Historian Romila Thapar, 96, on Sunday (October 25, 2026) argued that colonial historians fundamentally shaped the way Indian history came to be understood, reducing complex social and political processes to simplified religious narratives that continue to influence historical interpretations today and propagate the Hindutva reading of Indian history.
Delivering the Second Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture on the theme, “Historiography and Early Indian History” , Ms. Thapar said the subject stemmed from a brief conversation she once had with the late CPI(M) leader.
Reflecting on her career as a historian of ancient India, Ms. Tracing the origins of many prevailing ideas about Indian history, Ms. She argued that the tendency to read Indian history primarily through a religious lens was also inherited from colonial scholarship. Referring to the period after the Gupta era, Ms. Thapar noted the abundance of inscriptions documenting governance practices, caste relations and various aspects of social life, providing a richer understanding of the past than reliance on religious texts alone. Ms. She noted that Rana Pratap’s forces included Afghan soldiers, while the Mughal army was led by a Rajput commander. Yet, the battle was now frequently presented as a defining confrontation between a Hindu ruler and a Muslim invader.
Thapar said she had expected a quiet academic life when she entered the profession. “History is playing a public role, which it never did in the past,” she said, noting the growing public contestation over interpretations of the past. Thapar said colonial scholars viewed India through the framework of “Oriental despotism”, portraying Asian societies as static and unchanging and governed by despotic rulers. Had greater attention been paid to physical evidence such as inscriptions, Indian history might have been interpreted differently, she said. “Those writing the history of the colony were writing their own invention,” she said, pointing to British historian James Mill, whom she credited with advancing the idea of India as divided into Hindu and Muslim nations permanently hostile to each other. Thapar said colonial historians oversimplified a wide range of social and political conflicts by presenting them as manifestations of religious antagonism. Such accounts created “mono-causal” explanations that ignored other factors. Citing the Battle of Haldighati, she said the conflict was essentially a territorial contest. In this context, she said the decolonisation of history should depend on the new evidence available, thanks to the advances made in archeology and genetic, instead of building further on the colonial reading of history emphasising on religious fractures.
