The Past As Present Quotes

“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.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“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.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The occasional woman philosopher such as Gargi, who is often quoted to prove the high status of women in ancient times, is actually the proverbial swallow and does not make a summer.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“It is said that the Hindus must have been upset at seeing Turkish and Mongol soldiers in their heavy boots trampling the floors of the temples. The question is, which Hindus? For, the same temple if it was now entered by mleccha soldiers was open only to upper-caste Hindus and its sanctum was in any case barred to the majority of the population who were regarded as the indigenous mleccha. The trauma was therefore more in the notion of the temple being polluted rather than the confrontation of one religion with another.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Nations are not easily forged since many identities have to be coalesced.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Hindutva claims to represent indigenous Indian thought opposed to western interpretations of Indian religion, traditions and culture. The claim is that colonial scholarship used its understanding of Indian culture for political purposes to justify colonialism. Yet Hindutva is doing precisely the same by reformulating Hinduism along the lines suggested by colonial interpretations in order to facilitate its use in political mobilization. It uses colonial constructions of the Indian past such as the theories of James Mill and Max Mueller to further its programme of political control. The exploitation of history becomes a significant dimension of its attempt to appropriate the understanding of the past.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“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.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“A nation cannot be built on a single identity nor is it feasible to collate diverse identities of religion, caste, language and so on, and hope for something to emerge. A nation as a state is a new historical experience and therefore requires a new identity. Ideally, this would be the identity of the Indian citizen constructed on the assumption that all citizens are equal before the law with the same rights and obligations. The theoretical basis for this exists in our Constitution, but it has to be put into effect.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“questioning existing knowledge through a critical inquiry into evidence and its reading.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Religiosity is generally a characteristic of situations when there is a fear that the dominant position held by the followers of a religion is beginning to decline, and therefore has to be publicized where possible.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Putting wives through fire has continued since ancient times, from Sita to sati to dowry deaths. It is a curious aspect of our social culture.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“State intervention to try and control incidents of widow immolation begins during the time of the Sultans and the Mughals.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The act of immolation is first described in Greek texts, quoting from earlier accounts referring to incidents of the fourth century BC. Widows are burnt on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands among the Katheae (Kshatriya or khattiya) in the Punjab. Unable to explain this practice the author remarks that it was an attempt to prevent wives from poisoning their husbands!”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Insistence on the subservience of women did not dull male ardour in worshipping female deities, encapsulating the quintessential female force.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The Gita, for example, speaks of shudras, vaishyas and women as one category, all being papa-yoni, born of sinful wombs.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“One could well ask if there is some subconscious link in the patriarchal mind between the agni-pariksha, fire-ordeal of Sita; the encouraging of women to become satis, the practice of entering the fire jointly in a jauhar when a Rajput raja was defeated in a campaign; and the frequency of dowry deaths in recent times.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The Mahabharata can be viewed as a civilizational text not because it reflects the propagation of a particular view of these dharmas but because, among other things, it speaks to the debate on social ethics, especially between the brahmanical perspective and those that question it—a debate that has continued over many centuries.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“We know from many examples all over the world and from many periods of history that it was perfectly feasible for people of different racial origins, brought together through migration, trade, conquest or persecution, to find themselves ultimately using the same language.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Historically the interesting question is when and why did the prohibition on eating beef become the requirement of a good Hindu.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’ used as terms for peoples confuses language and race since these are language labels, and should correctly be used as, ‘Aryan-speaking people’ and ‘Dravidian-speaking people’.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Social and economic inequality was accepted as normal by Vedic Brahmanism and whether one approves or disapproves of it, it was an established point of view. To propagate the texts associated with this assumption and yet insist that they are appropriate to modern values of democracy and secularism is hardly acceptable.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“In the same Mahabharata where the protagonists go variously to heaven or hell, Krishna preaches the centrality of rebirth and the system of justice associated with it.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“In the same Mahabharata where the protagonists go variously to heaven or hell, Krishna preaches the centrality of rebirth and the system of justice associated with it. The”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“In the same Mahabharata where the protagonists go variously to heaven or hell, Krishna preaches the centrality of rebirth and the system of justice associated with”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“One is often struck by how different the message of the Gita would have been and how very much closer to non-violence if Gautama Buddha had been the charioteer of Arjuna instead of Krishna.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Religious violence is not alien to Hinduism despite the modern myth that the Hindus are by instinct and religion a non-violent people.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The absence of conversion accounted for the absence of the distinction between the true follower and the infidel or pagan.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The discarding of the icon by both the Brahmo and Arya Samaj was almost a knee-jerk reaction. It was seen as a pollution of the original religion but possibly the jibe of idol worship may have enhanced this reaction.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“Communalism is the political exploitation of a religious ideology.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

“The secular critique of communalism is not an opposition to religion but to the abuse of religion.”
― Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History