My first question to you, Professor Thapar. You were judged “substandard” when you sat for an entrance examination for Oxford University. Did that shape the formidable body of work that followed?

No, not at all. In fact, I am sometimes rather surprised when I think back on it, how unperturbed I was by this evaluation. I think it was partly because I then decided to carry on and do what I really wanted to do, and fiddled around with various subjects and topics, and so on and finally arrived at wanting to do history. And then, of course, the decision was which history one should do. And some people advised me to do European history, go abroad, study European history and come back and teach it because there were no teachers. And others said, well, you know, Indian history is always open to reinterpretation, so you could do that as well. And so that was really what my interest moved towards, looking once again at Indian history.

But do you think you were very influenced by Western universities at that time, or what was that the only option open as really at that time?

No, I was not very. But most people of course went to Oxbridge and did the usual kinds of degrees, but then very often they didn’t become teachers of history, they went into other fields. And my interest was really partly conditioned by the fact that this was all in some ways new. It’s the way that they were handling history in the School of Oriental and African Studies. And the kinds of emphasis that they were giving was very different from the kind of history that we had studied here, and I got quite interested in looking at that.

And why ancient history and why not medieval or modern? What was in your mind when you chose that?

Oh, I think there were two things. One was that ancient history was more distant than modern history, and therefore one looked forward to doing something that was in some ways new and different. The other thing was also that, now that I look back on it, this was when I joined college, or was about to join college. There was a gap of 6 months between the end of school, as in those days you finished school in December, and the university colleges opened in June, so I had 6 months of what I thought was going to be a marvellous vacation. It didn’t turn out that way because my father, who was a great one for picking up hobbies here and there and getting quite intensely involved in a hobby, went to Madras on tour. He was a doctor in the army, so he had to do a lot of touring.

And he had an afternoon free, and someone suggested going to the museum. And he went into the gallery that had the South Indian bronzes. And he was completely taken aback by the beauty of the promptings. He hadn’t ever been told that these objects existed. So he bought a whole pile of books and came back to Pune, where we were—he was posted and where we were living—and started reading. And then after a fortnight or so, he said, “You know, I can’t just do this reading on my own. I want to talk about it with someone.”

So, my mother immediately said, “No.” My sister was there, and she was about to have a baby, and my mother said, “Both of us are going to be completely tied up with this.” And then he looked at me and said, “You’re on vacation. So I had to say, yes.” I started reading chapters of books on art history. Indian art history. Art history didn’t capture my attention all that much, but the history behind it began to make an impact.

And that was, I think, the reason why I, at that point, then decided that maybe I should find out what the possibilities are of doing early Indian history in a new way. That was what was being emphasised by everybody, that if you go to the SOAS in London, it will be very different from how you’re taught, what you’re taught here. And I was interested in finding out what the difference was.

After you went abroad and you studied, you decided to come back, and as you mention in Just Being, you took up a position in Kurukshetra University. Which was not really a university, it was just coming up. And there are some lovely anecdotes about you driving there and so on and so forth and living on your own. So, how was that? And, why did you come back, when you obviously had the option of staying on if you wanted to?

That’s a subject that bothered me because every time things went wrong in Delhi or Kurukshetra, I would say to myself, ‘Now, if I was living in England, this wouldn’t have happened.” So there was that kind of feeling. At the same time, I suspect that my generation was a generation of young budding nationalists. We were shouting slogans all over the place and we were constantly going to Gandhiji’s prayer meetings, and so on and so forth.

And I think that was a kind of pull in the other direction, that you really do have something to contribute, which is important. And that sense of whatever the contribution may be, however limited it may be, there was that feeling that, you know, alright, we’ve now got our Independence, we’re now building a new society, what—in what way can I contribute? I mean, these kinds of things carry on in life. You keep thinking, well, maybe if I hadn’t come back, I would have got this. Maybe when you get this, you say, oh, I’m so glad that I came back because I got this.

There are some other lovely anecdotes about how your car was towed by a bullock cart when you had gone off with your friends. So obviously it was an exciting time in the ‘60s.

