Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. James H.

Billington: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this special occasion. I have to make the usual remark about turning off cell phones and electronic devices. This event is being recorded for later distribution over the Internet and so these devices, as you know, interfere with that. Dr. Romila Thapar, we are very happy to welcome back to the Kluge Center. She was recently with us in December to receive the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity, which she shared with Peter Brown of Princeton University who will be, like Dr. Thapar, returning for a lecture later next month. Her lecture, which is being sponsored by the Kluge Center, is on the topic "Perceptions of the Past in Early India." She is, indeed, the preeminent historian of early India. She was a pioneer in opening the study of that rich, ancient civilization really which she helps us up to think of as a continent rather than as just a country. In opening up study its study to inquiry of the new conceptual frameworks arising out of the modern social sciences, she formulated a whole set of new questions about social development covering nearly 2,000 years of Indian history. She challenged the existing ways of looking at Indian history that were common or were characteristic of both the colonial historians, European colonial historians, and more recently, nationalistic extremists within India itself. So she's rewritten the history of the entire subcontinent: the history, not just of India but of India which was almost indistinguishable in terms of its borders from Pakistan, from Afghanistan from other countries of the entire subcontinent. In her inquiries she has drawn her materials from multiple sources, multiple languages and considered all levels of society and traced across a very broad experience of time. Faced with the absence of reliable dating, she has found new information in ancient texts: Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Jain and old Tamil traditions and folklore, integrated all of these manuscript sources with findings from archaeology, numismatics, linguistics and inscriptions. So it's a really Herculean task that she's been performing, and she's persistently championed the history that's personal, grounded in evidence as best can be discerned, but it creates cumulative, I think, an appreciation of India that has accommodated civilizational diversity, been a crossroads of all kinds of different linguistic and cultural and ethnic influences, and it suggests that the past is not just a process from authoritarian past and the democratic future but a past that has itself a rich, pluralism and a rich variety and many peaceful moments, rather than just a series of conflicts. Anyhow, it's not been without controversy, and she herself acknowledges the uncertainties involved in writing history in the absence of a reliable written record or an accepted narrative from which all things can be taken, modified, but never strayed all that far. Her work and that of like-minded colleagues has profoundly changed the way India's past is understood, both at home and abroad, both within the academy and within the schools. She's had an enormous effect on textbooks which is rarely the case of someone who is such an excellent detail professional historian for specialists.

She's the Emeritus Professor of Ancient Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She's held visiting posts, received honorary degrees from universities on three continents. She's written and co-authored 15 substantial books beginning in 1962 with, "Asoka and the Decline of the Maurya," and including the 1969 classic, "A History of India." When she revised it in 2004 into "Early India: From the Origins to A.D. 1300," she really had, in effect, written a new book because she is continuously enriching or revising, perfecting as a model historian of ancient times with modern sensibilities and ethero-grounding in a wide variety of disciplines so it's a great honor and pleasure for me to present to you all the winner of last year's Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity, Dr. Romila Thapar. [applause] Romila Thapar: Thank you, Dr. Billington. Thank you very much indeed for that very generous introduction: generous to the point where I feel I don't really deserve it but thank you indeed. It's a great honor for me to be here. It's a great pleasure for me to come back to the Library of Congress. I'm familiar now with the corridors and the rooms and procedures, and it's like a kind of homecoming. I wondered what I should speak about today and decided that I should probably best speak about the work that I'm currently doing, which is basically an attempt to try and recognize historical traditions in ancient or early India. This is, I must warn you, a very complicated subject, and it is also a very controversial subject, but I think it is a subject that does need attention which is, indeed, why I have, for many years, been working on it and it is a subject that also needs to be analyzed as it has never been done before so that I am treating my research as a kind of beginning study, which I hope many other scholars will take up and do in greater detail. A couple of hundred years of go it was stated that Indian civilization was unique in that it lacked historical writing and, implicitly, a sense of history. With rare exceptions, there has been little attempt since to examine this generalization and it is taken as axiomatic. I would like to suggest that while, in the early period of Indian history, there may not be historical writing of the conventional form, familiar to us from Europe, there are, nevertheless, many texts that reflect historical consciousness. These came to be reformulated as historical traditions and later in the first and second millennia A.D. this was reflected in distinctive forms that approximate historical writing. My primary intention is to argue that, irrespective of the question of the presence or absence of historical writing as such, an understanding of the way in which the past is perceived, recorded and used affords insights into early Indian society as, indeed, it does in any other society. It is worth investigating what was written and why, what were the dialogues and debates that occasioned this writing and ascertaining the degree of historicity would be a subsequent step. Societies need to construct a past or even many pasts for these have social functions. Such constructions claimed that what venerated happened in the past, a claim that differentiates them

