Religious nationalism underlines the exclusiveness of one religion, culture, language, and such like

Interview with the historian Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University. By RANABIR CHAKRAVARTI
Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is one of the most celebrated historians of India, internationally acclaimed particularly for her immense contribution to the interpretative studies of early India. Her untiring efforts have largely enabled the shift of the study from what is known as Indology to early Indian History with a strong orientation to social sciences. Her untiring engagement with the study of the history of this subcontinent are marked by interrogating and interpreting the past, not merely on empirical richness, but by integrating the study of ancient history with several social and human sciences such as sociology, social and cultural anthropology, geography and political science.
The result has been the transformation of the study of ancient/early India from dynastic detail and dates to introspective readings of the past. In these ventures she repeatedly reminds us of the changing patterns of historiography and analyses the questions raised by historians, their methodologies of and approaches to the study of the past, which, as she rightly points out, is intimately linked up with the present. She has unravelled how a particular enquiry of the past has a bearing on the current social, cultural and political situation.
Professor Thapar obtained her PhD (1958) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, under the supervision of Professor A.L. Basham.
Her thesis on the Mauryan period came out subsequently as her famous book, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, in which she situated Asoka and the Maurya rule in the context of the socio-economic, political and cultural milieu of the period on the basis of a critical reading of primary sources. This work left lasting impacts on early Indian historiography.
Professor Thapar’s major contribution to the study of early Indian social history is writ large in many of her works, notably Ancient Indian Social History and Interpreting Early India. From the 1980s, Professor Thapar’s enduring interest in the study of the early state (From Lineage to State, The Mauryas Revisited) opened up new areas of historical research.
In these works, she offered new insights into the history of state formation in early India by highlighting the complex sociopolitical and ideological factors in the making of a state society. Though Professor Thapar’s principal interest lies in the social history of early India, she has also written extensively on the economic history (on forests, professional guild-like bodies, and trade).
In recent decades, her growing interests in cultural history (however, not cultural studies, following the current trend in postmodern and postcolonial studies) will be evident from her Sakuntala and Somanatha : Many Voices of a History. Another area of her pioneering work is the study of the Itihasa-Purana tradition vis-a-vis the modern discipline of history. She has ably contested the archetypical Eurocentric notion that early India lacked a sense of history and critically analysed the notions of cyclical time and linear time.
Among the most read of her works is Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, a magisterial overview of early Indian history. This book is actually an elaboration of her earlier book, History of India, Vol. I. The modifications, elaborations and additions (which she elegantly described as “autobiographical”) she incorporated in this later book amply demonstrate her keenness to accommodate new data, new interpretative models and fresh perspectives.
In that sense, Professor Thapar is ever alert and ready to revise her position. This highlights her firm commitment to her subject and demonstrates that a historian may also change—a point that shows the liveliness of the subject called History. An indefatigable and outspoken critique of the obscurantist, chauvinist and communal interpretations of the past, Professor Thapar has been awarded many academic honours in India and abroad, including the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the field of History (2005).
Professor Thapar was elected the General President of the Indian History Congress (1983). She is the recipient of the Honorary Fellowships of the School of Oriental and African Studies (London) and Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford University). In this interview, Professor Thapar discusses at length how the past—remote and/or recent—is intimately connected with the present. How and to what extent the situations in the present influence and determine the choice of the study of a certain phase of the past also figure prominently. Her statements are likely to create greater awareness of and sensitivity to the study of the past, which, like many other disciplines, stands on professional expertise and rigour and is vastly different from amateurish forays into history. She categorically warns against attempts at homogenisation of the past in the name of cultural nationalism and unequivocally stresses the sustained pluralist traditions in India. The interview has brought out her repeated encouragement of raising new questions to understand the past with a view to developing a comprehensive appreciation of the present.
Ranabir Chakravarti: When one reads your latest book, The Past as Present, one gets an impression that you are a little sad about the state of the study of history, and the general perception of history, in India. You don’t sound very optimistic about it. You are not pessimistic either—that you wrote very clearly. Could you elaborate on the scenario?
“ We are still using a completely outdated understanding of history and methods of teaching it. The emphasis is on dates and events.”
Romila Thapar: Your question is about where history has gone in the last few decades in India. Let me say that there are two levels on which history is being read and studied or being spoken about. One is the level of the scholarship of academic historians where I think that the kind of history being written is impressive, at least among those historians who work at the better universities and colleges. When I consider how history was taught fifty years ago, and the kinds of struggles that we had in those days to give a new direction to historical writing, and the kind of direction that is now being taken, it is in fact an impressive change.