It was exciting. And what was nice about it was that living in India at that time meant that there were all kinds of unexpected things happening, which one didn’t imagine would happen, which would have been expected in a society that was well run and so on. We were still in the process of looking at possibilities. And that was important.

You mentioned nationalism in your earlier comments and how your generation was inspired by that. Would you also say that yours was an idealistic generation, that you believed in change?

Oh, very much so. In that, for example, in my last year of school, I was then 15, I think. Suddenly, one day in the beginning of August, Sister Superior—it was a convent, a mixture of nuns and other secular teachers—and Sister Superior called me and said, we would have a little ceremony on the 15th. We will plant a sapling, and we will change the flags. The Union Jack will come down, and the Indian flag will go up. And we want you as the Indian prefect to make a little speech.

And I was terrified, I sort of said, “I can’t do it”, I went around saying, “What am I going to do? What am I going to say? How am I going to say it?” And my teacher, who taught us history and literature, said to me, “Don’t flap, just think of the conversations that you’re having amongst yourselves, or the Indian girls who were coming to school, and tell us about those conversations.”

Students at Delhi University's north campus on the second day of admissions for 2021-22, on October 5, 2021, in New Delhi, India. | Photo Credit: Hindustan Times

And do you remember anything of what you said?

There were two points I made which I remember very much because I sometimes think that they have bugged me all my life. One was, what is it going to be like to be an independent state after we’ve had colonialism for so long? And that was something that people were talking about. Ab kya hoga? Kya badleya? Kya ne badleya? That kind of thing. And the second question was very much that of what kind of society are we going to create? Because it’s now in our hands to make a society out of the way we’re living. So that was also there. So, these are two problems in a sense—problems, ideas—which one lived with all one’s life. I mean, it just became normal after 1947.

So now we are doing this interview in your lovely house, and as you point out in your autobiography, you have lived in this house since 1967. That’s almost several decades of your life. And did this rootedness—because you travel also a lot—help you in understanding the world, understanding what you’ve done? I mean, does that help? Because you travelled, as your book also shows, you extensively travelled, and I lost count of the number of friends you have abroad. So it’s impossible to.

No, and I made full use of all of that. You know, I don’t think that rootedness works one way or the other. I think the nice thing about rootedness is that if you decide to do something different and go off in another direction, you always have the feeling that if it doesn’t work out, you can come back and know what I’m doing. I mean, it’s the fallback position, which was always guaranteed to be okay as it were. And so also now it was a middle class that was emerging in India, we were talking about new things, how to do new things, how to follow new agendas and that kind of stuff. So, it was a sense of discovery despite the rootedness, and that sense of discovery was very strong.

Would you say, as a woman academic, a woman public intellectual, you had to work harder than men to achieve what you have?

Oh yes, oh yes, no question. I mean, when I was appointed to a readership at Delhi University, for example, one of my colleagues was constantly teasing, but not just teasing, and saying, you know, you’re doing a job that should be done by a man, because a man has a family to look after and you’re all alone, so it doesn’t matter where you get a job, but it’s important that a man should have this job that you have. That kind of thing, you know, you’re taking away the food from the mouth of a family, as it were. These kinds of jibes were fairly common in those days, said laughingly and treated as a joke, and you were meant to treat it as a joke, but it was hurtful.

In your understanding of the world, what would you say are the key elements? Of course, your education, your interest in history, and your delving into archaeology in so many places. You also mentioned in Just Being that when you had gone on a trip to China, you met Mao and Chou En-lai.

That’s something very few Indians may have done. So, what would you say, does your knowledge of archaeology, did your travel, did that enrich your intellect, did it enrich your way of looking at history? Ancient Indian or any other history for that matter?

Oh, absolutely. That was very, very central. I would say that the trigger was really curiosity to begin with. What happened in India in old times, and what happened elsewhere in the world. Whether I learnt anything from all of this is another matter, but nevertheless, there was intense curiosity. I mean, how did I get into archaeology? I did a little, we learnt a little bit, because you have to if you’re doing ancient history, archaeology is important. Back in Delhi, when I was reading more archaeology, I found the reports technically a little difficult to follow, because I didn’t have any training in archaeology, any formal training.

