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.