Professor Romila Thapar presented the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture 2012 on the topic "Reporting History: Early India" on May 3, 2012.
Click here to read/download the lecture in PDF format.
Keywords: Romila Thapar, Indian history, Indian civilization
Dr. Tharper is amongst the few Indian historians who present an unbaised and objective analysis of Indian history . Early Indian History is still shrouded in uncertainity and needs systematic and objective research . Pre concieved notions , enemating from political objectives, which are foisted upon the historical analysis do not help . It is a pleasure to read Ms. Tharper .
The most interesting fact is that most of our historians do not know sanskrit. They are just chewing the same words of British historians and not doing any serious study in the ancient scripts, vedas, puranas etc. scared of being labelled as 'nationalist historians'. They want to sit in the comfortable cabin of 'secular' (??) historians.
Thapar writes that raiding temples was not unusual in pre-Islamic times. True, but one swallow does not a summer make. A handful of such occasions are treated as true for the entire periods. Did the victorious army after taking away the royal statues use them for footsteps in the new temple he built? But on the other hand, there is abundant evidence that Muslims armies routinely despoiled temples, broke them and built mosques upon their ruins. In the entire North Indian plains barring a few exceptions, you find any ancient temples or monasteries while you find mosques and tombs. What explains this unless you are postulate that Hindu temple architects and builders used poor building materials and techniques. Thus you have both external evidence and internal evidence from books and writing from that period which speaks of destruction of temples and yet it is not to be discussed or explained away for nationalistic/secular reasons.
Evolution vs creationism/racism in history.
Great lecture by Romilla thaper, reflecting her great well known scholarship. For reason unknown she tends to ignore the fact that aryan and semitic language racism is rooted in biblical creationism of some 6000 yrs; this perpetuates a myth, a foundation of judeo-christianity, now fully challenged by out of africa evolution. My own work " urdu/hindi an artificial divide, african heritage--" ( Dr Thaper has acopy) exposes, the biblical racism that was exploited by british via " hindu-euro-aryan brotherhood".
Indian history along with other histories need to connect with out of africa and focussed on evolution.
There are very few historians in India who have given an independent interpretation of Indian history prior to British rule in India. Most historians have relied on foreign authors like Max Mueller and other British historians whose only motive was to denigrate Indian culture and paint European culture in superior terms.
There is a need for historical research relying on indigenous sources like the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.Authors like Swami Vivekananda, Swami Dayananda, Sri Aurobindo and Lokmanya Tilak have been deliberately ignored by Indian historians to present a totally Europeanised interpretation of Indian history.
Ancient India had a culture that was unparalleled in history. It had a civilisation which was entirely spiritual in its outlook and was spread almost all over South Asia.After almost 3000 years it entered a period of decline which coincided with foreign invasion and conquest.
If India is to regain its rightful position it should have a
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