Romila Thapar

Indian historian (born 1931)

Person · Open Library

Works: 72

Top works

Somanatha -The Many Voices of a History
Sakuntala Texts,Readings,Histories
Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas
Somanatha
Indien; von den Anfängen bis zum Kolonialismus

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Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Country: GB

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Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 19
Total plays: 40

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Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

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Quotes

“The fundamental sanity in Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.”
“The Hindutva version of the theory became a mechanism for excluding some sections of Indian society, specifically Indian Muslims and Christians, by insisting that they are alien.”
“Secularism is the curtailment of religious control over social institutions, not the absence of religion from society. It is when our primary identity is of equal citizens of the nation, not as belonging to a particular religion or caste. But the Indian definition of secularism is limited to the coexistence of many religions which is incomplete because some religions can still be marginalised as they are.”
“The majority of current politicians are characterised by little, if any, vision of the kind of society they wish to construct, barring those that come with the limited concept of extreme religious nationalism.”
“Intolerance of the views of others and anti-intellectualism are on the rise. In this confrontation, universities and the educational system are, and will continue to be, obvious targets. Education can easily be converted into indoctrination.”
“(The Srauta Sutra of Baudhayana) "refers to the Parasus and the arattas who stayed behind and others who moved eastwards to the middle Ganges valley and the places equivalent such as the Kasi, the Videhas and the Kuru Pancalas, and so on. In fact, when one looks for them, there are evidence for migration.”

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Key facts

Born: ( 1931-11-30 ) 30 November 1931 (age 94) , Lucknow , United Provinces , British India
Occupations: Historian, Writer
Known for: Authoring books about Indian history
Father: Daya Ram Thapar
Relatives: Romesh Thapar (brother), Valmik Thapar (nephew), Pran Nath Thapar (uncle), Karan Thapar (cousin)
Awards: Kluge Prize , 2008.
Alma mater: Panjab University , SOAS University of London ( PhD )
Thesis: Asoka and the decline of the Mauryas
Doctoral advisor: Arthur Llewellyn Basham

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Encyclopedic overview

Romila Thapar (born 30 November 1931) is an Indian historian. Her principal area of study is ancient India, a field in which she is pre-eminent. Thapar is a Professor of Ancient History, Emerita, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Thapar's special contribution is the use of social-historical methods to understand change in the mid-first millennium BCE in northern India. As lineage-based Indo-Aryan pastoral groups moved into the Gangetic Plain, they created rudimentary forms of caste-based states. The epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in her analysis, offer vignettes of how these groups and others negotiated new, more complex, forms of loyalty in which stratification, purity, and exclusion played a greater if still fluid role.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Romila Thapar” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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