Insight into a historian’s method

In his celebrated television series Civilisation, the well-known art-historian Kenneth Clark compared an African tribal mask with a Greek statue of Apollo. While admiring the mask’s power, he nevertheless concluded that the Greek statue represented a higher state of civilisation. African art, he claimed, arose from a world of fear and darkness, while Greek art sprang from light and reason.

The judgment tells us little about African culture and a great deal about Clark’s own assumptions. It illustrates a warning by the writer Jan Myrdal: “Many authoritative books reveal more about the society that produced them than about the cultures they claim to describe.”

It is this habit of mind that Speaking of History resists. In conversation with Namit Arora, Romila Thapar shows that history is neither intuition nor inherited belief, but a demanding craft. As AJP Taylor once observed, the historian’s task is to understand an epoch on its own terms, not to judge it against modern or personal scales. Thapar’s approach also echoes EH Carr’s insistence that historians must try to understand why people acted as they did. This requires method, i.e., choosing subjects open to inquiry, asking the right questions, verifying sources through scrutiny, and organising evidence into a reasoned and honest historical account.

The conversational format brings this out effectively. Arora often speaks in the voice of the informed lay reader: confident, contemporary, sometimes speculative, and frequently axiomatic. Thapar responds without condescension, grounding the discussion in scholarship, particularly when it turns to sensitive themes such as the rise of Hindutva. She does not rebut opinions so much as dissolve them by placing them in historical context.

This authority is evident in her critique of colonial interpretations of Indian history. She revisits James Mill, who wrote a history of India without ever visiting the country and framed Hindus and Muslims as two hostile nations. Thapar challenges these inherited narratives by pointing to long-established trading networks and intellectual exchanges, reminding us that Islam had a peaceful presence in India long before invading armies.

Issues of relevance

Several of the later conversations address issues of immediate relevance: Islam’s integration into Indian society, the limits of nationalism, and the need to revise our own historical interpretations. This is especially important today when religious polarisation threatens India’s democracy, secularism and pluralism. Thapar’s approach here recalls Margaret MacMillan’s warning that the past can be used and misused to justify exclusion and violence.

Thapar also demystifies cherished assumptions about early India. On patriarchy, she notes that available evidence suggests enslaved women were treated as property, exchanged as gifts, neither of which is cause for celebration. She questions romantic claims of ancient tolerance, asking why Ashoka would need to plead for non-violence if it was already the norm.

Not all her conclusions are uncontroversial. Her scepticism about the existence of a common Indian identity in early Sanskrit sources invites debate, given how widely the epics circulated among ordinary people. Yet the value lies in her willingness to leave questions open rather than force conclusions.

Speaking of History is less a survey of the past than a demonstration of how to think about it. By identifying what is genuinely worthy of pride in the Hindu past, such as the decimal system, zero, algebra, and geometry, Thapar points out how easily real achievements are displaced by exaggerated or invented claims.

If Thapar is the book’s intellectual conscience, Arora is its necessary foil. His questions, while accessible, frequently carry the freight of contemporary grievance, and it is what draws Thapar out. Where Arora nudges the conversation toward predetermined conclusions, she resists; where he reaches for historical analogy to validate a present-day position, she reframes. The pattern is revealing: each time historical examples are invoked to score a contemporary point, Thapar demonstrates why that move fails: the past is not a quarry from which convenient stones may be extracted, but a complex terrain that resists easy navigation.

In this sense, Arora’s instinct to instrumentalise history, so common among informed lay readers, becomes the book’s most useful device. It gives Thapar’s rigour something to work against, and in doing so, makes the case for serious historical method more vividly than a more scholarly interlocutor might have done.

Bridging the gap

A troubling question nevertheless remains. Romila Thapar is among the most celebrated historians India has produced, yet reputation alone cannot bridge the distance between the seminar room and the public square.

In an age when history is being aggressively weaponised, popular understanding of the past is increasingly shaped by articulate voices whose credentials do not always bear scrutiny. It is they who set the terms of public debate. This book largely addresses readers already inclined to listen. For Thapar’s thinking to matter beyond an admiring audience, it must find ways to travel further without sacrificing the rigour that makes it worth hearing in the first place.

The reviewer is a columnist exploring the intersections of state, society, and history. He taught public policy and contemporary history at IISc, Bengaluru.

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Published on March 29, 2026