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.