from fiction. Such narratives observe a chronology and a sequential order. This is a starting point, as it were, of historical consciousness. Communities have constantly to situate themselves in relation to the perceived past, which becomes a permanent dimension of social identity, although its construction, form and content might change with new definitions of identity. This is sometimes demonstrated in variant readings of the past, which indicate plurality. It becomes particularly apparent when there is an official version that differs from other versions and is appropriated by those in authority. New demands on power and legitimacy change existing forms. Thus, conventional history a couple of centuries ago was closely tied to nationalism, which tends to tidy up variety, preferably into a single identity within the nation. The recognition of possible pluralities in constructing the past is a recent idea. My concern, therefore, is not with whether or not early Indian society produced a specific historical literature of the conventional kind to record the past but, rather, with trying to understand the variety of texts that purport to represent the past. This involves many questions: why they took the form they did, what from the past was of relevance to their authors and why particular types of records were maintained, and my idea at the back of my mind is always that of the range and possibility of differences and not trying to stereotype every record into one kind of system. It seems to me that three aspects need inquiry. I would first like to ask why it was necessary to argue that Indian civilization lacked a sense of history. This was largely a colonial argument with an emphasis that derived both from the way Enlightenment thinking defined history but more so from the requirements of colonial policy. The second question is to recognize that historical traditions emanating from diverse cultures will inevitably differ and comparisons of world cultures have to be much more precise than they have tended to be so far. And the third aspect, which is in effect the most substantial, is to inquire into the nature of the representation of the past in texts linked to the early Indian historical tradition. The search for indigenous histories of early India began in the late 18th century. European scholars, conscious by now of historical literature as a distinct category recording the past, as was the case in Europe at that time, looked in vain for recognizable histories from the Sanskrit tradition. Indian culture and particularly the Sanskrit articulation of what came to be called Hindu culture was defined, therefore, as ahistorical. William Jones, the leading Hindologist of the late 18th century suspected that some texts, even if including the myths and legends of the Hindus, probably contained the core of a history. Most scholars tended to disagree but even Jones quotes only one example: the famous [foreign language] written in the 12th century A.D. as "acceptable historical writing" A century later McDonnell's searing remark that "Early India wrote no history because it never made any," was modified by others such as Rapson who granted the making of history but regretted the absence of a systematic record. Comparisons with the Chinese Chronicles [Chinese] and the Arabic writings of [Arabic] or even the biblical genealogies, not to mention

Greco-Roman texts strengthened, if only in contrast, the axiom of Indian society denying history. Such comparisons made no reference to the historiographical contexts of all of these other histories. The officers of the East India Company derive their data on law and religion from their Brahman informants. The centrality of the text important to Vedic Brahmanism, therefore, had priority. These texts were [foreign language], the social codes, the normative text, the Vedas as the earliest religious texts and, to a lesser extent, those known as the Puranas, the last of which they regarded as second order knowledge. They were later and dealt with more popular religion. Other systems of knowledge, such as the Buddhist and the Jain, assessed as inferior branches of Hinduism, were initially given little importance. That these, in earlier times, might have been alternative systems of knowledge was hardly conceded. Prominence was given to a limited upper caste perspective. There was little attempt at discourse with their Brahman informants on the wider context of the text and their authors. Other theories emerged from the European excitement at discovering what many believed might be an Oriental renaissance, bringing innovative knowledge similar to the earlier revival of classical European learning. But religion and mysticism were characteristic of Indian culture to the virtual exclusion of rational ways of organizing knowledge was reinforced in German Romanticism. The argument that in India caste, viewed as civil society, overwhelmed the state, further underlining the view that without a state there could be no history and for Hegel, therefore, India was a land without recorded history. A different construction of Indian history in the 19th century drew on other premises deriving from utilitarian thought. This underpinned the requirements of colonial policy in a changing relationship between the colonial power and the colony. A denial of a sense of history was implicit in the theory of Oriental despotism, which was articulated at length in what became the hegemonic text on Indian history, James Mills, "The History of British India," which began to be written in 1818 and continued throughout the 19th century as the major text. Mill's view was seminal to arguing that Indian society was static, registering no change and, therefore, had no use for recording the past: one of the functions of the past being to legitimize the present, if used correctly. This stasis could only be broken by British administration legislating change and, thus, introducing the notion of history. Mill's history was defining a new idiom for imperial control. The argument was that if the past is eliminated then despotic power cannot be accused of violating tradition nor can any appeal be made to thwart despotism in the name of the past. History was a record of change and progress was its ideology. India's endemic despotism governed by custom rather than law and, lacking rationality as the motivating force, represented the reverse of progress. Since neither law nor rationality prevailed, history too was absent. The absence of the history had the practical advantage of allowing the formulation of a history for the colony that would underpin colonial policy. Colonial attitudes to knowledge pertaining to their colonies assumed that such knowledge was a form of control. Thus, William Jones writes of the Itihasas and the Puranas as being, "In our power," and decades later Lord Curzon came up

