Towards interdisciplinarity:

Einstein was a Jew and he fled Nazi Germany to the US; he went on to discover the nuclear bomb and the rest is well known history.

Science does not work in a vacuum; in fact – science evolves and lives within a social context – giving birth to and destroying societies.

If all disciplines became interdisciplinary – we would – be more educated.

For example – how would we theorise about maths being interdisciplinary?

The flow of logic would be thus:

1. map-making allowed for trade routes to be deciphered.

2. what maths was used; trigonometry and geometry. And so - this is where the student will be doing hard-core maths - to actually draw maps.

3. what were the policies of the East India Company. Which countries were they trying to reach?

4. estimate distances; how were the Americas mapped in the early colonial period.

 

 

I would assume that no one has done what I am suggesting; mathematicians will refer to hyperbolic geometry and cartograohy - but 98 % of the paper will be on the former; and you need to give due justice to both.

 

One can argue - would colonization and empire have turned out the way it did without maths?

 

Or for that matter - can you read the modernist movement in arts alongside maths? The impressionists make use of points - pixels - fractals/ you can quantify and measure the art created - using maths. In this particular instance - you are using mathematical concepts to understand art.

 

Why do Indian historians tolerate crappy history?

Why do Indian historians tolerate such crappy works of scholarship?                               

 The Penguin History of Early India. Volume 1: Romila Thapar.

A book like the above – should be thrown away or completely rewritten. Each and every page – has such glaring flaws that they make me cringe as I read the text. It is an impossible task to sift through every paragraph – and underline each sentence with a pencil to question its validity; it would be easier to simply rewrite Indian history.

For the purpose of this analysis, I will focus on two pages and elucidate what I mean.

 Thapar reads the past, based on her assumptions of the present. For example, she has a lengthy analysis of what constitutes peasants (p. 59-61); and I am not sure what to make of it. I quote a few random selections:

1.      Surplus food [as a result of peasant agricultural activity] feeds non producers and therefore, elites, priests, soldiers and traders become viable. …

All of the mentioned above – would have participated in agriculture and supposedly peasant activity; in fact, women were intrinsic to most parts of agricultural activity – except maybe, ploughing.   

2.      Peasants, unlike the earlier categories, were sedentary and permanent occupants of the land they cultivated. …This perhaps made them less autonomous than pastoralists.

Her choice of words – “sedentary and less autonomous” – imbues certain degrading characteristics with a particular kind of labour.  

…

3.      Peasant discontent was expressed most commonly in India through migrating to new lands, and only in the early second millennium AD is there evidence for what some have interpreted as revolts.

This is an example of very bad scholarship as Thapar does not cite data or examples to validate her point.  

…

4.      The last paragraph in this section on “peasants” has a description of how states were formed and it has no connection with the first sentence of the paragraph which begins by talking about peasant society. There is no causality between the first few sentences and the latter part of the paragraph.

 

I have examined two pages and everything that is written in the text– is flawed. This is but symptomatic of the whole book. I actually wonder about the quality of scholarship that is being passed off in academia. The book is rife with factual errors and needs serious editorial work where every sentence needs to be rewritten; it would be better to thrash such books.

Writing Indian History.

What tradition  has Romila Thapar given us? – I am not sure. I am not a historian; and neither am I an academician – and I am no judge. And I am glad I am not a scholar – because it would have been very embarrassing to have had to study Romila Thapar. Everything and most things she has written – are outright badly written pieces of crap (one can also refer to it as shit)– which academia passes off as scholarship. I am still waiting for someone to come out of the closet and own up that Thapar sucks big time as a historian – simply because she makes assumptions and statements that are quite crap-pish.  We should be able to analyse the history of culture and thoughts and belief systems and social changes and locate all of this – within a materialist context; the former cannot be a mere footnote. And the other thing is this: you cannot take broad swipes of the past – like – shove 500 years together – and move on. For example, within a matter of 6 paragraphs – she moves from quantifying the population of India during the time period of Mohenjo-daro to talking about the Mauryan period and then to the Mughals and then to the British era. I am not very sure that is a very sustainable way of doing history; and yet – we call her a historian.

Any 14 year old child will be able to tell that: you don’t really have to be very educated to say the obvious – that Thapar writes history that is problematic.

I was kind of cringing while I read her book; and I also wonder a lot about the publishing houses that print such books and disseminate them to the world. If ever there was a justification to burn down publishing houses and the books they publish – now is the time.