I am pleased with the way things have gone, although admittedly the change is not universal in the universities and most have still not caught up with history as it is taught in the best centres. Nevertheless, there are a number of historians who not only treat history as a social science but also recognise its intellectual foundations. And this approach, one hopes, will spread.
However, my feeling about the other way in which history is being projected is actually the opposite. This is with reference to the popular history with which the general public is familiar. This suffers from its being either out-of-date history of the kind taught more than a century ago, or not history at all.
Often pointless questions are asked, and all kinds of generalised statements are made about the past, generally reflecting a lack of knowledge about history. This history in the public sphere, propagated by people who are not professional historians, has much to do with the way history is taught in school and even college. We are still using a completely outdated understanding of history and methods of teaching it. The emphasis is on dates and events and treating history as just a body of information that has to be memorised. As somebody said, looking at the notes given to students, they are like a telephone directory with a list of numbers on one side and a list of people on the other.
THE HISTORICAL METHOD
What is sad is that people still think that history is only information about the past. This attitude is now seen as being too limited when doing research into history. What we emphasise is not just getting information from known sources but also tapping new varieties of sources and checking even more carefully than before the reliability of the evidence before proceeding to use the information for understanding and explaining the past. These two aspects of exploring the past for information and then explaining what happened in the past contribute to what we today call the “historical method”. This is not something that was taught to us when we were students because few thought in these terms. But today it is absolutely essential.
Unfortunately, there is not enough emphasis on how this method is to be taught to students—whether at the high school or undergraduate college level. What it essentially means is that the first step is to collect evidence and data. The second step is to test the reliability of the data and make sure that what one is using is reliably tested information and not something that is casually picked up from here or there or just someone’s fantasy. The third step is to see the causal relationship between events where it exists.
Did event “B” result from event “A”? Is there a linkage between the two if the event happened at the same place, but only a little later in time? So the causal relationship becomes an important element in a reasoned, logical analysis. There are those who are professionally trained as historians and yet don’t take the next step, which is that every analysis has to be based on a critical assessment of the data. Fantasy doesn’t come into play and that is often the big difference. In popular history, it is often more fantasy than actual reasoned, logical analysis.
Once you have gone through these steps, then you can make a statement that we call a historical generalisation. So this procedure of treating historical information as a body of facts that needs to be analysed, considered logically and rationally is something much more recent in the historical research of the last few decades. It did exist earlier but was confined to the better historians. Today it is required of all students of history. Since it is rigorous, not all students qualify.
By that you are also perhaps suggesting that what we understand by historical information is itself a very rigorous process of analysis and data collection and that requires proper training and cannot be picked up by amateurish interest. And there is something distinctly different between an amateurish public interest in something of the past and a historian’s understanding on the basis of rigorous collection of information and its methodical explanation on a rational basis.
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You are right, absolutely right. The point is with reference to all history. But it is more complicated with reference to ancient Indian history, given the range of sources that have to be consulted. It is not enough to read a dozen books on ancient Indian history, for that doesn’t make you a specialist. You have to know the sources and how to analyse them.
You have to know what the sources are and in the languages that were used at that time.
For example, you have to know the language of the inscriptions of the Mauryan kings, which was Prakrit, and analyse them. You have to know other texts that were written in Sanskrit, such as the Arthashastra of Kautilya.
You have to know something about archaeology, and archaeology is today becoming increasingly technical and dependent on the use of scientific methods and knowledge. There is more and more science being introduced into archaeological research, so much so that sometimes when reading contemporary archaeological reports I can’t fully understand them because they require training in science. Then there is linguistics. It is not enough to know the language of the source one is using. One has also to understand the rules of linguistics when examining change in a language—different formations of vocabulary, grammar, and phonetics—and the way in which, and why, languages can be segregated or can interact.
Let me give you an example that is currently much talked about. When we were students, we were told that the language of the Rig Veda was Indo-Aryan and only that. Whereas today if you made that statement, not all Vedic scholars would agree because with the application of linguistics it has been argued there are some elements of Dravidian in the language of the Rig Veda, although the substantial language remains Indo-Aryan.
Does this then change the perception of it as a source by the historian? It changes because one can’t say, “Here is a text in a single language spoken by people who used only that language.”
Now the historian has to say, “Well if there are other linguistic features which do not belong to that language category, and Dravidian is different from Indo-Aryan, then it means that there was an interface between the speakers of one language with others speaking another language.”
You have to ask whether there might have been bilingualism—or is there not enough evidence for that? Is this the result of the proximity of different language speakers? This puts the Rig Veda into a rather fascinating historical context of not just a single culture but reflecting its domination in the midst of other co-existing cultures. So the historian has to uncover these other cultures.
