Quotes from Romila Thapar

The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.

Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.

Nations have to be built on an inclusive identity.

Democracy ceases to be so if it is governed by permanent majoritarian identities of any kind.

National-ism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject

Tolerance does not grow with banning what is thought to be unpalatable; it grows with arguing and talking about it; for that which is unpalatable gets discarded.

Intensely devotional poetry was written by poets, some of whom were born Muslim but worshipped Hindu deities. One of the best known among them was Sayyad Ibrahim, popularly referred to as Raskhan, whose dohas and bhajans dedicated to the deity Krishna were widely recited in the sixteenth century and are still remembered by devotees of Krishna and others.

The eating of beef was reserved for specific occasions, such as rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status. This is a common practice in other cattle-keeping cultures as well.

If the shar'ia required that a woman suspected of adultery should be stoned to death, the Bhagvad Gita establishes a mindset by referring to women and low castes as sinfully born, and khap panchayats do the rest.

Nations are not easily forged since many identities have to be coalesced.

Strangely, Indians travelling outside the subcontinent do not seem to have left itineraries of where they went or descriptions of what they saw. Distant places enter the narratives of storytelling only very occasionally. Notions

The late arrival of the horse in India is not surprising since the horse is not an animal indigenous to India. Even on the west Asian scene, its presence is not registered until the second millennium BC. The horse was unimportant, ritually and functionally, to the Indus civilization.

ecclesiastical

But, curiously, membership of the Society was not open to Indians for many years, even though those presenting their findings were being trained by Indian scholars.

In the questioning of existing explanations the validity of periodizing Indian history as Hindu, Muslim and British was increasingly doubted. It had projected two thousand years of a golden age for the first, eight hundred years of despotic tyranny for the second, and a supposed modernization under the British.

The existence of autonomous individuals free to criticize was once a landmark of our civilization.

Some forms of Indian asceticism, although not all, have a socio-political dimension and these cannot be marginalized as merely the wish to negate life.

This was also demonstrated to a more marked extent in the universal segregation of Dalit groups across all religions. Because much of religion was also linked to caste, it was not surprising that Christianity and Islam in India also functioned through a variety of sects, and recognized caste inequality and hierarchy in practice, however much they may have disavowed it in theory.

The remains of what might be the earliest temple dedicated to Hindu worship have been located through excavations at Besnagar.

Religion rarely fights for the equality of all in material life.

Harappan pottery is distinctive, with designs in black, of plants, birds and abstract forms, frequently painted on a red surface. Pottery is a clue to locating Harappan sites,

Periodization based on religion as the sole criterion of historical activity is a negation of history.

That every civilization emerges out of interactions with others, but nevertheless creates its own miracle, was not yet recognized by either European or Indian historians.

Pre-modern Hinduism had its warts—big and small—as do all religions, but its subtleties were richer than what is now being thrust on its believers. Hindutva is in many ways the antithesis of Hinduism, and aims to create a society that is narrow, bigoted and inward looking, in which the co-existence with those that differ, such as the minority communities of various kinds, is becoming increasingly impossible, as demonstrated by the frequency of communal riots.