with his famous statement that the "Intellectual discovery of the Orient was the necessary furniture of empire." History was the portal to knowledge about the colony. This would be enhanced if it could be maintained that even the awareness of the colony's past had to be provided by the colonial power. Assisting this process was the almost obsessive concern with the Orient being necessarily the "other" of Europe. Statements on otherness were foremost in Carl Marx and Max Weber. Part of the otherness lay in a lack of transition to capitalism, which Weber attributed to a failure of economic rationalism. It was also attributed to a denial of a sense of history as emphatically maintained by Marx. Meanwhile, throughout the 19th century, the collection of manuscripts and artifacts for the reconstruction of Indian history continued apace. Equally impressive were the results from the decipherment of the ancient Brahmi Script, which revealed the new resource of epigraphic data. Archaeological excavations revealed antiquities which provided the tangible evidence of history. However, in the reconstruction and interpretation of the larger flow of history European models and preconceptions hovered and comparisons with Europe were unavoidable but the comparisons, even, were superficial and the changing historiography of European history, as is evident from the 19th century, was ignored by colonial historians. The nature of history being discussed with intellectual intensity in 19th century Europe made little impact on Hindologists and colonial historians and for historians of European history the past of the non-European world was another country. Indian historians, by and large, initially subscribed to the colonial view and accepted that Indian society was ahistorical. Insightful discussions tended to be limited to single genres of texts rather than historiography. The existence or not of the historical tradition in early India has been the subject of passing comments in recent times. One argument is that a historical tradition did exist but that it was a weak tradition and, despite high intellectual levels in other aspects of thought, it never developed into a major tradition. This has been attributed to the decentralized nature of political institutions to the role of the Ramans, the priest, the elite, in fabricating genealogies for rulers and to the exclusive control of the priestly elite over the transmission of the tradition. Another explanation points to the bifurcation between the keepers of state records, largely the scribal castes, the Kaists [spelled phonetically] as they are often referred to, and the priestly elite, the Brahmans, from whom a critical, intellectual assessment might have been expected but didn't emerge. More defensive views maintain that history, as a discipline, has been formatted through modernization and Indian civilization has been unconcerned with this. Such explanations are hardly adequate, particularly in light of recent historical research which has questioned the earlier stereotypes. It is evident now that Indian society was not static and was subject to change. The nature of such change was not uniform in time and space. This constitutes a radically different view of the Indian past. Change is a nodal point in history when new identities can emerge and the past can be reformulated for the purposes of the present.

Two processes of change continued through the centuries. The first was the mutation of clan societies into castes as part of a bigger change of assimilation into a state, generally a kingdom. Kin relations ceased to be crucial to the pattern of polities. Social hierarchy was introduced as also was differentiated access to resources. The second change was the transformation of early kingdoms of a simple, non-complex type into more complex state systems. Interestingly, both processes are reflected in various genres of texts that are referred to as the Itihasa Purana tradition, the words that are used in particularly the Sanskrit literature for "a historical tradition." This becomes apparent in the references to the polities, economies and patterns of social control: aspects that have tended to be neglected because of the focus largely on religious history. Some texts represent historical change in a covert manner. Others do so more openly. But before I speak about historical consciousness, I would like to consider the second aspect that I mentioned earlier. This concerns our present day changed understanding of history itself: the discipline of history. In this the focus on historiography, the context of the writing of history, has been central and let me go back a bit in time to the Enlightenment to explain this. History as defined by the Enlightenment was thought of as central to civilization. Every branch of knowledge had to have a history. A people without history were a people without knowledge. The history of civilizations also derived from humanist traditions, which maintained that there was a unified, European identity with continuity from the Greeks to modern Europe and was accessible in European literature. There emerged through this a rather literal view of GrecoRoman historical writing and a susceptibility to treating ancient narrative accounts as invariably historical. There were at the time no analytical studies such as those which have recently re-examined Greek and Roman historical writing or, for that matter, much of the writing from many other ancient societies. These have pointed to the interweaving of fiction and history in the representation of the past. It has been said, and here I quote, "If one starts by distinguishing between Oriental or mythical or mythologizing historiography and a rational and scientific historiography which strictly sticks to sources and facts, it is questionable whether Thucydides can be counted among the latter." This may be too harsh a judgment but Herodotus was frequently accused of lying by his contemporaries, perhaps because he drew heavily on oral tradition, which they could not consult. Later writers such as Monetthieu [spelled phonetically] and Plutarch questioned many of the statements of Herodotus. History was a narrative of persons and events recalled from the past through oral and written sources and some witnessed in the present. Parallel to the late Greco-Roman notion of the history was the altogether different Jewish tradition and dissonant to the Christian. The Greco-Roman notion was virtually set aside with the coming of history infused with Judeo-Christian views. This began with Jerome and culminated in Augustine. History was no longer just a narrative of the past. It was now the record of the power of God and of Christ as reflected in the actions of the Christian Church. This was a departure which was contrasted in early Renaissance writing, drawing on Greek and Latin

texts. It took a more secular form with the Enlightenment explanation of human activity being the pivot of society. Historiography became decisive to Europe with the Judeo-Christian religions claiming the historicity of person and events. History also provided a community identity for the nations of Europe as they emerged in recent centuries. The change in European historiography needs underlining. Generalizations can hardly be made about the single, unified sense of history of the West. In Europe the change was from the GrecoRoman to medieval Christianity to the Enlightenment: each born of different historiographies and formulating diverse historical tradition. Some attempts were made to reorient Greco-Roman ideas. Arnaldo Momigliano, the great classical historian, writes that, "Greek models became transformed into a Jewish apocalypse." Clearly, historical consciousness is understood in present times in a different sense from a century or two ago. Islamic historiography is also treated as uniform and seen from the perspective of religious texts. Yet, there are distinct ideological variations that gave shape to the writings that emerged. The Arab discourse was imprinted with facets of Judaism and Christianity even if what eventually emerged was the distinctive ideology of Islam. The Persians internalized their legacy of Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. The difference within the Islamic tradition is apparent if one compares the representation of the past in Fededulci's [spelled phonetically] Shahanamee [spelled phonetically] or the writings of the Gaznalee's [spelled phonetically] scribe Bihachi [spelled phonetically] with the Arab [Arabic]. Such diversity would have produced histories with variable nuances. The history historiography most frequently taken as a measure of historical writing is the JudeoChristian. This has a clear eschatology, narrating the beginning and the end of humankind with a ideology built into it and time is seen as linear. The others where this is not so evident are the Greco-Roman, the Chinese and the Indian. The Greeks had virtually no eschatology and in the other two traditions it was not definitive. Dying takes various forms in these traditions: linear, spiral and cyclic. The Greco-Roman is treated as foundational to European historiography. Yet, it has little in the way of common premises with the Judeo-Christian. We now recognize that history lies, not just in a sequential narrative set in a chronological framework, but also in inquiry and explanation. This implies that a comment on the presence or absence of a sense of history in a particular society also requires some familiarity with the genres of texts incorporating historical consciousness. These are not identical across its constituent cultures. The way a narrative relating the past is formulated reflects not just a curiosity about the past but with how it explains the past as well as the concerns of the time when it was composed. This draws from the political economies and religious ideological concerns that had currency at that time. The form of the narrative changes when these change and, therefore, there is more than one genre of text encapsulating the past. The context is what allows us today to observe the complexities of the past, looking at its own earlier past. Essential to history is the shape and accounting of time. Much has been made of the lack of history in India being tied to a cyclic concept of time, an insistence which continues despite