Studies of this period today have to consider the evidence from other categories of sources not known a few decades ago. For instance, there are studies of the hydrology of the rivers in the area, and more so now with the Sarasvati river having become a subject of debate. Its identity is not definitively known, nor its history. Was it substantially monsoon-fed or glacier-fed? Were its waters captured by the Yamuna and the Sutlej, leading to its decline? Other sources that might throw light on this history are reports from genetics now being brought into the debate. Were there migrants into the area at particular points of time or did the composition of the population remain relatively static?
These are controversial aspects of the evidence, and I am referring to them in order to explain that historical questions do not always have “Yes” or “No” answers as the evidence can be diverse and controversial. (That, by the way, is one reason why “objective-type questions” in history make no sense.) Historians have to depend on the logic of their explanations. These may well have to change when the evidence changes. What was argued in the 19th century may have to be argued differently in the 21st century. Historical explanations are conditioned by the degree of knowledge about a subject known at a particular point in time. Such explanations can also be coloured by the purpose for which they are intended.
DENIAL OF DIVERSITY
May I now move to a broad issue? The public in general, not always trained in historical studies, are being fed a dangerous and wrong understanding of the past by looking at some homogenised versions of certain groups, certain religious tendencies, certain ethnic identities—everything is seen as a homogeneous entity. And we know that the past is not a homogeneous representation of events. You were saying that the Rig Veda cannot be just Indo-Aryan? It is not composed in a single language and it contains multiple languages and therefore suggests multiple cultures as well.
I am not going into the details of the argument being propagated at a public level. Again, one of the differences is that at the level of scholarship, nationally and internationally, scholars working on ancient India have maintained that the Aryan language came possibly via Iran from Central Asia. But the one view that is now being propagated in India by various people is that the Aryan speakers were all indigenous. Some even argue that the authors of the Harappan civilisation were Aryans, thus suggesting that there was no non-Aryan element in the origins of Indian civilisation. This is an argument I, for one, cannot accept for a variety of reasons.
Sanitised!
Sanitised Aryanism, where everything is simplified and has a single source. The complexities of the problem are set aside. Clearly, there is a strong difference of opinion and the evidence quoted in support of the two views is unequal. What is being suggested is for some of us linguistically and archaeologically not feasible. We argue that the Rig Veda is post-Harappan in date, so naturally it would not reflect the earlier culture.
The Harappan culture had settlements in Oman and contacts with Mesopotamia, none of which is reflected in the Rig Veda. By the end of the third and early second millennia, the Harappan culture was contemporary with various non-Harappan cultures in the vicinity. In the mid-to-late second millennium, B.C., generally taken as the date for the composition of the Rig Veda, the presence of a range of cultures is registered, such as the Painted Grey Ware culture, the Black and Red Ware culture, the Megalithic culture, and so on. These are diverse. They are not a single culture. And in their spread the Aryan-speakers would have met these diverse cultures and settled in their midst.
And let’s not forget that the big difference between the Harappans and the authors of the Rig Veda is that the Harappan cities host essentially sophisticated urban cultures, with a knowledge of writing, whereas the society of the Rig Veda is agro-pastoral and unfamiliar with urbanism and literacy.
Especially what was happening in the Megalithic culture of the southern peninsula is hardly reflected in the text.
The Megalithic culture is not recorded as such in the texts. But different groups are discussed even in these texts, such as the asuras, the dasas, and the dasyus. Let’s look at the texts more realistically. The Rig Veda refers to two varnas— the arya and the dasa.
Who were the dasas?
They are described in the Rig Veda as people who practise rituals and customs that are different, they worship different gods, and they appear not to have spoken the same language as the authors of the Vedic corpus. They are wealthy and envied for their cattle wealth and they live in separate settlements. Some scholars therefore think they were of a different culture. So we have to ask “Who were they?” and why were they mythologised?
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Then there are the dasi-putra brahmanas, unacceptable at first, but when they display their powers they are accepted as brahmanas.
The term is an oxymoron in one sense, as dasi-putra (literally the son of a slave-woman or a woman of inferior status or culture) would contradict the status of a brahmana. The Vedic texts mention that devas and asuras were often in conflict. So yes, at one level it is mythology, but mythology is not totally divorced from the assumptions of a society, although it may not describe the reality.
