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Namit Arora and Romila Thapar, "Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present" (India Allen Lane, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
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C
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. What does it mean to be a historian? How do you try to explain the past when sources are lacking? And how do we talk about history when it's so politicized? And in the new book, speaking of conversations about India's past and present, Namit Arora and Ramla Thapar discuss some of the challenges facing historians in India today, what it means to be an academic historian, and how ideas around gender, caste and religion may be getting distorted in India's public history. Namit joins us on the show today. He is a writer, social critic, and the author of three books including A Brief History of Civilization and the Lottery of Birth Trained in science and technology, he has spent over three decades educating himself in the humanities, history, and other social sciences.
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D
So, Namit, welcome back to the Asian Review Books podcast. You were on a couple years ago, kind of talked about your book Indians, about the early history of India, and you're back now to talk about your next book, which you kind of did with Romula Thakur. Speaking of history, you know, I was reading this book and it's quite an interesting format. You know, it's a series of kind of long conversations between you and Ramila, kind of about the historical method, about Indian history, you know, kind of throughout its whole history, how people should think about history. You know, what was the inspiration behind this book and why did you want to frame it around a series of conversations rather than, you know, something a bit more like normal prose?
- [03:16]
E
Yeah. Well, first, thank you, Nicholas, for inviting me back on your podcast. The idea for this book grew out of a conversation Professor Thapar and I had about two years ago. We were discussing why history has become so controversial in India, and we initially thought of unpacking the reasons in maybe an article or two. We chose the conversational format because it felt more accessible and inviting for general readers. But as we got going, we started having fun and the conversation naturally expanded to cover a much wider range of themes and questions, turning into a book length exploration.
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D
So I guess they're going to start things off. I mean, what do you see as some of the problems facing history in India today? You know, whether in a, in a public facing form, you know, public history, or in its academic form, you know, how it's talked about in, among academic historians and in universities, kind of. But what do you see as some of the biggest problems facing the conversation about history in India today?
- [04:25]
E
Yeah, I think the problems facing history in India lie mostly in its public facing form, not in academic scholarship. So let's look at the academic side first. So today there are literally thousands of historians working on Indian history across hundreds of institutions in India and around the world. They represent a wide range of social backgrounds and historiographical traditions, such as Marxist, nationalist, post colonial, subaltern, feminist, Ambedkarite, and many others. These scholars often begin with novel questions, and sometimes they arrive at different interpretations. But what unites them is a shared commitment to the historical method, which is a found, which is just foundational to the discipline. That method involves carefully examining all relevant sources, such as texts or inscriptions, assessing their authenticity, reliability, and the context of their creators. Historians also draw on insights from allied fields like linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, Economics, ecology, genetics. More importantly, academic historians are trained to ground their interpretations in evidence and reasoned argument, and to revise their conclusions when new evidence emerges or better explanations are offered. So yes, disagreements exist among them, but that's not a flaw. It's how historical knowledge advances. In fact, multiple evidence based interpretations deepen our understanding rather than undermine it. So in that sense, there's nothing specially controversial or problematic about academic history in India. It functions much like academic history anywhere else in the world. I think the real problems with history in India like lie in the public facing space rather than in academic scholarship. That space is full of intensely polarized debates about the past, in which ideas that differ sharply from established research are deliberately invented or kept alive. And this isn't the sort of normal gap one often sees between academic history and popular understanding. Elsewhere in India, we're dealing with entirely opposed narratives, with each side claiming exclusive ownership of the true past. So let me give you an example. Based on evidence from linguistics, archeology and now genetics, scholars across the world are virtually unanimous today that Indo Aryan languages and cultures arrived in the subcontinent through migrations from Central Asia. Yet in popular discourse, the opposite claim, that Indo Aryans, Sanskrit and the Vedic gods are indigenous to India. This continues to circulate widely, despite the fact that there is no credible evidence supporting it. Now, what makes this especially troubling is the hostility directed at academic historians who try to correct such distortions in the public sphere. They face abuse and intimidation. Women scholars in particular face sexualized harassment online. Clearly, the past provokes very strong emotions in India. But it's worth noting that this hostility almost always comes from people with no training in history. And it is largely led by currents associated with Hindu nationalism and the ideology of Hindutva. I'm not making this up. It's a plainly visible and consistent pattern. And the methods they use are also telling. Facts are invented or selectively read. Myths are blurred into history. Interdisciplinary evidence is frequently ignored, arguments lack rigor, and serious critiques are dismissed rather than engaged with. None of this resembles how professional historians actually work. It in fact undermines the historical method itself. And alongside this, a cluster of conspiracy theories has taken hold in the public sphere. That a shadowy cabal of Marxist historians controls academia, that scholars have betrayed the nation or denigrated Hindu culture, or that the Indo Islamic period has been deliberately whitewashed. Many popular history writers today actively promote these claims, which has created enormous confusion about what history is, how it is written, and how we should argue about the past. So, in short, organized Hindutva disinformation in the public space. In the public space actively supported by the Indian political regime is what plagues history in India today.
