianism supposedly common to ancient India. Historical method demands scrutiny — comparing sources, testimonies, and what different accounts from the same period actually mention. Take Ghazni’s raid of Somnath, for example, which remains a contentious issue centuries later. Contemporary Sanskrit records show hardly any evidence of the mass destruction of today’s popular imagination. Could

 

it be, then, that Persian accounts exaggerated and embellished their claims?

 

Chroniclers, Thapar reminds us, aren’t neutral recorders: Sometimes “the chronicler fantasizes and twists what actually happened in order to satisfy the expectations of the audience of the chronicle,” and why “testing the validity of the chronicle is crucial”. Even the enduring claim of Muslim invaders wrecking Indian civilization doesn’t pass this test, as she puts it: “Every culture is partially shaped by the other cultures it encounters, what it imbibes from them, and how it responds to the initially unfamiliar.”

 

Simplistic notions often don’t survive historical scrutiny. That’s why a wider grasp of historical method is so urgently needed in a country where history is central to national identity and pride. Myths are comforting because they ask nothing of us; history, on the other hand, asks everything — curiosity, rigour, discipline, the willingness to be wrong. That’s also why a book like Speaking of History matters today. Because, in the end, the truth may not be prettier, may not be a single, simple narrative, but it would be trustworthy.

 

The reviewer is a journalist, and writer. Instagram/X: aroomofwords