And I remember mentioning to one of the archaeologists in the Archaeological Survey, B.K. Thapar, that, you know, what should I do in order to understand this? And he laughed and said, "There’s only one thing you could do, come and excavate, because without that practical experience, you will go on feeling that somehow you’re in an uncertain condition. So I said, what does that mean? And he said, over 3 years, every year for 3 months, you come to the sites that we’re excavating— this was Kalibangan in Rajasthan— and we will put you through the works. Excavate different kinds of situations—of objects, areas and locations and so on. And so I spoke to the head of the Department of History in Delhi University and said, "You know, you’re given one month off at Christmas,” and I said, “Can I double up on the lectures and take the month at either end instead?” And he said, “Talk to the students,” which I thought was very unusual.

But anyway, I talked to the students, and I said, “Can I take—” and they said, “Yes, yes, of course, you take double the lectures for this month and that month, and you take the time off and go, great fun, and then tell us all about it”. So I did this for three months of free, over three years of this, and I certainly learned much more about archaeology. I mean, I didn’t become a first-rate archaeologist, but I learned much, which was nice. And it also taught me that you don’t just pick up something like linguistics is very important now in the study of Vedic Sanskrit. You don’t just pick up a few things and say linguistics is important. You try and understand what the importance is, and it introduces a different kind of approach to understanding and to doing historical analysis in depth. And above all, it is something that prepares you for something that became essential as we in the 1960s, and that was interdisciplinary work.

You didn’t just stay with one discipline. If you were doing—studying society in ancient India, you also studied some social anthropology, not because you were going to apply it, you know, point by point to history, but because it might give you suggestions and ideas for the kinds of questions that you could ask your sources. So, I mean, I have been accused by fellow historians who say, “Oh, you brought too much anthropology into your classes and into your books,” which is really not so. All I’ve done is use interdisciplinary studies, perhaps in a more meaningful way than if I had been without it.

I just wanted to return to the question of rootedness. Your family also has roots in what is modern-day Pakistan, and you lived there as a child when your father was posted there. And, you know, we underwent—along with Independence, the burden of partition. Separation, and perhaps in some ways we continue to, you know, suffer it really. So would you say that the fact that your family straddled both sides of the subcontinent, literally, would you say that in your understanding of India or the subcontinent or Pakistan, would you say that this element of separation and rootedness, what role does it play in your view?

Well, I think, now that I think back on it, I mean, it’s not a subject that I have thought of very much, but now, yes. And also the fact that I made 4 visits—Yes—for conferences and seminars to Lahore and Peshawar and so on. Lahore particularly. That whole sort of life—and we used to go back every November. My grandmother had a room. The three sons had these three suites of rooms. They were to bring their families and come and spend November in Lahore because, as she said very correctly, the cousins must grow up knowing each other.

And I’m very grateful for that now because much as I dislike this business of, “Oh my God, we’re going back to Lahore again. Can’t we think of a new place?” for a holiday. But now I realise that, you know, I have a certain closeness to my cousins, and it’s simply because we all grew up together for at least one month in the year. So that was it. Rootedness, I think, everybody has it. You have to be rooted to some place, and I think what it did to me, the whole business of going back to Lahore and bringing Lahore home.

And Lahore, of course, in a Punjabi family that lived there, partition died away, and what remained were all the mystiques and curiosities about what life was like across the border, and that became very important. Now, that’s important in the sense that I think what it did with me was that it opened up the possibilities of mixed societies, plural societies. The pluralism that I inherited from that rootedness has stayed with me, and I think that that is very important, especially these days when there’s so much emphasis on one culture, one religion, the singularity of everything. I just find it contradicts the fact that I have all my life found Indian culture and society to be a marvellously plural society, and that’s been a great help to me in adjusting to life as I went along.

So, interestingly, you have some interesting observations about family in your book. And you describe family relations as a gamble while saying that friendships derive from a greater freedom. And so do you see any contradiction between family ties and friendships, or do they complement each other?