- [10:04]
D
And I guess not to just kind of put this forward as a solely kind of Indian tension. I mean, this is a problem across kind of many different cultures and societies, of course, where there is this kind of gap between what public history says or public history puts forward and kind of what the truth of the matter is, or at least what we kind of believe to be the truth of the matter is kind of talked about through academic history.
- [10:30]
E
Yes, I agree with that. There are these gaps. In some places it's a lot more, in some places a lot less. Yeah, I think in India, what I see is the extreme nature of it, and the popular narratives are often entirely opposed. And I hope we can get to. We'll talk about some of those examples of how extreme some of this polarization is.
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D
You know, I do kind of want to. Want to return to this idea, but before we get into it, I mean, the book does start off by talking about the historic method or the methods that historians use to kind of think about claims, test those claims. I mean, it's not. It's obviously different from the scientific method, but in your view, I mean, how does a historian kind of approach these unanswered or not fully answered questions?
- [11:23]
E
Yeah, I think what really we are speaking about is how historians, what is their mission? What should they be doing? In some ways, so I see their task really is broadly similar to that of other producers of knowledge, with two central dimensions to it, an academic one and a public one. You know, on the academic side, I think historians need to help us understand how societies change over time, how institutions and ideas emerge, how power operates, how people in the past made sense of their own worlds, often in ways very different from ours. That requires asking good questions, weighing all the evidence, testing interpretations against sources and logic, and being willing to revise conclusions when better evidence or arguments come along. After all, that commitment to method is what history. What makes history a discipline rather than a collection of just so stories. But, you know, historical knowledge also needs to go beyond the academy and be widely and effectively disseminated to the public. Too many historians today focus narrowly on their research, career goals and speaking to other specialists. And there is a cautionary parallel here, I think, with the ancient university at Nalanda, which I wrote about in Indians. In the earlier centuries of Buddhism, its monks used to live close to lay communities and maintained daily interactions with them, offering guidance and services in exchange for a variety of support over time, as monasteries like Nalanda became economically self sufficient through royal land grants, those ties weakened and their monks withdrew into walled courtyards, focused on their academic quests, and lost touch with the public they were meant to serve. Not surprisingly, the public returned the favor and the institution's long term viability suffered. The lesson, I think, is about what happens when knowledge producers lose sight of their broader social role. And in India, this public responsibility is especially acute. The past here is intensely politicized. It is in other places too, as you said. But here historical claims are used to legitimize present day ideologies, exclusions and grievances in an extreme way. In such a context, historians have to do more than produce careful work for fellow scholars. They also have to defend the historical method itself. They need to draw clear lines between evidence and belief, myth and history, argument and mere assertion. And that doesn't mean becoming political activists, but it does mean speaking up in public forums according to their comfort when the past is willfully distorted or when serious scholarship is misrepresented. And then, I think equally important is to help make historical knowledge accessible beyond classrooms through public lectures, podcasts, essays, reviews of popular history books, or thoughtful commentary on films and TV series that have this huge hold on the imagination. Supporting public history initiatives, from exhibitions to documentaries to curating museums, is part of this work too. If historians retreat entirely into academic silos, they leave the public sphere open to distortion. And taking public history seriously is, I think, part of a basic civic virtue in India today. It's essential to the health of both the discipline and that of the Indian Republic. And so that's what I would say about that.
- [15:54]
D
So I kind of want to talk about some of these distortions that you think we have in the current conversation about Indian politics. And, you know, whether that's around religion, whether that's around caste, whether that's around kind of where some of these Indian kind of linguistic or cultural traits came from. But like, what do you see as some of the biggest distortions in, in Indian public history today?
