This article was originally published on Psyche

On the day we first met, Romila Thapar was contemplating a loss. It had been less than two weeks since the death of her nephew, Valmik Thapar, a conservationist who was for decades the leading figure in the campaign to protect India’s tigers. He was twenty years her junior. I would say she was in mourning, except it wasn’t apparent on the surface. Telling me about Valmik, she held the steady tone of a long-time scholar and, perhaps, of a person who is not a stranger to grief. To live a longer life than most people is also to experience more loss. In November, Romila Thapar turned 94 years old.

She had received me, as she would each time, in an immaculate kurta, and wearing on each hand a large ring of silver or semi-precious mineral. We sat in the living room of her home in south Delhi, which opens onto her study. Thapar sat in a scarlet chair, a scoop of bright colour, amidst the muted tones of a historian’s home. Spines of books covered the walls from the floor to ceiling, and between them were pieces of temple sculpture, wooden antiques, a rubbing of a Cambodian mural, a fading print of a Jain cosmological chart.

In his twenties, she told me, her nephew had had a divorce and spent a while feeling lost, not knowing what to do with himself. “He hadn’t found the tiger,” she said. Valmik would drop in on his aunt and they formed a habit of talking. She was sympathetic. In her own youthful years—before she became India’s pre-eminent historian of the ancient world; and arguably, the most famous living academic in the country, in any field—Romila Thapar had been confused and anxious as well. Nephew and aunt grew closer. Valmik became a person in whom she could confide.

“I knew him, of course, from the time that he was born,” she said. By the end, he had become like a son. “So now I have that sense of discontinuity.”

“With him being gone?”

“With him being gone, yes.”

Change and continuity are rival ways in which historians can conceive of and narrate the past. It is tempting to use the same terms in thinking about Thapar’s own life. For people my age, Thapar has been a star historian for about as long as we’ve been sentient. She has taught and published across the tenures of every Indian Prime Minister, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi. Larger arcs of time than usual are to be found in her histories, but also in her reminiscences. The past is outsized in the problems she considers as a scholar as well as those she confronts in her life.

She came of age at the end of an era, that of British rule in India. As a woman and a scholar, she broke deliberately from convention and precedent. In a country searching for the best use of its freedom, she found the best use of her own. Now, late in her life and her career, she is witness to yet another historical rupture, and a new regime in which she is both a figure of dissent and a scholar of it. Which is why, to many Indians, Thapar is a national treasure, and to others she is a traitor.

***

In 1947, the year of Independence and Partition in the subcontinent, Thapar was 16, in her final year at convent school in Poona, and class prefect. She was told it would be her privilege to lower the Union Jack and raise the new flag on the school grounds. She would also have to give a fifteen-minute speech. That threw her into a tizzy. For several nights, she lay in bed worrying about what to say: What did it mean to be Indian, outside of the British Raj?

Thapar was born in 1931 into an elite class of Punjabi Khatris, one well-rewarded for its service to the British Raj. Her father was a doctor in the army, so Thapar spent much of her early childhood in the rebellious North-West Frontier, on British India’s border with Afghanistan. Home was the hill-fortress of Thal. From there, her father would drive to practice in nearby villages, and Romila would go with him, spending hours cloistered with Pashtun women, acquiring from them a love of rings and silver jewellery. The family later moved to cantonments: Peshawar and Rawalpindi along the North-West Frontier, and later Poona, in peninsular India.

Every winter without fail, Romila would travel to Lahore to spend the holidays with her cousins in her grandmother’s large home. Lahore was the capital of the province of Punjab, and a byword for the urbane mingling of India’s faiths and cultural abundance. It was the twin city to Delhi, barely 200 miles away. In 1947, however, when the country was divided into India and the new state of Pakistan—the gruesome condition of its Independence—her grandmother’s house, the city of Lahore, and half of Punjab were severed from India.

For a year, the province was convulsed with atrocities, as its residents were driven in terror across a new border, into the nation-states where they now ostensibly belonged; Muslims west into Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs east into India. The ethnic cleansing had started months earlier, but it was off the leash by August of 1947, when young Romila lay sleepless in bed.

What did it mean now, to be Indian? A hint at one answer was inscribed on the flag she would raise on the morning of August 15. Its central device was an archaeological motif: a spoked wheel, or chakra, found on a ruined pillar in Bihar. Rediscovered in the nineteenth century, the inscriptions on this pillar, and others like it, had helped reveal a picture of an ancient empire, that of the Mauryas. At its peak in the third century BCE, the Mauryan rulers held sway over most of the subcontinent, under a sort of philosopher-king, Ashoka.

