The queen bee of Marxist history writing in India needs to be congratulated for refusing the Padma award. Indeed, she wouldn’t risk accepting the award. For then it would conclusively prove that she is on the Commies’ payrolls favoured list. Now that her mask of being a “scholar” has slipped away, she takes recourse in veiled language, which however, betrays everything. The most recent example is this interview in the Indian Express.

Her response is not surprising, and to say the obvious, predictable. And self-righteous. Her refrain runs as follows: I have been targetted unfairly. What have I done to deserve this? The last question is answered voluminously, the most telling source being Arun Shourie’s book. She asserts her self-righteousness in several ways. For instance:

Also, unfortunately, I think we don?t give enough value to professional awards. Ultimately, recognition lies with one?s peers.The Indian History Congress selected me to the general presidentship a few years ago. To me that was award enough.

The question–in an increasingly politicized world–that is more appropriate is this: who by your definition, constitutes your peers? A person who says “I think people like us, working in fields that are sensitive to notions of nation and society, should keep an independent position,” should think twice. Especially in the light of her “award enough” appointment as the president of ICHR. Sri Nurul Hassan, a fellow Leftist was then the Education Minister. Mere coincidence, I suppose. And she puts her foot in her mouth when she says

The procedures for making these awards need to be gone into a little more systematically. Who sits on these committees? How do they decide? Who is recognised?

That’s how her books get rave reviews from fellow-travellers like Bipan Chandra et al. Why aren’t her/their books reviewed by other (read: genuine) historians? Rather, why aren’t these other historians’ reviews published in the mainstream media? For example, how many people have read about Koenraad Elst’s thorough demolition of Thapar’s fantasy thesis about Harsha of Kashmir? I quote the relevant passage here:

Next to the Pushyamitra fable, the most popular “evidence” for Hindu persecutions of Buddhism is a passage in Kalhana’s history of Kashmir, the Rajatarangini (Taranga 7: 1089 ff.), where king Harsha is accused of looting and desecrating temples. This example is given by JNU emeritus professor of ancient history, Romila Thapar, in Romila Thapar et al.: Communalism in the Writing of Indian History, p.15-16, and now again in her letter to Mr. Manish Tayal (UK), 7-2-1999. The latter letter was written in reply to Mr. Tayal’s query on Arun Shourie’s revelations on the financial malversations and scholarly manipulations of a group of historians, mainly from JNU and AMU…Note, at any rate, Romila Thapar’s total reliance on arguments of authority and status. No less than seven times does she denounce Shourie’s alleged (and unproven) incompetence: Shourie has “not the faintest idea”, is “unaware”, “untrained”, and “does not know”, and what he does is “laughable”, “a joke”, “garbage”. But what exactly is wrong in his writing, we are not allowed to know. If history is now a professional discipline, one couldn’t deduce it from this letter of hers, for its line of argument is part snobbish and part medieval (relying on formal authority), but quite bereft of the scientific approach.

Digression: Notice the words, which Elst has put in quotes? What does it remind you of? The Leninist technique of “sticking the convict’s badge?”

Then Thapar treads on familiar ground: her “views” on Indian identity. She has (thankfully) retained her position.

No one is denying the identity of the Indian past. 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 more relevance to understanding the Indian identity than the obsession with just the Vedas and the Hindu identity.

And this is the key to her position. The “way to look at the past,” the process of “identity-formation” is all given by The Theory. Everything else is either untrue or in her words, “an obsession with the Vedas.” For one whose expertise is in ancient Indian studies, Thapar’s lack of first hand knowledge of Sanskrit is amazing if not unpardonable. Majority of what we call the “priceless Indian heritage” resides in the Vedas. The seeds/ideas contained here were later expanded by scholars, poets, and kings alike. But this technique is definitely something Romila is at home with. Dismiss as irrelevant, the facts which don’t suit your ideology and/or are beyond your comprehension.

And then she comes up with a blatant lie:

(Interviewer) That is another allegation. That you refuse to look at the Vedas and 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. They keep reverting to Vivekananda and Aurobindo and people like that.

