A History of India, Vol. 1 Quotes

“The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.”
― Romila Thapar, A History of India: Volume 1

“Some have argued that as language is the medium of knowledge, that which comes in the form of language constitutes a text; since language is interpreted by the individual, the reading by the individual gives meaning to the text; therefore each time a text is read by a different individual it acquires a fresh meaning. Taken to its logical conclusion, this denies any generally accepted meaning of a text and is implicitly a denial of attempts at historical representation or claims to relative objectivity, since the meaning would change with each reading. However, the prevalent views are more subtle.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“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.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“National-ism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“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”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“analysis. The focus on culture, beliefs and ideologies could be a necessary addition to the earlier historical emphases on politics and the economy, but it is not in itself definitive history since history requires a correlation between the reading of a text and its multi-layered historical contexts. This enables an understanding of what is directly stated in a text and, equally important, that which is implied.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“ecclesiastical”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The period from the ninth century in the subcontinent, far from being ‘dark’, was a period of illumination as it was germane to many later institutions.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The decline of Buddhism in the Ganges heartland and the peninsula occurred before the Turkish conquest.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The worship of the Buddha by non-Buddhists remained largely formal and deferential.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“For peasants and merchants, war was a nightmare that disrupted the routine of earning a livelihood Laying waste vast tracts of inhabited and cultivated land, merely because it was part of the enemy’s territory, was a proud boast attributed to Prithviraja Chauhan on defeating the Chandella ruler.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“This would suggest that the destruction of temples by Hindu rulers was known and recorded, but such acts were viewed as more characteristic of the Turushkas.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The destruction of temples even by Hindu rulers was not unknown, but Mahmud’s was a regulated activity and inaugurated an increase in temple destruction com-pared to earlier times.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“For the next few centuries, brahmans who migrated from Kanauj to seek employment elsewhere were highly respected for their knowledge of ritual and their learning.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The flesh of the ox was medically prescribed to enhance vigour.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The remains of what might be the earliest temple dedicated to Hindu worship have been located through excavations at Besnagar.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Expanding urbanization often trapped people at the margins of settlements into becoming landless and unable to use their skills and thus gradually forced them into performing lowly tasks.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“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.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“A number of families constituted a grama, a word used later for village, suggesting that the families in the early settlements were related. Another view holds that grama was the formation made up of wagons used by the mobile pastoralists”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The use of the plough goes back to pre-Harappan times and one of the words frequently used for the plough – langala – is from Munda, a non-Aryan language.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“A later age looks back with nostalgia at an earlier one and depicts it in terms of ideals and activities now receding.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“The change from the categories of hunter-gatherers to pastoralism to agriculture involved using a decreasing area of land, but an increasingly more intensive use of the land.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Adivasi societies are not fossilized societies.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“These passes were used so frequently that it is incorrect to project the north-western mountains as barriers. They were corridors of communication.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“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.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“To categorize some people as indigenous and others as alien, to argue about the identity of the first inhabitants of the subcontinent, and to try and sort out these categories for the remote past, is to attempt the impossible.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“Historiography therefore becomes a prelude to understanding history as a form of knowledge.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“A fundamental sanity in Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300

“But among the more widely used eras are the Vikrama era of 58-57 BC and the Shaka era of AD 78. The Vikrama era was known earlier as the Krita or the Malava era. Others include the Gupta era of AD 319-20, the Harsha era of AD 606, the Vikrama-Chalukya era of AD 1075 and a variety of others.”
― Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300