research to the contrary. This is contrasted with the linear time of the Semitic tradition which is said to provide a necessary factor for historical thinking. Yet, linear time in India is manifested in the extensive incorporation of genealogies and even more so in the shift in astronomy from lunar to solar reckoning. With this, chronology becomes more precise as in the use of the [Hindi], the Eera [spelled phonetically] and calculations based on Eeras enter historical records. This is from about the second century B.C. onwards. Stating in detail the time of an action is particularly essential to recording gifts of land, as is evident in many inscriptions intended for this purpose. A sharp dichotomy between linear and cyclic time is not feasible since some elements of each are often parallel, although pertaining to different functions. Even in cyclic time the present is not a repetition of the past as has been maintained. Each cycle records change as is evident from the eschatology of the four ages in Puranic and Buddhist cosmology. Let me now turn the focus away from the rather dog-eared arguments about the absence of historical writing and consider what I regard as the more relevant question: namely, how the past was perceived and recorded in early India? Answers to this question, even if partial, might provide insights into early Indian history and that is the main thrust of my argument: that by looking at the way in which early societies looked at their past, we begin to get insights into how these early societies functioned. The early Indian historical tradition has two distinctly different historiographies. One emerges from what might be called a Puranic framework, often associated with Hinduism. This draws on ideologies deriving from Vedic Brahmanism and the emergence of new sects and social movements of the first millennium A.D., closely associated with what we now called Hinduism. Historical traditions, as I hope to show, are encapsulated in texts called the Puranas [spelled phonetically]. The second historiography draws from the ideologies which evolved from a questioning of, if not opposition to, Brahmanism. This is often labeled as shramanic [spelled phonetically] from the word shramana referring to Buddhist and Jain monks. The ideological underlining of each of these would, therefore, be different as is reflected in the choice and representation of events and personalities that each highlight from the past. Alternate positions which, although not always stated as such, are, nevertheless, reflected in diverse formulations for in contradictions. The two terms associated either separately or conjointly with traditions relating to the past are Itihasa [spelled phonetically] and Purana [spelled phonetically]. Itihasa literally means "Thus, indeed it was," and has come to be used now to mean history but earlier it was not history in any modern sense of the term. It was merely a reference to what was believed to have happened in the past. Purana refers to that which belongs to ancient times and includes a medley of events and stories believe to go back to the early past and some that we would now call myths. The origins of the Puranic framework, of the Itihasa Puranic tradition, go back to forms that are embedded in various texts such as the "Rigveda" [spelled phonetically], which dates back to the second millennium B.C. There's a category of hymns in the Rigveda known as the [Hindi] hymns, literally hymns in praise of gift-giving. They have hardly any ritual function and one

often wonders why they were included in an essentially ritual text. They are in praise of contemporary heroes and chiefs of clans for their generosity in giving gifts to the composers of the hymns, which were made usually in celebration of a successful cattle raid. Association with the sacrificial ritual perhaps gave these hymns greater credence and certainly ensured their continuity. The poets that composed them frequently talk about how they are giving immortality to the Rajahs, the Chiefs, and they did indeed give them immortality because we know of them now because of these hymns. Heroic acts involving raids and skirmishes are enlarged in the epics [Hindi], which moved from multiple raids to one formal, devastating battle. The epics are not averse to innovative features since the appeal to the past can be to fix a precedent for action in the present. This is an appeal which still exists. The [Hindi] as Itihasa was used on occasion for this purpose: namely to legitimize the induction of hitherto unknown clans and their social custom. It was said that they were a part of the earlier society. The central narrative, however, is the confrontation between the clans, a story familiar from many epics. The Lamai [spelled phonetically], on the other hand, differs in as much as the conflict is between not two equally matched clans but a newly emerging Kingdom at [Hindi] and the clan society of Lankar [spelled phonetically] where the latter is demonized as the famous [Hindi]. Interesting, both ethics are recited at a sacrificial ritual, almost as if the earlier tradition was being continued, even if the compositions themselves were not initially the ritual text that they were converted into later. But, essentially, the important point is that the epic text, as historical texts, are really talking about clan conflict. The embedded history in these texts relates to clan societies and registers the gradual coming of kingdoms. The authors are looking back nostalgically to the past. Perhaps for historical purposes, this might have been the function that had priority. Persons and events gave form to remembering this past and the past that is remembered is much bigger than just persons and events. Historicity of person and event, however, would be of less concern where the intention was rather to evoke a past society. Such an evocation is common to epic forms. Composed as oral traditions, they are currently seen as repositories of historical consciousness whereas a century ago societies without literacy were said to be without history. This was the raw material that was reformulated into a long-distance view of the past as in a section of the Puranas referred to as the [Hindi], the succession lists. Earlier scattered material was drawn together and a pattern was worked out. It was marked by distinctive phases in the mapping of the lineages and their genealogies and, therefore, of the past. The lineages and genealogies have various functions and are carefully mapped. It becomes a databank for those in later times wishing to latch themselves onto a lineage and, thereby, claim the aristocratic status of being [Hindi], which many did. It was not intended to be counted literally generation by generation, nor to be interpreted as racial identities as has been done by some modern historians. The listing of clans in this record are succeeded by a sequence of dynasties and the rulers of each of these. This change represented the mutation to kingdoms. The list began with dynasties of the sixth century B.C., continuing up to the Guptas of the fourth century A.D. These are largely historically attested dynasties such as the Nundas, the Mauryas, the Shungas, the Andras, the Guptas [spelled phonetically] and so on. Another indicator of the transition from clan to