- [16:20]
E
Yeah, you know, I see a whole lot of distortions of India's past in the, in the public sphere today. And most of them are closely tied to, to Hindu nationalist politics. These groups need a particular version of history to legitimize claims they are making in the present. So certain ideas get endlessly repeated even when they don't hold up to evidence. You know, one major distortion to begin with concerns the origins of the Indo Aryans. Were they indigenous to the subcontinent or did they migrate in from Central Asia. This question matters because it's tied to the origins of Sanskrit, the early Vedas, Vedic gods, fire rituals, oral chants, reverence for the cow, basically many elements that are now seen as foundations of Hindu religion and identity. If these roots lie outside the subcontinent, it complicates claims about an exclusively indigenous Hindu civilization. And that's why Hindu nationalists strongly resist the migration model, despite the overwhelming evidence supporting it. A second distortion is the idea of an ancient Hindu golden age. In this telling, early India is imagined as a harmonious, prosperous civilization centered on noble Rishis and the Vedas, which are treated as timeless sacred texts and even as repositories of advanced scientific knowledge, sometimes with exaggerated or outright false claims about modern validation by agencies like NASA. Scholars, by contrast, see ancient India as deeply diverse, with multiple belief systems and cultural streams. They treat the Vedas as historical texts composed by specific communities whose traditions evolved through interaction with many others. Indian culture, in this view, has much deeper and broader roots than the Vedas alone. The third distortion I would propose suggest is involves the Indo Muslim period. Historians see this era as complex, marked by an influx of people and conflict, yes, but also by peaceful coexistence, collaboration and rich forms of cultural mixing. Hindu nationalist narratives flatten this complexity into a story of relentless Hindu victimhood. Temple destructions, forced conversions, and they issue slogans like a thousand years of slavery. That framing simply doesn't match the historical record. I would say a fourth area of distortion is around caste and patriarchy. Scholars see both as central, long standing structures that shaped Indian society and must be examined critically. Hindu nationalist accounts tend to minimize their oppressive dimensions, sometimes portraying caste as a benign or mostly based on merit. And early Indian women of the upper caste are significantly empowered is another claim. This runs counter to what the sources actually show. Finally, I think the fifth distortion is around something I would call timelessness. Historians see Indian civilization as constantly changing politically, socially, economically and religiously. Hindu nationalist thought, however, presents it as an unchanging civilization rooted in an eternal Hindu essence, often expressed through the idea of Sanatana Dharma, or Sanatana means eternal. From a historical perspective, no religion is truly timeless. That's very clear. What we call Hinduism has undergone profound transformations over the centuries, and those changes are now very well documented. There are many other examples, but I hope this gives you a good sense of how and why history gets distorted and why historians keep pushing back so strongly against these narratives.
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D
You know, I remember when you canoed when you came on the show earlier, going to talk about your. Your last book, which was kind of about the, the early. The, the early. The early, yeah, Indians. A Brief History of Civilization, kind of, kind of the very early history of India. And I kind of have a, have a couple questions based off that. I mean, first, you know, to kind of return to that. I mean, you talk about the historical method and sources and all that, but I mean, how much do we really know about India's very early history? And you know, how does the sources or perhaps the lack of sources kind of affect the way we talk about it? And then kind of building off of that, I mean, how do you see this book, you know, speaking of history, connecting to the work you did for Indians?