No, up to a point, they complement each other. Now, whether this is something that, you know, when you’re growing up as a kid, you’re always told, now you have to behave, that’s part of family. Family becomes a very conscious content in one’s life. But I think also it’s a case of—I mean, the thing that struck me very much, and I discuss it a little bit in that chapter, is that family is a given. You have a mother and a father and siblings, and God help you, you have to learn to live with them and take what they say. Whereas with friendships, you explore another person and you gradually begin to say, “Oh yes, I think I get on with this person, I think there’s something meaningful in the friendship”. And so friendships are much more chosen relationships, whereas Family relationships are given, and you either accept them or you reject them.

In your book, you write about London and Delhi, and you lived in Delhi for so long that you know the ins and outs of the city. So, at one place in the book, you write that in London, the attraction of new ideas and images is open, audible, and visible. In Delhi, however, you write, one has to explore the potential. Could you explain this point a little more?

I think it depends on the area of Delhi that you’re in and the culture. I should really have explained in that passage that the Delhi of the cantonment and of Lutyens’ New Delhi was really not such a curiosity because one had lived in that ambience all one’s life till one went to college, and even then university. When you went abroad, it changed. So there was that Delhi, which was familiar, and one would participate in it quite fully. There was the other Delhi, when I was younger, for us, the other Delhi was Old Delhi, because there hadn’t been the cantonment, so much, it’s a very small cantonment.

The buildings and the so-called colonies today, which have come up, there are very few. I remember when my father wrote and said that he bought a plot of land in Chanakyapuri. Everybody wrote to him and said, “Have you gone mad? That’s the wilderness, it’s an absolute forest, what are you going to do there?” And so, you know, for me, that typifies the kind of change, intensive, fast change, that Delhi has undergone. And the change is a change that I’m not so happy with because I think it’s— that is a Delhi that I would like to see developing a little differently from the way it has developed.

But the nice thing about Delhi in those days was, and not so much now, then, was that you could sort of pick the kind of culture that you wanted to mix. And I mean, if you wanted to have kebabs and biryani and so on, it was all there. You just had to make the effort to go there. And that was nice about Delhi. And similarly with London, the great parlours, or were, at that stage. And in London, too, there were pockets of people coming from the same area living together, migrants coming together.

I mean, you knew that the East End of London was really not quite the same as the West End of London. And yet gradually it changed, and today the East End of London is more or less the same as the West End of London. But that, I think, is one of the interesting characteristics in big cities, that you do find variety and difference from location to location within the city.

Cover of Just Being | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Let’s come to your writing of history and your intervention in public life as a public intellectual. You’ve seen history, you’ve analysed it, and you’ve never been a party member of any kind, from what I can recall. So why does the right wing love to hate you?

Well, you know, it’s a curious thing. I have thought about it a little bit, not too much, because I don’t let it interfere with my life. It’s something apart which I’ve dismissed since long. To begin with, history is very important to the building of a society. To the extent that there are some historian friends of mine who have argued that tradition, what we call historical tradition, is an invention. It probably never existed, and certainly its existence today is an invention. So history is a very important part of the new society that we are creating. And it is particularly important to nationalism, which is why today political parties that are not emphasising nationalism so much are not emphasising communalism and the single religion and the single society and so on. The political parties that are emphasising Hindu nationalism have made it into an ideology that concerns the development and so on of the one religion, the one community, the one people, their culture, etc. So there is at the same time the possibility of plurality, and yet the political choice is veering more and more towards the singularity of a particular religion and culture. Now, those of us that argue that Indian culture and Indian history therefore also comes from a background that has a wide scale of interest are disliked by those who want to make a singular thing out of Indian culture. Indian culture consists of only one culture, that is, the one religion, that is the religion of the larger community and that sort of thing.

So one of the reasons for the dislike of a person like me is because I write the history on a— of a larger society, of a more open society. They would prefer it to be the history of a closed society, a majoritarian history. So that’s one reason.