kingdom was the change from the [Hindi] lineages, the lineages of aristocratic status, to non[Hindi] dynasties, the latter frequently being members of the lower castes. The legitimacy of kin relations among clan chiefs had been undermined by upstarts of low status, appropriating power through changing the policies from chief-ship to kingship. Where obscure families acquired status with the help of a priestly elite, these families in return provided patronage to the priestly elite and, in theory, supported the Orthodox social codes. From the perspective of the Itihasa Puran tradition, the Gupta period starting from about the fourth century A.D. marks a watershed between history that is what I call embedded: that is, not primarily written as history but included in ritual texts and differs from the articulation of the historical tradition in the post-Gupta period, which is reflected in new, specifically historical genres of text: what might be called history in embodied forms and I make this distinction between embedded history and embodied history where I argue that embodied history has its own genres of literature. The occasion is now the court and not a ritual or a gathering of the clan. Historical consciousness is made apparent in other more striking ways: for example, in the reuse of objects from the past known to have had a historical value. The most dramatic example of such reuse is the pillar erected by the Mauryan Emperor Asoka in the third century B.C., now located in the Alhabab Fort [spelled phonetically] in northern India. It carries a series of inscriptions of Asoka and one particular series that talks about his ethics of tolerance and nonviolence, particularly nonviolence. It carries a series of inscriptions of Asoka as also a long eulogy on the military campaigns of the good Gupta King Samudragupta ruling 700 years later in the fourth century A.D. It's the same pillar that has these two inscriptions and yet another inscription giving the genealogy of the Mogul Emperor [Hindi] of the early 17th century A.D. Evidently there was a perception of the pillar encapsulating history and the legitimacy that history provides. Hence, the deliberate choice of the same pillar, even though the reasons for eulogizing Samudragupta's military campaigns were contrary to the ethics of the Ashokan edicts, all on the same pillar. The construction of the past now moved at this time out of the chrysalis of embedded form and came to be expressed in genres that were newly created as specifically historical texts. These were the charitas, or biographies of kings and ministers, the vamasavalis, or regional chronicles, and on a much larger and wider scale, the royal inscriptions, some of which are, in effect, dynastic annals. The change of forms, information on authorship, and distinct ideological perspectives signal the importance of the historical tradition to post-Gupta society. This is society after about the 5th century A.D. There is awareness of sources in varying degrees of the specificities of space and time and of the significance of the past. What was earlier subterranean now surfaces and takes a visible form. Kingdoms, of which there were many more in this period, were being transformed into complex state systems. Their take on the past was necessarily different from before. A new form of kingship was symbolic of the polity requiring additional mechanisms of legitimacy and representations of state power. Kings are occasionally said to be incarnations of deity, but even as such, they were not even a pale shadow of the articulation of divine will, as in other historiographies. Incarnations did not direct events. They shored up the claims of the ruler, and this is a very fundamental difference. The role of human agency remains primary. The biographies are of