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E
Ah, okay, yeah, multiple questions. Let me try and tackle the first part, which is the what do we know about the very early history of India? So very early. I mean, I would say that I'll go back quite a bit. So I would say that humans have of course, been in the Indian subcontinent for over 50,000 years, ever since they migrated there from Africa. For most of that very long span, people lived as hunter gatherers, they were nomadic, followed food sources and owned very little because anything you owned had to be carried. So it's not surprising that we are left with relatively few artifacts from that period. Things change once people begin to settle down, take up agriculture and develop more complex social lives. With occupational specialization, craft production, writing, social hierarchies. That's when we start seeing many more material traces. This really comes into focus with the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization, India's first urban civilization, beginning around 3,000 BCE. Over the past century or so, archaeologists have studied dozens of Harappan sites of different sizes, looking at everything from housing and burials to art, jewelry, crops, diet and long distance trade. That work has given us a remarkably vivid picture of early urban life in India. But it's still very incomplete. Many aspects remained speculative, especially around religion and social or political organization. And I think even if the Harappan script is someday deciphered, our understanding of that distant past will still remain quite partial. And after the decline of the Harappan world around 1900 BCE, the next period where our evidence really thickens is the first millennium bce Especially from the Gangetic Valley in the north and the Vaigai Valley in the south, we get more deciphered texts alongside archaeology. By combining evidence from comparative archaeology, you know, in other parts of Central Asia and so on, linguistics, genetics and several other fields, historians today can speak with much greater confidence about early migrations, the spread of languages and ideas, the formation of early states and the evolution of social and knowledge systems. It's really the point you raised is really true. Now, history is always limited by the sources we have, and India is no different. There is a shortage of sources for the early past. But these sources have been expanding and new scientific methods allow us to extract far more information from them than before. Some examples of earlier carbon dating, now genetics. There's a whole bunch of archaeomagnetic dating and many other types of techniques which can extract more information from artifacts of the past. And good historians are very conscious of these limits and they often humbly say what they do not know. They treat their interpretations as provisional, tied to available evidence, and they resist bending the past to serve present day ideological or political agendas.
- [25:33]
D
I want to move to talking about the colonial period and how, you know, India's colonial history affects the way we talk about India's history today. You know, whether it's because. You could say whether it's because during the colonial period only certain forms of sources were written. Let's say sources written from a particular British perspective or in how we talk about history 86 today, in which it's a reaction to things that people things that happened during the colonial era. But how do you see kind of India's colonial history affecting the history conversation today?
- [26:09]
E
Yeah, that's very interesting. I think India's colonial period is indeed when the past was first studied in a systematic, empirical way. And yes, that work was initially done by Europeans. But this early scholarship had its problems, some of which you hinted at. It was based on first a relatively few textual sources and archeological finds. And it was shaped by some strong Eurocentric assumptions and uncritical reliance on Brahminical texts which they had access to. And of course, the asymmetries of colonial power. Some of the earliest first drafts of Indian history were written by people like James Mill, who famously wrote a very influential history of India without ever visiting the country. Many of the ideas introduced in this phase became deeply entrenched, and later historians have had to push back against them with mixed success. 2. I would cite two ideas that have been particularly consequential. One was the religious periodization of Indian history, dividing it artificially into Hindu and Islamic periods, and the related claim that these religious communities functioned as distinct nations locked in perpetual conflict. I think the Europeans brought their own understanding of Islam from their prior history in Europe to bear on the Indian situation, which was very different. Later Indian historians rejected this framing for good reasons. But the broader logic of the two nation theory survived with devastating consequences. And it continues to underpin Hindutva ideology today. The consequences include, of course, the partition of the subcontinent. The second idea emerged after William Jones identified linguistic connections between Sanskrit and other Indo European languages. The idea of an Indo Aryan migration into India, now well supported by evidence, first took shape in the early 19th century. Some other colonial thinkers, including the Theosophists, argued for an indigenous origin of the Indo Aryans. What was problematic and common to both, however, was, was the move to trace Indian culture and religion almost entirely to the Vedas and to Indo Aryan language and traditions, sidelining a vast range of other cultural streams. Brahminical texts were read as if they represented society as a whole rather than the worldview of a small elite. Today we know that Indian culture was shaped just as profoundly by Harappan and other regional traditions. But the belief that the Vedas alone constitute the origin of Indian civilization remains surprisingly resilient in India today, especially among Indian elites and within the Hindutva ecosystem. That said, I would also concede clearly is that colonial scholarship wasn't simply destructive. It also opened up large parts of India's buried past through archaeology, epigraphy, philology, decipherments and new methods of historical inquiry. These invaluable tools were later taken up and refined by Indian and non Indian scholars alike. So the colonial legacy in history writing in India is a mixed one, Deeply flawed in its interpretations, or at least many of its interpretations, but also foundational in the methods it introduced.
- [30:25]
D
So I, I want to kind of wrap up this conversation, kind of returning to this idea of how kind of history should be, should be used in the present day, you know, and, and I want to start by kind of again with history and politics. I mean, I mean, politics will always kind of rely on history. History is kind of inevitably linked to politics. That's not always a bad thing. I mean, you know, having, having kind of a national story isn't potentially like, could potentially be quite helpful for a country, helpful for its politics, assuming it's all done for beneficial purposes, of course. But how do you see this relationship between politics and history in India? I guess India needs a story for itself, but how do you ensure that it's rooted in something that's accurate, that it's not divisive or distorting? And how do you keep the space open for, for challenges to that story, for problematizing it or investigating it or whatever?