The discovery of Ashoka and the Mauryas had been a balm to the ego of colonised India. It meant that, like the Europeans and the Persians, Indians too had had an empire of the classical age, strong but enlightened; Rome but also Greece. In 1951, the two-thousand-year-old symbols of Ashoka became the chosen emblems of the modern republic of India.

History was unfolding all around her. But in the early years of the republic, history—let alone ancient history—was no subject for a bright young person. The country was building its way out of colonial backwardness with infrastructure and industry. The “temples of modern India”, said Nehru, were hydroelectric dams. Thapar was a precocious student, but she was at a loss for what to do with herself.

In her high-ceilinged living room, which seems almost built out of countless books and the mementos of her career, Thapar recalled her unsteady start—the girl before she found her tiger. “I agonised,” she said. “What should I do? What should I do? I’d bore the hell out of all my father’s friends, because I would sit there and say—won’t you advise me on what to do?”

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It was always certain that Thapar would receive a higher education, but it was far less clear that she’d have a profession or career. Her mother was a college graduate but had never been allowed to work outside the home. Romila’s older sister was married and a homemaker. Her father was patient, but he was always clear: “Ultimately, you have to get married. We have to find you a husband. Just try not to be difficult about it.”

In 1953, Thapar escaped to London, enrolling in a program in history at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she became a favourite of A.L. Basham, one of Britain’s leading Indologists. His classes were so specialised—and under-subscribed—that they became, in effect, personal tutorials. Her adventures outside the classroom were just as educational. To a young Indian woman raised in stuffy cantonment towns, the sheer autonomy—and the fun—was amazing. The buzzy cosmopolitanism of London, Thapar later wrote, left her “utterly intoxicated”.

She was invited by friends to go hitchhiking in Provence. They visited Roman ruins and slept in hostels that were often no more than barns, with bales of hay to spread out as beds. On the roads, the small automobiles rarely had room for three, so they would wave down trucks, “these huge camions”, and squeeze in on the wooden bench on which the drivers slept at night. It was a summer she had never imagined she would experience.

When her undergraduate program came to an end, her father wrote to say that he was out of funds. She would have to come home and—here she paused—“get married”. In turmoil, Thapar wrote to her elder brother, Romesh. He replied with a line she still enjoys repeating. “He said, marry if you must, but not if only turnips are available.”

“That clinched it.” Here was a reason to discontinue tradition. She applied for a doctoral fellowship, proposing—almost to her own surprise—to study Ashoka. Some in the committee grumbled; they believed the subject was done to death. She won her doctoral award anyway. She went to “Bash” to tell him the news.

“He looked at my face and said, why are you looking so depressed? I’ve never seen you look so depressed.”

“I said, I’ve got the fellowship.” She mimicked a voice of despair. “I’ve got to become a historian.”

***

In Ashoka, Thapar had a subject who harmonised with contemporary society and its concerns. The Ashokan inscriptions, inscribed in rock-faces and pillars—most in the Brahmi script, but a few in Greek and Aramaic—are among the oldest legible writings found in the subcontinent. Among much else, they tell this legend: After witnessing a great carnage at the battle in Kalinga, Odisha, Ashoka repented his imperial wars. Moved by the teachings of the Buddha, he began to propagate a code of non-violence, the Buddhist “dhamma”. His edicts call for mutual tolerance between “brahmanam-shramanam”: that is, between the orthodoxy of Vedic Brahminism, with its sacrificial rituals and hereditary priesthood, and newer, distinctive beliefs like those of the Buddhists and Jains, which swayed followers toward self-salvation through an ethical code.

Thapar immersed herself in the inscriptions, and the philology—the close reading of ancient languages—that informed earlier work. She was also alert to newer methods becoming available from adjacent social sciences. She grew comfortable with her identity as a historian, knowing that the discipline—its rigour of research and writing—“would give direction to my great need for autonomy”.

She still had a taste for physical adventure, and increasingly, an eye for what the historian might learn from actual landscape. In 1957, halfway through writing her dissertation, she was invited to be an assistant on an expedition to the Buddhist cave-sites at Maijishan and Dunhuang. She travelled in the interiors of revolutionary China, then on the eve of the Great Leap Forward, dancing the foxtrot with Russian engineers, playing table-tennis with monks and revolutionary guardsmen, and eventually even shaking hands with Zhou En-Lai and Chairman Mao himself.