contemporary kings but include the historical antecedents of both the subject of the biography and the author. The focus is on a particular problem. For example, in "The Harsha Charita," written by Banabhatta in the 7th century on the famous king Harshavardhana, the focus is on the ways in which Harshavardhana acquired sovereignty of the central part of northern India. And it was not just by military campaigns, and that is the interesting aspect of this biography. Similarly, another biography of an Eastern Indian ruler, Rama Pala, a biography called "Ramacharita," is about how he defends himself against his feudatories, who are all in confederation and attacking him, and gives an absolutely magnificent picture of feudal society as it were in India in the 11th/12th centuries A.D. The intention is, in these biographies, to give the official version justifying the king's action. New powers claimed by kingship in new societies are being invoked, and if they are giving the official version, one inevitably asks the question, "Why are they doing so? Who is, in fact, critiquing them, that they required this official version?" Inscriptions, especially those recording grants of land, have their own format. There is one section, very commonly referred to as the prashastis, the eulogy of the ruler, in Sanskrit. It is largely formulaic. The opening benediction is followed by the origins and achievements of the dynasty and the reigning king and the qualifications of the donor to whom land is being granted. Genealogies move from desirable links to actual descent. Some statements are rhetoric, but much is acceptable historical narrative, set for the most part in a precise chronology. The section of the inscription in the regional language, which is not in Sanskrit, addresses aspects of the donation and the local administration, obviously meant for the local administration. They provide us with indicators of how the system worked at lower levels. The vamasavalis, or chronicle, of which the finest example is the 12th century "Rajatarangini" of Kalhana, was the document establishing the legitimacy of the kingdom and of its rulers. As such chronicles were composed in various kingdoms, coinciding with the process of regions becoming acculturated to mainstream Sanskritic culture, some continued to be updated up to recent centuries. I think the last updating of some chronicles was done in the early 17th century. Origins tend to be linked to the Puranic descent lists, but there is much that accounts for persons and events, largely of the past and some of the present, and provides a perspective of the history of the region. These are valuable in tracing the process of state formation and the establishing of kingdoms, which is in fact what these chronicles were actually doing. They were less concerned with recording people and events and much more concerned with recording the processes of historical change. As a genre of historical writing, they continue into the regional languages when chronicles become a necessity in a newly established kingdom. These perceptions were predictably different in the parallel historiography in Jain and Buddhist writing, although the difference narrows in later times. Texts from the Buddhist and Jain tradition sometimes contested the representation from Raman authorship. For example, the earliest Jain version of the story of Rama was Vimalasuri's "Paumacariya" of around the 3rd century A.D. Not only did it contradict the Valmiki version, but insisted on its own historicity. A political dialogue is implied in these contradictions.

The choice of subject in later Jain biographies and chronicles highlights those who were their patrons, and the style is not too dissimilar from other biographies and chronicles. Both narratives of the history of Sri Lanka in the "Dipavamsa" and the "Mahavamsa" of the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. begin with the earliest kingdoms in the Ganges Plain and continue until the end of the Mauryan Empire in the 2nd century B.C. The Indian link is because of the Buddhist connection. These chronicles have a different focus on events and personalities, as compared to the more Hindu Puranic tradition. For example, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka is a mere name in the Puranic king list, because he was a Buddhist and did not patronize the Puranic religious sects, but in these Buddhist chronicles, he is both powerful as an emperor and the most important patron of the Buddhist sangha order. The reason for the difference is ideological. The sanghas' attempt to ensure authority included correlating the succession of monastic elders to successive rulers. These heterodox traditions, as they have been called, have a sharper understanding of the centrality of a historical perspective. The reasons can be many. Literacy for them meant not only copying the Buddhist or Jain canon, but many other kinds of writing. This included commentaries on the canon, monastic chronicles which record sectarian activities, including dissidence, as well as the biographies of the founders and elders who were historical figures. Records of the properties of the monasteries had also to be maintained. Events were generally related to the central date commanding their chronology: the date of the Mahaparinibbana, the death of the Buddha, in the case of the Buddhist texts. A new and distinctive kind of historical consciousness emerges with all these changes of form. Some links with the embedded tradition are present, but their role is different. These were forms that continued into later medieval times. Inscriptions, biographies, and chronicles, used by court chroniclers and authors, speaking for institutions of authority, continue in Persian, as indeed they also continue in Sanskrit and the regional languages in the 2nd millennium A.D. All these texts can be looked at afresh and in a comparative way, because historians are now turning to themes which had earlier been precluded from history. It is recognized that groups in society have their own versions of history which reflect the perceptions of their past as viewed by particular authors. Even what we regard as a fabricated version claiming to be historical is of historiographical interest. Fabrication is often the rhetoric of ideology, as indeed it is also an attempt to bypass the problematic; therefore, the reason for the fabrication has to be sought. Any codification of the past tends to be selective. The reasons for making a particular selection are significant. The historical tradition in its Puranic, shamanic, and other forms come to constitute the core of the constituents of historical thinking. A heroic phase moved to a courtly phase, or a king had an interface with the sangha [spelled phonetically]. The ideology of the Buddhist and Jain perspective was different from the Puranic, although some of the data could overlap. In looking at the Itihas-Purana, or historical tradition, my intention is not to try and reinstate an indigenous interpretation of early Indian history, or to argue that there is an authentic version of Indian history -- an Indian view of India -- in such sources. This would be a present-day imposition on the past. I am arguing that an awareness of the perceptions which earlier authors had of their past could be a way of illuminating our understanding of that earlier society. Such perceptions would relate to the creation of variable identities, to social hierarchies of dominance and subordination, that involved differentiated access to resources and to claims of status. It is