The other reason is that when we start looking at history as an open society, we have to say that there was dissent and there was disagreement in the past, from earliest times, that history was not just one idea that was believed in and continued. There were varying ideas, there was dissent, there were people suggesting contrary positions and so on. Again, people like me are arguing this way, and those that want a singular authority don’t like the argument of this plurality. And it goes on like this in many things. It started quite simply with the textbooks that we wrote for the NCERT. And what was their objection to my book? There were two objections. One was that I talk about the Aryans eating beef, for which there’s lots of evidence, and I provided the evidence, but no, that has to be excluded. And the second was why I was saying that the Shudras were not very well treated. Again, there’s so much evidence for that, but it’s a preference. So it’s really a case of a party wanting to impose a certain image of society on the past and saying history supports this image, whereas as some of us other historians are saying history does not support that image. It supports a different image. That’s one of the differences.

You also mention in Just Being that even after a subsequent lot of textbooks came out, with which you had nothing to do, they still attacked you for that. We’ve seen a lot of changes since 2014. Do you see that there’s a de-intellectualisation process going on in India? Will India ever be able to return to a democratic, secular, and equalitarian path in your view?

That’s very worrying. We’ve asked this question of ourselves, of course, many times; we do discuss it. Again, it’s the case, you see, that if you have an approach— for example, take a simple thing, the question of migration. We are the kind of historians who say, yes, there were migrations, okay, the Aryan-speaking people came in as migrants. And after that, there was— there were others that came, the Shakkars, the Kushans, the Huns, and then the Turks, Turushkas. They were all migrants coming in. What did they do to Indian society?

They opened it up in certain ways and introduced new ideas. Some of which were picked up, and some were just dropped and forgotten. But there were new ideas. This worries them because for them it is essential to say that everything that’s happened in India has a root in India and India is responsible for its production. Nothing came from outside. And India is the Vishwaguru.

India, therefore, should today not take anything from outside because this is not so. And secondly, the corollary to that is that India is not only the Vishwaguru, but because it is the Vishwaguru in a way, it’s also the society that clings to a single objective and that clings and explains everything due to that one rootedness.

So this obsession with the single, as I may put it, does that come out of a sense of insecurity because you’re always saying, “Our religion is in danger, somebody else is multiplying.” Is this some kind of insecurity?

I think it’s the insecurity of not having the power that they wish for. I mean, ideally for the Sangh Parivar and the Hindutva and so on, ideally India should be a society— it’s a Hindu society— and they are trying to bring it in and bring in the idea of a largely Hindu society. And if it doesn’t work, yes, there is an element of a lack of confidence.

Because today, the Sangh Parivar has tremendous power. I mean, I don’t think the RSS ever felt that they would have a Prime Minister for three terms; previously, there, Vajpayee. So, they have everything under their control, the writing of history, the textbooks, excising, you know, whatever people are learning. But still, there is that insecurity that people don’t really believe us or, you know, they have ideas which can be disturbing.

Or there is the odd person here and there which is giving a contrary explanation, and that explanation is not being totally rejected. That’s a big fear, that there’s a contradiction to what we are saying, and however much we may say that this contradiction is nonsense, it is there, people are talking about it.

Professor Thapar, I also wanted to ask you about your reference to the Emergency and, you know, today’s India, because it is a bit problematic for people to understand, because Indira Gandhi wanted to give a legal veneer to whatever she did.

So you write that this time, since 2014, state control is tighter and with a clear-cut agenda. How do you think the current government has managed this without any legal sanction? Because the kinds of raids we see on people, the kinds of visits, people being picked up, or, you know, parties being broken because, you know, you don’t toe the line of the BJP. So how do you see this?

Well, I think that it’s been a traumatic experience for India because India was used to being an open society, and now suddenly it’s not so. And when I say it’s a traumatic experience, what I mean is that it’s something which might have been bewildering in the beginning, but people have settled down to it somehow. I myself don’t understand why they have settled down to it so easily.