In Xi’an, she visited the monastery of Xuan Zang, a seventh century pilgrim to India and a great friend to modern historians because of the priceless chronicle he left of his travels. Thapar, alone on an upper balcony, looking out over the monastery and the land, felt an uncanny sensation: the “sweep of the centuries” made palpable around her.

Back in Beijing, she was eager to meet Chinese academics to discuss what she had seen. “The questions were broadly concerned with what they were doing to protect the ancient sites and whether the new society that they were organising after the revolution was what they had wanted,” she told me. She found them reticent. The previous year, Mao had urged that “a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred points of view contend”. Already this brief window for dissent was closing. In a diary she kept at the time, Thapar noted the rising noise of the party’s rectification campaigns. Historians had begun to face vague but chilling accusation of being “Rightist”. (One of them, Xiang Da, an authority on the Dunhuang murals, had allegedly remarked that a hundred flowers were not blooming in the field of Chinese history, but only five, and they all said the same thing.) To Thapar, the shift in the scholarly climate “was sad, and somewhat shattering after our time and work”. She wrote: “So far there have been no tanks and no bloodshed. But will it stop at this?”

***

Thapar’s dissertation was published in 1961 as Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. It was ground-breaking work, veering away from modes of historiography that dominated the study of ancient India at the time. Influentially, she explained Ashoka’s dhammic code of tolerance as a moral but also an imperial ideology: one that “borrowed from Buddhist and Hindu thought” but also served to hold together a humongous empire. In the 1950s and 60s, Nehru’s India, a large, poor and increasingly riotous democracy, was trying to do something similar: to hold state authority and dissent in balance, without falling apart. Thapar saw herself naturally included in its project.

With her doctorate complete, she returned to Delhi. Many of the extended family there, she found, viewed her study abroad as “a kind of finishing school”. “They said, What are you doing now?

“And I said, I’m teaching.”

“Oh, so you became a school mistress.”

When her brother Romesh came up from Bombay to see her, though, he put a word in their father’s ear. “He told him—Please remember, you are not to treat her as an unmarried daughter. You have to treat her as you would a professionally qualified son.”

Romesh had always understood her, she said, but “I was very, very impressed with that.”

The sweep of Thapar’s work in the sixty-odd years since then is not easily conveyed. Since Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, she has produced more than two dozen other volumes, which established her as the doyenne of her period—early India—and of the subcontinent’s history at large. Moving beyond dynastic history, she inquired into the formation of early Indian social structures: kingship, caste groups, religious sects, early states and their economic forms. Alongside the study of classical, usually Sanskrit, texts, her generation of historians went to work with archaeological and social-scientific methods. Over the 1960s and 70s, as Indian history “moved from being Indology to being a social science”, many of Thapar’s ideas became paradigmatic in the field.

In 1969, she joined the faculty of a new university founded in New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, or JNU, a pioneer in interdisciplinary teaching and critical inquiry. Today, it is typically ranked as India’s best university. At the same time, Thapar had brought her critical approach to another exercise: writing new textbooks for Indian schools. The existing curricula taught history as a fixed sequence of events, for students to recite “like catechism”, she said. Thapar thought they should teach explanations for historical phenomena and change, and how historians reach those explanations.

This was not as easy as it sounds—“I would much rather write a PhD thesis all over again than write another textbook for children,” she later said—but it was an important, not to say patriotic, undertaking. “The past must not simply be narrated, it has to be explained, understood, revisited,” she wrote. “Is the form that the past was given some decades ago still tenable?”

She never married. At one point, while she was in her forties, her mother urged her to adopt a child. It could be a girl, her mother said; daughters do more to look after you in your old age. “I thought about it quite seriously,” Thapar told me. Her mother even offered to help raise the child, since Thapar was busy, “rushing around giving lectures here, there, and everywhere.” Ultimately, she chose not to. “I said: No, I think it would be unfair. On the child. I wouldn’t be able to give it—give her—the kind of attention that I would like to give a child.”

Thapar was in her fifties by the time India’s feminist movement arrived in strength in the 1980s. She is a committed feminist (visiting Paris, she would lay flowers at the grave of Simone de Beauvoir), but never felt a need to “write volumes on the status of women” herself. “Some of us could just live a free life, and through the way we lived and talked and claimed our rights, we could make people think.”