for us as historians to explore the manner in which these early writings record and explain the processes of historical change as perceived by their authors. Such an interrogation of earlier traditions might help us recognize the nature of historical consciousness that went into the making of historical traditions and, in some instances, of historical writing. Thank you. [applause] Female Speaker: Can you stay for some questions? Romila Thapar: [Assent]. Female Speaker: Okay, Dr. Thapar will accept some questions from the audience, and please wait for the microphone. Female Speaker: Fascinating lecture. Before you talked about this imbedded and embodied histories, you mentioned about rationality and Enlightenment, and I think that's one of the most important themes that we don't seem to explore as much, in the sense that Western historiography -- that Enlightenment must precede modernity, and when, in fact, even Russia, Japan, so many countries and societies, never really went through so-called "Enlightenment," and yet they have to struggle painfully because they feel that they have to wrestle with Enlightenment and become modern. So since you mentioned that, I wonder if you could explain a little bit further about the Indian situation. Romila Thapar: Well, what I was really trying to emphasize was the fact that, in a sense, the kind of history which until recent years we regarded as good conventional history was something that came out of the Enlightenment, and therefore to look for that kind of history in societies that did not go through the process of the Enlightenment was really in a sense a negative exercise. The next question, then, is, "Were there other forms of histories that these societies had, which we could look at in terms of how they saw their past, how they put it together, and the degree to which this is really historical writing, per se?" And this is what I was trying to develop in terms of the Indian data, that even at a time when we didn't go through this process of Enlightenment, we still had writing that related to the past, and we still had writing that I think, for example, in some cases can be called historical writing. Now, of course, the thing is that these days, in the post-Enlightenment age, there are many intellectual trends that would deny the importance of Enlightenment history. I can't say that I'm too sympathetic to all these trends; I think that we have learned a certain amount from the kinds of emphases that they have given, but nevertheless, I guess I am old-fashioned. Male Speaker:

How, in simple terms, would you describe the way in which your vast and variegated exploration of this long period changes the sense of modern India's identity from either the old colonial view or the new hyper-nationalist view? What are the main two or three things that really are different about the identity affecting modern India -- admitting that's only part of your canvas, which is much broader, the whole subcontinent -- but how does this affect, or should it affect -- and has it because of your great influence in textbooks as well as general deep prose -- how has that changed the sense of modern India's growing sense of identity? We are conscious in this country of enormous changes in technology and various things, but what about the sense of Indians -- I know it's difficult to generalize, but somebody who has your depth of knowledge, it would be fascinating to know what that sort of new sense of identity would be that follows from your investigations or is suggested by them. Romila Thapar: Well, let me begin by saying that the sense of identity changes as one changes one's understanding of one's past. Historical changes do bring about changes of identity. And what we're facing at the moment in India, really, is a choice of two identities. One is an identity which draws very much from an extremist position that argues that the real essence of Indian culture lies in religion and lies in Hinduism, which is then defined, and of course all -isms are always redefined for whatever purpose they are needed, so there is a new definition of Hinduism that comes into this. And then there are the groups of people who say, well, there was much more to the past than religion, whatever the religion may be -- it could be Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, or whatever it is -- and what one is trying to suggest is that let's look at these other categories as well. Let's look at how society was organized. Let me give you one example that, you know, we were brought up to believe that caste was rigid, that once you were born into a particular caste, or, you know, whatever the caste was, it had a status and a hierarchy, and that couldn't be changed. And then when you start looking at historical texts, you find that the status of certain castes that were low were somehow made high, and the historian then says, "Now, wait a minute. How did this happen?" And so you go into doing a historical analysis of how this happened, and this has been a very major contribution that a lot of the historians from the 1960s onward have made: sociologists, social anthropologists, historians altogether. Now, this becomes important, for example, in present-day India, where you have a conflict going on between lower castes and upper castes, or at least, certainly, a desire of lower castes to aspire to better status. Now, if they know of a history and they know that this is not something that existed in eternity, from the very beginning, that there were other ways in which people in the past did make a change to their social status, it does create a difference. It doesn't become something that is destined, as it were; it does give people a sense of, well, you know, let's see how we can do it, and what is it we need to do in order to make that change. And the same kind of thing would apply to other aspects of life as well. Basically, it's really a question of -- or at least, let me say that I think about it in terms of what is the identity of the Indian citizen. And for me, the identity of the Indian citizen, I feel should draw much more from all these texts that I have been talking about and all these changes, you know -- clan-based, skin-based, caste-based, to kingdoms, to states -- to realize that there was an

immense change taking place right through the centuries. It was not a static society. To realize that you had varieties of societies and that there were lots of changes that took place. Societies themselves underwent change; there were other societies that came and confederated, and there were changes and so on. So, it's the openness and plurality of the past, which is very important, and I think that for today's India, that is the major message that we get from all these texts -- that is, the need for plurality and openness. Male Speaker: At the time that you're talking about history -- the Indian history -- the concept of India must have been very strange, because there is no concept of India at the time that you are talking about the history. It's more a mosaic of vernacular happenings and events that were -Romila Thapar: And states, and states. Male Speaker: And states -Romila Thapar: And formed kingdoms. Male Speaker: I'm a little confused right now between clans and embodied forms and imbedded forms -Romila Thapar: [Laughs] Sorry. Male Speaker: But then, I'm not a scholar in your field; I'm just a layperson, a scientist, really, but it's always bothered me that the concept of India, which is really a modern concept, is absolutely and totally artificial, and it blurs the differences between different conglomerates on the Indian subcontinent that had their own history, their own wonderful thing, and the study of Indian history is not as important as it is to understand the history of these little bits and pieces, the mosaics that make up an artificial India. And to this day, we're struggling with different pieces of India that want to take off in different directions, but we always tell ourselves, "We are Indians, we love each other and we should all be in the same place," but is that historical reality? Romila Thapar: Well -Male Speaker: In your studies, did you see -Romila Thapar: Yes, the historical reality is not that there is a single history and every Indian stands by it. There is a single broad sweep of history that one may accept, but there is definitely -- there are regional