There are, after all, lots of situations which are contrary, at least thought of as contrary, if not actually contrary. But the exploration of this alternative is not really being done in the kind of in the meticulous, detailed way that one would like it to be done. Now, I’m not saying here that crowds of people should get up and start shouting against anti-government slogans. That may or may not happen. But there should be enough people thinking about the possible different kinds of society that we could have, given what has happened in the last 10 years. Given this background, is it going to be a case of it’s finished, we just go on being like this?

Now, as a historian, I don’t believe that, because as a historian I know that after a certain number of years, maybe a decade, maybe two decades, there will be change. There’s bound to be change. History has only moved forward. It is changing. The question is that in that period, who are the people that are going to discuss, discover, and implement the change? And that’s where it will depend on whether it becomes a secular democracy or whether it moves into something much more severe, like, in the past, the history of Europe, for example, the World War ended up with fascism.

And there’s— extreme ideologies are always there in the background, anywhere in the world. So that is something that we should be thinking about and adjusting ourselves to. Do we want that kind of society? Do we not want it? And if we don’t want it, what do we do?

You refer to extreme ideologies, and it seems to me that the extreme ideologies are not confined to India. No. They are everywhere, including in the United States of America and whatever we are seeing happening in the Gulf region. So what is your sense? Is this like a burst of history or Is it a trend which will continue? And as you said, nothing lasts forever, but in this case it seems like a rather long moment of history.

Well, one doesn’t know. I mean, if you study history carefully, it’s had some very long moments. This may be just one of those. Certainly, we’ve had some very long moments here in India. I’m the kind of historian who doesn’t believe in history working in bursts. I think history works slowly and gradually. It may change in a dreadful way, but one has to always remember that change is not permanent. There will be other changes. That would contradict that change. Don’t ask me what they are because I haven’t thought them out yet. But judging by history, I mean, in history, one of the most interesting aspects of studying history is studying this constant change that goes on.

If you see the world, if you look at the rise of China, you see also what the United States is doing not only to the rest of the world but what it’s doing to itself. So what is your sense? Will this kind of global turmoil, this global disorder, will it continue?

It will continue until there is enough buildup to question it. When people feel that they are in a position where they can question it and say, “Wait a minute, we don’t want this system, we want another system”, then it will begin to break down. But as long as people are satisfied— but here again one really doesn’t know what is happening today because you have elections and some people say they are absolutely fine, they are free, and everybody is voting the way they want to. There are other groups of people who are saying, “No, no, these are all being managed, manipulated”. So one doesn’t really know. I mean, ordinary people like us don’t know whether there is any manipulation going on or whether this is perfectly normal. And that will only happen one feels, or I feel, when it becomes much more intense. And then possibly you have either this or that.

In the decades that you lived, do you have any regrets personally? Anything about your life, what you could have done or what you didn’t do, or you could have done better?

Not terribly much. And I think one of the reasons for that was the great breakthrough that many of us had with JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University], the building of JNU. That’s been a very major part of the lives of many of us. And when I say that, I don’t mean just building a new university and settling down in it and so on. It was the idea that we started with, many of us in the initial years, 1971, when the University got going, and people would ask us, “What are you doing in this new University? What are you so excited about?” And we would say, ‘Yes, we are building new courses, and we are making a new syllabi, subjects are going to be taught in a different way, and this new approach to knowledge was very important.”

And with all that, there was also— we discussed in great detail— we will build a university that will prove to the world that Indian intellectuals and academics can produce a university which is as good as the best. I think we did produce a superb university. And therefore also now, when one sees what has happened to the JNU in the last 10 years, at one level it’s heartbreaking. I mean, I’ve stopped going to JNU because I can’t bear the thought of driving through those places and meeting people and so on with the kind of background that there is now.

But personally, with all of us, I think there was a touch of having done something quite spectacular, although we didn’t recognise it as being spectacular at that time. Now we know. That it was. So I think there have been activities of these kinds that, in the building of a new society and a new culture, as it was after 1947, there was a tremendous feeling of we’re doing something really worthwhile. We are intellectualising generations of students. We’re teaching them to think, and for me, that’s the most important thing. As a teacher, I think that the only thing that I can really convey in my life is to teach the younger people how to think, what to think, and what to think about.