- [31:25]
E
Yeah, that's really true. History and politics are inevitably intersect, especially in the context of nationalism. All nations need a certain story of their past and origins and so on. Ideas about the past shape how we see ourselves in the present and imagine our future. So in that sense, the use of history or of any other kind of knowledge in politics is not inherently problematic. As you said, what matters is how history is used. At its best, history can inform public debate by offering evidence based perspectives. I think the problem arises when history is treated not as a field of inquiry, but as a quarry for political ammunition. This problem is especially acute in India. Selective readings of the past are often mobilized to legitimize present day identities and exclusions. Evidence is cherry picked and myths are passed off as facts. In such cases, politics isn't just using history, it's actively undermining the historical method itself. So what do we do about this? And it's a challenging problem. And I think a useful way to think about the relationship between politics and history, including in the Indian context, is to insist on a division of labor. Politics will inevitably use history, but historians at least must not bend their methods to suit political ends. Their responsibilities to uphold evidence, context and complexity in history, even when the conclusions are uncomfortable or unpopular, and a mature political culture, should India ever have one, should be able to engage with such history without demanding that it legitimize its ends.
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D
You know, one, one more question and maybe, maybe as part of your answer, you could explain if you see yourself as an academic historian or a public historian or both. You know, the other part of being a public historian, of course, is that like, like it's a market, right? I mean, you have, you have to make a living, you have to sell books, you have to, you have to, you have to work for a public audience that is interested in certain things, but still make sure that they, you know, learn something, something useful out of it. I note this because, like what, I mean, how many airport bookstores in the US are filled with World War II history books and biographies of US presidents? Because that's what sells. But, but how do you, but when it comes to kind of the, the public part of the public history, in terms of, you know, persuading, like informing the public, you know, conveying information to the public, being aware of what they want, but not kind of beholden to it, the business of being a public historian, I mean, how do you see that side of this conversation kind of coming together? Yeah.
- [34:34]
E
Okay, so my primary identity is that of a writer who also does public history. A writer who's trying to understand his world. And part of that requires understanding history and talking about it in ways that are accessible. So I do public history. And in that context I could be called a public historian. Clearly. And I acknowledge that there are market pressures that others may succumb to and they may want to produce work that sells and so on and so forth. And you can't stop them from anybody from doing that. It's their choice. But I think what one hopes is that we would create a culture whereby we demand high standards of our public history and public historians. And this is something that is not currently we don't make this demand in India. And so our public spaces are filled with people who have not familiarized themselves with academic history, not engaged with it, that, you know, don't follow the historical method. They blur the lines between myth and history. So and the public out there and the, you know, the quality of education in our schools and the long disregard for the social sciences and the humanities has meant that, you know, most of our, even our professionals, engineers, doctors, lawyers, such folks, they come out of, they, they come out and they have no basis for separating myth from history. And they then become sitting ducks for, you know, the pro, the kinds of propaganda that is now in the public space. And so these are just some problems. I think public people can do whatever public history, but we need to demand as consumers, as discerning people, we need to demand higher standards and critique bad public history in public life.
- [36:48]
D
I think with that, that's a great place to end our conversation with Namit Arora, who is the author of Speaking of Conversations about India's Past and Present with fellow historian Romola Thapur. Namit, I actually have two final questions for you which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work and what's next for you? What do you think the next book project might be?
- [37:13]
E
I am hoping to soon resume work on a long brewing book project that will explore a few strands of India's journey from the pre modern to the modern era. I'm still working on the shape and the architecture of this book, so it's a bit premature. Shubh, talk more about it right now. But wish me luck.
- [37:36]
D
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asiareviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter @BookReviews Asia, that's reviews plural. And you can find many more author interviews at the New books network@newbooksnowberg.com we're on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts. Spotify. Rate us, Recommend us share us with your friends to support us interviewing those writing in around and about Asia. Next week, join us for an interview with Yosef Rappaport, author of Becoming the Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East. But before then, Namit, thank you so much for coming on the show again.
- [38:17]
E
Thanks for having me, Nicholas.