The assumptions they have about themselves usually creep into the myths they create. So if there is an insistent emphasis on “Us” and “Them”, then clearly there must be more than just one category of culture. That is why historians are arguing that the Vedic corpus refers to the period from the post-Harappan up to the urban cultures of the historical cities of the fifth century B.C. If seen in terms of interacting cultures, it raises a variety of possibilities in terms of the interaction of societies such as are excluded if the focus is only on a single culture. Would it be possible, for instance, to argue that the texts of the Vedic corpus are attempting to present themselves as an evolution of one pattern of culture out of an amalgam of many? Even today, despite five thousand years of historical activity, we still have diverse cultures.
It is neither single nor monolithic and it consists of definitely multiple sets of cultures. Since you raised this issue of archaeology and Vedic texts, I am reminded of a particularly interesting discovery made about five or six years ago. This is the archaeological site called Sintashta. I was fortunate to interact with the excavator, David Anthony, and he found out that it was a bronze-age culture. About 2500 BC, that is the possible date, the inhabitants were manufacturing bronze items, but they were not yet fully sedentarised. What is fascinating is horse bones being ritually buried, along with human remains that were buried. The striking fact is that the horse skeletons bear marks of mutilation with remarkable anatomical precision. It is something of a ritual back in the third millennium BC in the heart of Central Asia. Far away from India, there is some sort of a horse sacrifice. I am not saying it is Asvamedha, but some kind of ritual killing of the horse and ritual burial of the horse and chariot is visible. Maybe, it has a later reflection in the Vedic corpus. One cannot see everything coming out of this claim for Indocentric Vedic/Indo-European culture, which, once again, is a case of homogenisation. Also it breeds a chauvinistic attitude.
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That is the intention.
That we are the greatest of all civilisations.
And that is the popular argument—that the Aryans are indigenous and they went from India to the outside world and took civilisation to Europe. This theory was invented in the 19th century and became popular, as it still is. It was first expounded by the Theosophist, the American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, and was adopted by the Theosophists. For a while the Theosophists were close to the Arya Samaj, although Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the Arya Samaj, believed the Aryans came from Tibet.
These are the theories that have formed the grist of historical debates referring to the earliest past in India. They began in the 19th century. They seem unable to move out of that groove. And we have to keep in mind that this was the time when European supremacy, drawing from Aryan origins, was being discussed as part of what was called “Race Science”. Some of these theories led to the disastrous direction that Aryanism took in Europe in the 20th century. Historical theories coupled with extreme nationalism and the politics of identity can have severe consequences, which is why it is essential to debate these theories.
Questions that are historically debatable should be treated as such, with scholars holding variant views and each one’s views being weighed in terms of the evidence. Unfortunately, the issue of “the Aryans” in India has been so politicised that those who question the indigenous Indian origins of “the Aryans”, and its corollary of the supremacy of Aryan culture, are viciously abused in the social media and the Internet, apart from being treated with hostility in publications. This reduces the possibility of a historical debate.
And we get quite agitated in the public sphere. When we look at these chauvinistic pronouncements, this urge to present everything in a homogeneous neat past that is being presented as an unbroken continuum, is there also the fear of the different? Do you perceive that in the political culture there is an increasing tendency to stash out anything perceived as different from the homogenised norm?
I think the fear of having to see the past differently, that is, of seeing it as complex interactions of diverse cultures rather than a simplified single dominant culture, is a fear. To that I would add that it also suggests that we don’t have the confidence to admit that our cultures, like all cultures all over the world, are multiple in origin and have been evolving over many centuries and will continue to do so.
Every period in history sees the evolution of particular cultures and there is more than one culture of importance in every period. So we have to study the degree of difference or similarity in their evolution and why it was so, as well as the interaction between cultures. Only then can we ascertain common features. We as historians at least recognise that there could be more than one culture existing simultaneously.
This means that we have to ask if there was communication between these cultures and what their interface was. These are the questions that we are interested in now. But where there are those who want nationalism to be based on a single dominant culture, and who regard their culture as the political identity of the country for all time, there we run into a problem given that we are a society of multiple cultures.
HINDUISM AND HINDUTVA

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This cultural nationalism, doesn’t it imply a nationalised culture? In other words, the claim that there is only one type of culture; everything is homogenised.
The construction of cultural nationalism can be rooted in colonial interpretations of a culture, rather than in interpretations that might have existed in pre-colonial times. What did the Mauryans take to be their culture, and how did the concept of culture differ in the time of the Guptas, the Cholas, and the Mughals? This is something we don’t think about, because its reconstruction is not easy.
But this is something all ex-colonies have to consider, namely, how much of their acceptance of traditional culture is, in effect, drawn from colonial constructions. This is as true of India as it is of Indonesia, and is even more heightened in places such as Peru and Mexico where many of the old records were destroyed by the Spanish.
