Social media producing biases, says Romila Thapar

Historians urged to defend ideas based on reliable evidence

Noted historian Romila Thapar has said that historians should be ready to debate and defend their ideas on the basis of reliable evidence.

“We should not dismiss a bias but try and understand why there is a bias. Every human being has a bias and its conditioned by the context in which you grow up and think or what you read and these days by the new invention that you call social media, which produces all kinds of biases,” she said at a webinar on ‘Meet the Historian’ organised by the Kerala History Congress on Tuesday.

“The main thing then is looking for a range of sources and defending what one picks up and how one interprets its sources does require very wide reading. A historian today has to read books in other disciplines in order to understand what some historians are writing,” she said.

Theoretical knowledge

On whether her writings were too theoretical, Ms. Thapar responded by referring to it as a comment on the decline of emphasis on intellectual work in what we today call education. “The content of education today does not encourage people to think analytically. I think that is really a big crisis not to people like myself. But for the younger generation that is growing up and seeking education. Education does not mean its only for jobs. It should also make you think. Theoretical knowledge may be a problem for wider public for whom history is a narrative of events,” she said.

Continuity and change

Ms. Thapar pointed out that historians had to recognise that there was something in the past that continued in a different form into the present. “We as historians have to recognise both the continuity and the change. A historian is like a detective that searches for clues. You are asking a question of what happened and you are searching for clues. We have to understand what happened in the past in order to understand something that is happening in the present,” she said.

Rajan Gurukkal, president of Kerala History Congress, said that similar sessions would be held with renowned historians aimed at understanding their methodology and methods of historical research.