She taught at the JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies as Professor of Ancient Indian History, until her retirement, mandatory at the age of 60, in 1991. She is now a Professor Emeritus there. Her career did not slow. After her retirement in 1991, colleagues honoured her with a festschrift, or tribute, Tradition, Dissent and Ideology. Nearly three decades later, with Thapar still active, a younger generation produced another: Questioning Paradigms, Constructing Histories.

After her ostensible retirement, she published Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002), which found a wide lay readership, despite the few concessions Thapar makes to genial or accessible prose. She was awarded honorary doctorates from leading universities on four continents, among them Oxford, the University of Pretoria, and the University of Chicago. She twice declined the offer of a Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honour given by the Central government, saying she preferred to “only accept academic and professional awards”. In 2008, she shared the million-dollar Kluge Prize given by the US Library of Congress: the first woman, and the first scholar not living in the West, to ever receive it.

***

Thapar’s public lectures and events still fill up auditoria. On a Monday evening last July, I arrived at one such event—a panel discussion of ancient cultural ties between India and Rome—to find a crowd of Delhi gentry outside the gate, incredulous at not being allowed in. It was a full house, and then some; inside, people were already seated in the aisles and there was no room left even to stand.

The organiser, the conservation architect Ratish Nanda, tried to mollify the crowd, most of whom belonged to a class of citizens not used to being refused. Nanda suggested that we take a sundown stroll in the restored Mughal garden next door. Some of us agreed. Drifting around the park, we confessed to each other how funny it was to feel this anxious to attend an academic panel discussion. An hour later, as we circled back, a handful of people were still at the venue’s gates, fighting to get in, attempting various forms of influence on the security guard. That was a show worth watching, too.

“I guess it’s a good sign,” said one person, “that she still has so many fans.”

A common way to speak of Thapar is to say she is an institution. Like many Indian institutions, Thapar has spent the past decade under attack.

As a historian, Thapar’s main confrontation has always been with Hindu nationalism, or “Hindutva”. The historiography she’d helped pioneer often broke up the frames of earlier history-writing, including a particularly rusty meta-narrative: India as the home of a timeless Hindu civilisation, ancient and continuous, but threatened since 1000 AD by Muslim invaders and tyrants. This binary picture of the past—an ancient Hindu sublime and its medieval Islamic inversion—originated as a colonial theory, one that justified benevolent British rule displacing the Mughals. By the twentieth century, it had become the gospel truth of Hindutva.

In 1977, a conservative-led alliance took power in India, bringing Hindu nationalists into the Central government for the first time. A burst of official censure and bans of school history textbooks followed, including ones written by Thapar. The alliance soon failed, but the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, the electoral wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, was set to grow steadily in strength. In its first full term, in the early 2000s, the BJP resumed its campaign to correct, in school textbooks, what it saw as the entrenched historiographical bias against “Hindus”, one that had left them diminished and demoralised. Thapar spoke up in protest and was drawn into controversy, and so into the harsh limelight of the culture wars.

Hostility towards academic historians had “revived with the BJP government in 1999”, Thapar told me, “and with even more concentration since 2014”. That year, Narendra Modi led the party back into power, where it has stayed for over a decade. To many of its supporters, and some of its opponents, the 2014 mandate was an event as transformative as 1947.

The Modi regime has fought its history wars from the outside in. Its grand narrative has returned, mainly through a mandate to creative industries; Hindi movies, popular publishing, and TV news have all fallen in line. (The historical genre in Bollywood is now dominated by a rolling spectacle of Hindu heroics against lurid Islamic savagery, as in 2025’s Chhaava, one of the year’s best-earning Bollywood films.) Professional historians have not yielded as easily. Many have been quiet. Others, like Thapar, ready to dispute these caricatures of history, have become targets themselves.

First they came for JNU. The university is famed for having a left-leaning student body, equally keen to read and to march. In 2016, the government began a long campaign to tame the radical campus. Police entered JNU during an on-campus protest for Kashmir and arrested three of its student leaders. When they were taken to court, the police stood back while right-wing lawyers kicked, punched, and humiliated the students for cameras. On primetime TV, news anchors used doctored video-clips to carry out a grand guignol of the “anti-nationals” of JNU. The students were accused of sedition, which can lead to a life sentence. One of them, Umar Khalid, was working on a doctorate in history.

On campus, Thapar joined a series of protest teach-ins, which drew an audience of thousands. She knew what would come. Neither her measured, methodical style nor her international prestige would protect her from it. She began receiving threats and abuse over the phone—these continue, mostly over email. The same year, the Mumbai Police provided an escort when she visited the city to give a lecture. By 2019, even the administration of JNU—where she had taught for twenty-five years and been an emeritus for another thirty—was asking Thapar to show them her CV in order to review her position.

