The knowledge of how to read a language has changed.

Romila Thapar in an interview with Santwana Bhattacharya

The Indian Express Wednesday, February 02, 2005

None of the social sciences are totally without bias. The difference between a good social scientist and a poor one is that the first is aware of the method he or she is using, discusses it and so makes it clear. But that awareness has to be there. In the old days it used to be called bias. But it is in fact the method.... So that small element has to be conceded in the social sciences. People now argue that it has to be conceded in the sciences as well. That science also works on the basis of preconceived ideas. Secondly, history is very strongly related to nationalism. Therefore, inevitably, nationalist ideology comes into play, at least marginally. The problem arises when political ideology totally colours the history being written-to that extent it ceases to be an independent history. Thirdly, the essential in all social sciences is the right to discuss. The moment you have someone saying we will delete these passages from textbooks and we won't allow any discussion on this...that is when one says this is not on.

• Our political structures are liable to change, probably every five years. How to insulate the institutions, history writing and textbooks from this?

You must make a distinction between state textbooks and history writing. The two are not linked. History writing is not going to change every five years. The textbooks you use in state schools may change. This is why it is necessary for the present government to bring in statutes on these bodies that are concerned with state-sponsored textbooks. That will disallow every new government from bringing in a change in the body of knowledge.

• This phenomenon is not confined to this country. A similar process is on in Italy.

Wherever there have been historical changes, people are going through this process. One of the most interesting cases is Germany-the books that were used in the schools in East Germany and the ones in the West and how you correlate the two. So these are problems that belong to a much wider world than ours. We have to treat them not as 'leftist vs rightist' historians and that kind of nonsense but as problems in how to treat a body of knowledge.

• How do you create the right kind of dialogue between historians?

I think a dialogue is going on, continual dialogue. The history I was writing 40 years ago, it has changed in my own later writings. When I brought out my recent Early India (From Origins to AD 1300), it's in many ways different from the first books I wrote. My own understanding has undergone some degree of change and that is necessary. What one has to avoid, or point out continually as a professional historian, is the abuse of history for political mobilisation-done by presenting a point of view that is not historically valid from the premises.

• You mentioned national identity. Post-independence, history in the subcontinent also had to deal with the idea of two nations...

The Indian subcontinent is more than two nations.

• Our recent debates were marked by an exchange of allegations rather than facts. What does the common man, the receiver of history, make of this conflict? How do you even approximate to truth?

The discipline of history itself has undergone immense changes. We talk today not of the truth. People practising the humanities and the social sciences, we talk about understanding...and there are different ways of attaining that. This is not an arbitrary thing. It's not that X has a certain understanding, I have another and you as the public have to decide. There are mechanisms, procedures by which history is written today. These did not exist a hundred years ago. It was practised almost by instinct by certain very good historians. Today, we train our history students in techniques by which you analyse data. One has of late been battling with people who are not trained historians. If you say, 'To hell with all your historical rules and methods, I will pick up a text and interpret it the way I want and that's history', face up to it, the historian will turn around and question your method. It's really like the debate between astronomy and astrology where there is no conversation.

• If there can be a European identity, an American identity, a Black consciousness, why not an Indian one....

No one is denying the identity of the Indian past. You can't. There was an Indian past. That is a given. The point is, how do you look at that past. How do you analyse it? How do you understand what identity that past gives you? This is where the difference lies. In the long run, I think the kinds of issues many of us are looking at have much more relevance to understanding the Indian identity than the obsession with just the Vedas and the Hindu identity.

• That is another allegation. That you refuse to look at the Vedas and the Sanskrit texts as historical documents.

That is of course an absurdity. None of us could write our history without doing that. Some of the major histories of early India written in the last 50 years are based precisely on those sources. Unfortunately, very often it is they who cannot read the sources. They don't read sufficiently. Historiographically, they keep reverting to Vivekananda and Aurobindo and people like that.

• But they do say new, scientific methods are not being taken into account.

It's the reverse that is true. It's they who are using the old tools. When you start talking to them about the new tools of analyses, they are lost. For them, their analysis of a Vedic text is simply the ability to read Sanskrit. The way in which the subject has evolved now, linguistic analysis of Vedic Sanskrit has thrown up all kinds of problems... explorations that are very interesting historically. But which they are unaware of. For them, the readings that existed in the nineteenth century are still valid. And they don't see that even the knowledge of how to read a language has changed.

• You've been the target of personal attacks. There was a signature campaign against you when you received the Library of Congress honour.

I was startled by the fact that I was the icon of hatred. I kept asking myself, what had I done to deserve this? But I was absolutely overwhelmed by the kind of support I got. Initially from academics-not just from India or America, but literally all over the world-then the number of people in India who were incensed by the nature of the attack and wrote in my defence. I realised that I as a person was unimportant to the debate. In some ways, I was glad the issue had surfaced, that people were forced to think and clarify their position. Earlier people used to say we were exaggerating. But it became very clear there was an attitude towards knowledge which was backward-looking, to put it mildly.

• Whether the BJP or the BSP, exploration of a historical identity has been crucial to politics/political empowerment.

You are right. Political empowerment is what every group is searching for-as such for rights to history. In the twentieth century, history moved from traditional elite groups to new groups that sought and gained empowerment. Groups that were treated as marginal are now slowly moving centrestage, which in fact enriches not only our understanding of the past but also the issue of identity. It comes back to that point. One of my problems with the nineteenth century concept of civilisation is that it locates a territory, gives it a language, a religion and everything is determined through that. Now if you take something like Indian civilisation, the great characteristic was that it was multicultural. You can't just say that my identity as an Indian is a Hindu identity and that's the end of it. For one, historically, identities keep changing. You cannot say 'this' is the Indian identity for all times. And then. There are other groups that have contributed to the creation of the Indian civilisation-whose past has to be conceded.