Traditions, as we know from history, are invented through the generations or on particular occasions, so it is difficult to insist that a contemporary tradition of today is pristine and goes back millennia. Even those traditions that seemingly go back have been tampered with in the interval.
I remember attending the performance of the lengthyagnichayana Vedic ritual in Kerala, specially performed by Namboodiri brahmanas in 1975. They were reciting from the established Vedic texts and one would have thought everything would be acceptable to all. But there was a fierce debate among the Vedic scholars present, who had gathered from various centres of Vedic studies in India and abroad, debates that went on for the full two weeks of the ritual and after, as to how authentic the rituals were and how correct the pronunciations of the Vedic texts were.
This also applies to the history of terms. If one traces the references to “arya” in the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pali texts and observes how the meaning and identity of the “arya” changes in history, the information does not entirely support the 19th century interpretation of the concept. One has to ask who is addressing whom as “arya” and why. How is the term being used?
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In the Pali texts, some social categories are addressed as “arya” because of their exalted status, such as Buddhist monks, irrespective of their ethnic origin, caste, or earlier occupation. Yet the same people are dismissed as nastikas or non-believers and castigated as deceivers in the Vishnu Purana. Today the popular perceptions continue to be rooted in colonial ideas, and these are often thought of as ancient usage.

“ Historians have to depend on the logic of their explanations. These may well have to change when the evidence changes.”

The concern with indigenous Aryanism is, in part, a by-product of religious nationalism—the search for the foundations of Hindu culture. The obsession with a single culture does not go back to early times. Inscriptions of the post-Gupta period claim an ancestry and history in their prashasti sections—in praise of the dynasty. The histories of their ancestors and their community are diverse and they have varying sources of legitimacy. Religious nationalism moves away from the multiplicity of cultures. It picks one religious culture and makes that the central “national” culture. This is a typical feature of nationalism all over the world, irrespective of whether it is anti-colonial, religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism. National movements tend to assume the superiority of one culture that then becomes the “national” culture.
Religious nationalism underlines the exclusiveness of one religion, culture, language, and such like. This is often deliberately constructed to help mobilise political support, a case in point being Hindutva. As has been often stated by various scholars, Hinduism and Hindutva are not identical. Hinduism is a religion and Hindutva is a political ideology.
Hindutva is a modern ideology derived from some aspects of Hinduism but is substantially different. The concept came into existence in the 20th century and its purpose is the political mobilisation of Hindus towards a Hindu Rashtra.
In creating an ideology based on religion, the fundamentals of the religion can be reconstructed should there be a need to do so. Such a construction often draws from the elite and conservative expressions of those following the religion. Hindutva speaks of a defined territory, a single culture and ethnic origin, a single religion and language. Hindus must have the same pitribhumi and punyabhumi, ancestors and religion. All others are foreigners.
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The religious aspect has been reformulated along the lines of the Semitic religions in its focus on historicity and a monolithic religion, a single sacred book, and attempts at ecclesiastical organisations, all of which make it easier for social and political mobilisation. I have therefore called it Syndicated Hinduism.
Yes.
Drawing on the past, national cultures also bring in the epics familiar to large numbers of people. Where there are multiple versions of the epics, there a problem arises because one version has to be chosen as the “correct” version. This is the problem we face with the Ramayana in India.
This comes in multiple and sometimes somewhat contradictory versions created over the centuries. Religious nationalism has to project one as the correct version—an attempt that historians find unacceptable. And let’s not forget that in the many versions of the Ramayana in South-East Asia, where these have also been integral to a cultural identity, the versions can differ significantly from the version of Valmiki.
A text that becomes sacred is composed initially in one region for one community, but if it becomes acceptable for various reasons to others, they restructure the text or sections of it to suit their requirements. Some people can certainly place their faith in the sanctity of a particular version, but this should not debar the study of the other versions.
Exactly.
Sometimes a particular period of history is chosen and described as Classical, or as exaggeratedly positive and with a single dominant culture. This becomes a core idea in the national movement. Then when the nation state comes into existence, problems arise as the single culture is frequently the culture of a dominant majority community. It is no longer required to the same degree as before.
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The nation is a secular democracy, or trying to become one, as we are, and many other cultures demand equal status. The group that is supporting the dominant culture would like to continue as the dominant culture, but there are other cultures that wish to be adequately represented. And if one is talking about national culture, it must include all cultures. So in the Indian situation various cultures have to be included and given status—Adivasis, Dalits, middle castes, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsis and others who had not been given adequate status before in the initial stages of nationalism. And in creating a national culture, the multiplicity and plurality has to be conceded and there has to be a shared history.

DIVERSE NATIONALITIES AND IDENTITY PO