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Literary Review
Monumental history
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In Early India, Romila Thapar attempts the grand sweep, reconciling diverse trends and adjudicating between rival positions. SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM, though appreciative of the balanced tone, would have preferred some fireworks thrown in too.
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A CERTAIN Indian social scientist living in New York, who shall naturally remain unnamed here, is believed to have boasted to his colleagues that he was "like the Taj Mahal — everyone who visits the city has to come and see me." Romila Thapar, who is today a very young 72 and rather more modest than the person mentioned above, is a monument of sorts too in the Indian historiography, though the appropriate comparison may be to the Jantar Mantar rather than to the Taj Mahal. By this I mean that with her work, the emphasis is on utility rather than pure aesthetic appeal, even though a certain residual enigmatic quality remains. And to push the metaphor to its conclusion, like that monument located on Sansad Marg, she has managed to be both centrally located and to maintain a distance from the Connaught Place hurly-burly of the Indian history establishment.
Romila Thapar's reputation does not rest on a single work, but on the capacity to have adapted herself decade after decade to changing trends and tendencies, and to have continued nevertheless to produce work of a consistent quality. Most Indian historians of her generation either were one-monograph wonders (effectively the case of the demi-god of medievalists, Professor Irfan Habib), incapable of mounting a fresh project once their doctoral thesis was done; or otherwise they were specialists of the "one-note samba", producing fresh books on Indian feudalism every two years which effectively said the same thing again, again and still again. Romila Thapar on the other hand has moved from her early work on the Mauryas, to a general consideration of early state-formation that is much influenced by the marriage of Marxism and structuralism, to reflections on the epics, historiography and a host of other subjects. In this vast output, an early book does stand out: this is her History of India, first published by Penguin in 1966, and which has been used since in countless classrooms by numberless students. Written when the author was in her early thirties, the book is a prime example of chutzpah, and what is remarkable is that it easily upstaged the second volume of that same series, written by the "senior scholar" Percival Spear. The work under review here is a much revised version of the same text, written some four decades later, and has expanded from about 350 pages to over 550 pages in the newer version.
The work is organised as 13 chapters, which — after an introductory set of two, on historiography and on "landscapes and peoples" — follow a broadly chronological trend, although there is occasionally a shift to a more thematic organisation (as in Chapters 11 to 13, all of which deal with the centuries from about 800 to 1300). Political history in the sense of state-formation continues to dominate as a theme, but this is of course no mere dynastic history. Rather the emphasis is solidly on questions of socio-political history, and the interaction between state and society; questions of trade and agrarian economy are of course present, though cultural themes do lag noticeably behind and are often treated as appendages of social history. In each chapter, the evidence from secondary literature is carefully weighed, and a mix of the author's own prose and citations from the primary sources serves to give the reader a sense of the "style" of each epoch. Obviously, the author is more comfortable with certain periods than others, and the discomfort is clear when we move from the middle chapters (which are certainly the strongest) to either the early ones or the later ones. The problem though is that every reviewer will have his or her axe to grind. Early historians will find archaeology underplayed, while historians of the Delhi Sultanate will find that their period is treated in a somewhat schematic fashion. But this is really neither here nor there. The real question is how this work compares with others of a similar scope and ambition.
Here, only two serious rival candidates exist, namely Kulke and Rothermund's work, and the posthumously published History of India by Burton Stein. The former does possess some notable virtues in its first half, namely a closer attention to sources and to the nitty-gritty of history. On the other hand, it is also rather weak on the later centuries of the first millennium of the Christian era. Stein's work takes a somewhat different tack, by assuming the explicit burden of a schematic argument, which Romila Thapar largely eschews. She attempts the grand sweep which also reconciles diverse trends, and attempts to adjudicate between rival positions. Those who like their history written in a sober and balanced tone will hence much prefer her volume, though it is a sad commentary on the popular perception of ancient Indian history today that even this even-handed work will be tarred by some as being "sectarian". My own chief complaint against the work is quite different: namely, that there are not enough fireworks in it. We have had an "Aligarh School", a "Cambridge School", an "Allahabad School" and even a "JNU School" in Indian history. I am inclined, especially for the southern readers of The Hindu, to suggest that it is high time to promote the existence of a "Sivakasi School".
Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, Romila Thapar, London, Allen Lane, 2002, p. xxx + 556, £30, Indian Price £8.75.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor of Indian History and Culture in the University of Oxford.
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
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