variations, and we have to learn to understand these regional variations and come to terms with it. But on the business of "was there an India then?" the point is that all nation states are recent developments. I mean, any nation state that you take today is, at most, 200 years old. So that's not surprising; that's not at all surprising. This is -Male Speaker: [Inaudible] that united the Spartans and the Athenians and all the others, and that was critical. Romila Thapar: Yes, and that was not a nationalist concept. That was much more a civilizational concept. In the same way, you can say there was a concept of belonging to the caste group or whatever it may be, which was much broader than the individual kingdom. That was certainly there. But that was not a nationalist concept, and that's my problem with the idea that, you know, why can't we take India all the way back, or when does India begin, and what was there before was the multiplicity of kingdoms. In the Indian case, what was there before and what is there even now is the whole gamut of life and society, from food gatherers to IT specialists, and that, for me, is something terribly exciting, challenging, difficult to work with, and this has been the case all along. We've had a variety of societies, and so even when I'm talking -- for example, when I'm writing about the Mauryan Empire. When I wrote my Ph.D., 50-what-odd years ago, it was of centralized bureaucratic empire, because everybody only talked about centralized kingdoms in India. And then twenty years ago, I sat down and looked at the problem again and started talking about differentiated administrations, because you had some areas that were clearly centralized, there were others that were not, and the others which were forest tribes, over whom no one had any control, to the point where even to this day, the control is pretty dicey. So one is talking about an extremely complex society, and I was trying to underline the fact that one isn't talking about the history of a nation; one is talking about the history of a variety of societies, and all that I'm trying to do is to say, let us go into all these regions, pick up the texts from these regions, and then see what we're being told about the regions and which regions are in conversation and dialogue with which other regions and why. Female Speaker: I think we'll just have one last question and -- Dr. Dean? Male Speaker: [Inaudible]. Female Speaker: Oh, there's another? Okay, we'll do two questions, but that'll be it. Male Speaker: Would you please comment about the clandestine discovery of Kotula's [spelled phonetically] "Orteshasdo" [spelled phonetically] and the politics around it.

Romila Thapar: Sorry, does -Male Speaker: I was just curious to find out the clandestine discovery of Kotula's Orteshasdo and the politics around that time, how did it impact the historiography. Romila Thapar The clandestine discovery. It wasn't very clandestine. You know, the point is that a lot of the early manuscripts lay -- some lay in marks [spelled phonetically] and what would be the equivalent today of libraries and monasteries and so on. Others lay in people's homes; they were in private hands. So some manuscripts would turn up when the interest at the turn of the century became one where everybody was looking for manuscripts. And so it wasn't a clandestine discovery; it was just a very pleasant discovery that this thing, this document, this manuscript, came up. The politics were really not very acute. The nationalist opinion was very excited, because colonial scholarship had gone on saying, "Oh, Indians are all spiritual and religious and don't care for anything else, and they have no sense of how to organize their lives and how to make their lives productive," and here you had a text that talked about nothing but how to organize your life and make it productive, and how to run the government in the best possible centralized fashion, so that there was a lot of excitement that, in a sense, the past of India had been somehow set right by this text. Female Speaker: Okay, just one last question. Female Speaker: Thank you for this wonderful, wonderful presentation, and as you mentioned something which I thought was very exciting -- you talked about -- well, history can be written in many ways, as the great man history, the dynasties and so on, but also the concept of linearity -- chronologically linear, and then you talked about the circular, and I was wondering if this is rooted in theological philosophy, in a way, because you talk about a Semitic tradition, which is chronological, and in a way, a person is born, suffers, and dies, but that's the end of it. The Indian tradition is more -- is richer, in a way, because there is reincarnation, there is a return, so that perhaps this circular concept that you mentioned could be rooted in, well, in religion or philosophy, as you wanted to say, because life continues, but in another way, whereas the Semitic tradition ends at a certain point in a man's life, in a dynasty's life, so I was wondering if you would comment on this. Romila Thapar: Yeah, well, there are actually two views on that, the cosmology of circular time. One is, as you said, that if everything is a question of rebirth and it'll all come back and so on, then the cycle of time will also return, and so this feeds into the notion of rebirth. The other is, of course, the figures, which are very interesting. The entire full cycle of four smaller cycles pulled together have -- the main figure is the same as the one that was used in Sumerian astronomy and was then -- somehow reached -- Indian astronomy used it as well. One is not allowed to say it was then

borrowed, but anyway. But, the interesting thing is that as the figures went on being discussed, there's a lot of dialogue, it seems, between the writers of the cosmology and the astronomers, and they sometimes decide on the same figures, and they sometimes don't, and it is thought that the figures were extremely large, because the astronomers in their theories used -- had to have larger figures. But the interesting thing is, and the reason why we think that there was a dialogue, is that most astronomers use the same figures as are given in the cosmology scheme. But there is one very famous astronomer, Aryabhatta, who is possibly the best astronomer that Indian civilization produced, who doesn't use the same figures. He uses a different set of figures. But clearly there was some give and take in this situation, and possibly the authors of the Puranas were borrowing the figures from the astronomers. At least, that's what I would like to think, but that may be a very rational way of looking at it. And the reason for that would simply be that, you know, you prove that the cosmology is correct because the astronomers are saying the same thing, and so it sort of reinforces it. Female Speaker: I would like to invite you to please thank Dr. Thapar for a wonderful lecture. [applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. [end of transcript]