Online, a widening campaign denounces her as a “saboteur”, a “failed Marxist Ghazi” (“ghazi” is a medieval term for a crusading warrior for Islam), or in the phrase of a recent piece in Organiser, an “architect of intellectual treason”. “Thapar’s cabal,” one web editorial recently had it, “has disfigured the psyche of at least three generations… by poisoning Indian history.” So far there have been no tanks. Much of the force of intellectual intimidation in India remains anonymous, digital, and decentralised.

It has been easy to treat Thapar, who exemplifies a class to which I also belong—of English-speaking leftish liberals—as an effigy of a subversive, “anti-national” elite. It is even easier because of her sex. “I get abused not only for the history I’m writing but for being a woman historian. There’s a very substantial quantity of that,” she said. “There are, for example, interviews on YouTube—with comments. There are some really horrible things, pornographic, sexist.” In this regard, she said: “Being a woman has been tough.”

I do not say so, but I suspect she has not seen the half of it. (She does not use social media.) But she must have thick skin.

“Not too thick, but thick enough,” she said. “Thick enough to keep on going.”

***

The real cost of her public stance, she thinks, has been time. She still has work to do, but India’s new establishment is crowded with ersatz historians, pandering to fantasies and resentments, and “when startling statements are made, then the next lecture I give, I tend to address that,” she sighs. “It’s not that it’s taking up very much time, but the little it has taken up I would rather have spent on major questions.”

Through her career she has made a sustained study of the contours of intellectual dissent in India. From the Ashokan edicts, Thapar discerned that dissent was a salient feature of ancient India. (In fact, it was evident in the history of religions everywhere, she had said, and India was no different.) Here it was enshrined in early philosophy, which even described a system of constructive debate resembling dialectics: between poorva-paksha, the thesis, and prati-paksha, the antithesis, from which confrontation there may evolve the resolution, siddhanta.

“My generation of students was brought up to believe that there was no dissent in the Indian past,” Thapar has said. “Everybody agreed with everybody, and it moved seamlessly from one point to the next.” The early Orientalists had portrayed ancient India as a scene of drowsy, sensual stasis. On that basis, nationalists built their own view of a harmonious Indic civilisation free of any kind of internal conflict.

Her study of pluralism, schism, and conflict within Indian structures of religion—“brahmanam-shramanam” onwards—punctured a hallowed image of pre-Islamic India as a continuous zone of enlightened consensus. “What I have been interested in all along is the social roots of religion, which I’ve used in my history,” she said. “And therefore I’m accused of being anti-Hindu, because I’m showing another dimension of religion, which is not liked by the worshipper.”

In 2023, she published a short book on the subject, Voices of Dissent. She is not satisfied. “I didn’t do enough work, and that’s a great regret of mine,” she said. “I’m trying to suggest that we’ve deliberately ignored the dissenting tradition. It was a very strong one.”

The question of dissent sounds through many parts of her life: As a line of scholarly inquiry; as a personal principle and orientation in public; and as a habit to encourage in younger Indians, many of whom won’t remember the more expansive, voluble country that India was before 2014. Today it is a more brittle society, trained to exalt a mythical past of piety, conformity, and order. To claim a tradition of dissent here is an act of dissent in itself.

I asked Thapar if the long view was a source of solace in a stifled, oppressive time.

“The tradition of dissent is not intended to bring solace,” she replied, in classic, unsentimental style. “It is rather a justification for the right to dissent, and a support for doing so, and with reasons for doing so.”

***

I’m fifty years younger than Thapar, and I’ve also spent my life in India. A single milieu—the Gandhian-Nehruvian experiment in pluralism, rights, and social democracy—shaped us both, though her generation was the first to come of age within it, and mine may be the last. What we embody is a contradiction, an identity crisis, or—in the reigning discourse in India—a kind of betrayal.

Thapar is an Indian born into the colonial house of the English language and into its liberal, international mores. But she has lived in India, studied it, and served in its institutions throughout her life. As a historian she defies Hindu nationalism and its slanted ideas about the past. And she is better-versed in the Sanskrit epics, the Vedas, and the shastras than any critic who might come at her for being “a Hindu hater”.