As I said earlier, one of the main criticisms levelled against Thapar is that she has no first hand knowledge of Sanskrit. Now our lady turns tables by saying the charge is an “absurdity.” This is clear when you read this a rather longish passage I have reproduced:

Thapar claims that the Aryans were curious about the elephant and called it mriga hastin, the animal with one hand [...]Why not? After all, the Aryans invaded India from outside, and the elephant, an Indian animal, should have been new to them. Naturally, this should mean that the Dravidians, who Thapar implies were the earlier residents of IVC/SSC, must have been more familiar with the elephant ahead of the Aryans, right? Thapar has repeated this claim about the elephant having been a novelty to the Aryans earlier too.The Dravidian family of languages is largely confined to Peninsular India. Among them, Tamil has the oldest extant corpus of literature, the Sangam anthologies. These are basically collections of bardic poetries dating from 100 – 250 AD. Sangam literature speaks of Tirupati as the northern boundary of the Tamil country, beyond which was spoken a language other than Tamil. Another Sangam poem talks of the Pandyas fighting their wars deploying the elephants raised in Tirupati. Yet another Sangam song talks of the elephants that were trained in Tirupati. One may ask, while all these references establish that the elephant was trained in, and probably resided too, in the region that was either at the northern most part of the Tamil country or beyond that, how all of this would prove whether or not the Dravidians were ahead of the Aryans in domesticating the elephant. We have references from three more Sangam poems that pronounce the judgment. One of them talks of ?the great male elephant trained by the Aryans with the help of a cow elephant.? Another says that ?the mahouts trained the elephants using Sanskrit. [...] If the Dravidians were the first to have tamed the wild elephant, then there is no need for the Sangam works to talk of the Northern Aryans as its trainers and tamers. Not only that, the oldest Tamil records also speak of having used Sanskrit, and not Tamil, to train them. This only means that the Dravidians learnt the art of domestication of the wild elephant from the Aryans. The last of the references above, which talks of training the elephant with a mixed tongue, suggests that a transition regarding the domestication and the training of the wild elephant was happening between the Aryans, the original domesticators and the Dravidians, who received that art from them. Or, would Thapar like her readers to believe that the Dravidians had somehow forgotten the art of domestication of the elephant, and a 1500 years later, re-learnt it from the Aryans? [...] Those familiar with Tamil as well as Sanskrit can see on what pathetic scholarship Thapar’s argument[78] regards mriga hastin is concocted. The Tamil word for the elephant’s trunk is puzhaikkai, as in literary Tamil or tumpikkai, as in the colloquial. This means, freely translated, tubular hand. Would Thapar argue that the elephants were unknown to the Dravidians as well, as they didn’t have a generic name for its most distinctive part? In any case, it is worth noting that the Rig Veda uses atleast 3 generic terms to refer to the elephant: varana, srni and ibha

[...]

Did the word asva necessarily always mean the horse in the Rig Veda? Sri Aurobindo convincingly argues that the words go and asva are constantly associated in the Vedas, as in gomati or asvavati. So, they can?t refer merely to the physical steed. Instead, he says, that they symbolically refer to light and energy respectively… It is also worth mentioning that the Rig Veda itself explicitly states that its words are metaphors and not literal.

Asva: In the Vedas, the Sun is visualized as being driven by a fleet of seven horses as in the sloka, Saptaasva Rathinam. The reason is not far to seek. Horse is generally associated with speed, vigour, and energy.
Go: The word Go has tens of meanings and one of them is light.

This is why I agree that Thapar lacks first hand knowledge of Sanskrit. If she had mastered the Amarakosha (the Sanskrit dictionary/thesaurus), she’d have probably avoided getting caught making these elementary semantic mistakes. Or she perhaps knows Amarakosha, as she herself claims, and yet makes these mistakes?

And it is interesting to note the tone in which she refers to Vivekananda and Aurobindo and “people like that.” The rest of her responses contain more invectives potshots about “backward looking,” “unscientifc,” “old methods.” And the self-righteousness?

I was startled by the fact that I was the icon of hatred. I kept asking myself what I had done to deserve this. But I was absolutely overwhelmed by the kind of support I got.

You spin fantasies and call it history, this is what you get. I stand corrected. It isn’t fantasy. Many of her “scholarly” books contain abuse against the BJP! A mention of the BJP in “history” books about ancient India! Not to forget her active pamphleteering in the Ayodhya dispute. And our lady claims that the Marxists deny that she is on their side, so to speak. That doesn’t explain the fact that passages from her scholarly treatises are quoted in support of this or that assertion that they make in say, www.countercurrents.org or www.cpim.org. This statement also presents a logical problem. One, you don’t have to be a “party member” to be called Marxist. And two, even if the Marxists don’t admit that you are a Marxist historian, it doesn’t obliterate the fact that you’ve depicted Indian history in terms of class conflict, which is one of the pillars of Marx’s theory.

The real danger perhaps is not that Thapar is a Marxist historian. It is when you give cognizance to a fraud like Thapar by calling her a historian.

Postscript: And don’t forget to read the comments the interview has received.