Her scholarly authority and prestige have been pressed into service, again and again, to defend those who are less well protected. In early 2020, she visited the women’s protest encampment in Shaheen Bagh, an industrial outskirt of Delhi. It had become the heart of a massive, country-wide movement to affirm India’s Constitution and its inclusive principles. In the conclusion of Voices of Dissent, Thapar wrote about being moved by the dignity of the women there, and their eloquence, without recourse to religious rhetoric.

With its non-violent ethos, and the crucial participation of women, Shaheen Bagh took her back to her own “very youthful participation” in India’s freedom struggle. “I felt after many years that I was witnessing a form of dissent that was somehow taking off from the roots of anti-colonial nationalism,” she wrote. Two weeks after her visit, however, the popular movement was stilled by a bloody, orchestrated riot in New Delhi. Umar Khalid, the graduate student Thapar had defended in 2016, had been a gentle and galvanising figure in the protests. He was arrested, with other young Muslim leaders, under terrorism charges. Since August of 2020, he has been in prison, without his trial having even begun. This January, a bench of India’s Supreme Court declined to uphold Khalid’s right to bail.

***

At this late stage in her career, and her life, Thapar fights a rearguard action for both dissent and historical scholarship. She is not alone, but it is an increasingly lonely battle. With it comes the solitude of age. Time steals friends away, and physical frailty makes it harder to stay in touch with others. In December of 2024, six months before the death of her nephew, Thapar lost one of her closest friends, Shirish Patel, an engineer and urban planner devoted to Mumbai. He and his wife “were the kind of friends one thinks aloud with and doesn’t pause, you know”, she said. “I miss that very much indeed.”

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One source of consolation, with the Patels, was remaining in touch with their son and daughter-in-law, allowing “the friendship to continue to the next generation”. Within her family, she has moved her deepest attachments from one generation to the next: from her brother, Romesh, to her brother’s son, Valmik. Now, one of the people she is closest to is Valmik’s son Hamir, who is 23.

“Now, in old age, I do regret not having a child,” she said. “I don’t regret not having a formal husband. I do regret not having a child—I would love to have a sort of continuity.” There was some truth to what her mother had said about having someone to look after you. But what she really misses is a channel for “just that feeling of—something’s carrying on”.

I joke that, without children, everyone worries about who will inherit their books and furniture.

“That doesn’t bother me. I have a long list of fifty friends to give this to and that to,” she said. What she means is both simpler—“chatter about a person, anecdotes about the past”—and more complex, a way of transmitting and revisiting the memory of people and things known and loved. It’s a desire that is hard to anticipate, but in hindsight, hard to ignore.

“I’m not saying this because I’m a historian,” she said. “But in a sense, continuity is a very meaningful way of living. I don’t mean that you should be completely stuck with it, and keep on thinking: What was it? And am I carrying the past? The past goes on with you, without you even being aware of it. But there is something in that continuity that gives you the confidence that life will carry on.”

In her generation, at least in India, Thapar is an outlier. It isn’t common to experience your mid-nineties the way she does: with a full head of steam, professionally, and with a healthy appetite for company and conversation. Her favourite chair—the bright red one, shaped in a fluid curve as if drawn by a mathematical function—is set on a swivelling base. It is perfect for “conversational swivelling”. She demonstrates for me, panning across a room full of hypothetical conversation. “You see, it gives me access to absolutely everybody.”

It’s harder now to go out, and in the colloquial sense, have a life. To go to a lecture, for example, she is obliged to call up a younger friend and ask if they’d be free to escort her. As she says this, I picture a battalion of young people who would happily line up around the block to escort her to a seminar: I would be one of them. But I realise, too, this is not how real life works.

“Sometimes, you know, I’m hesitant to ask people,” Thapar says. Especially with lectures: “They may not be terribly interested.” But because she needs the company in order to go out, she has made a habit of asking for it, turning one of the challenges of old age into a basis for new connections. This way Thapar still goes out into the world, with younger people at her side, to oppose the mounting wave of spurious history.

Mornings tend to be quiet. She has company from the birds, she said, mostly magpies and bulbuls. They arrive at the bowls of grain and water set out on Thapar’s verandah. Squirrels come too, and her dog, Bulleh, tries his luck for a bite of her breakfast. A recent guest is the ghoos, the bandicoot, who emerges from her hole in the corner of the garden, to the bulbuls’ distress. Occasionally, too, there is a long-tailed garden lizard, who approaches the very edge of the verandah. “It stands still and looks up at me, and I look at it,” Thapar said, “And we go on out-staring each other, until it finally decides, This is no fun, and goes away.”

Raghu Karnad is an award-winning journalist, essayist, author, and editor living in India.