Ancient Indians had a sense of history: Romila Thapar

At a conference in 1956 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, historian Romila Thapar, a student at the time, started thinking about one of the key questions at the event: did ancient Indians have a sense of history?

“A decade later, I realised that this was actually irrelevant. Even in ancient times in India, records were kept and reference made to some past events, which were believed to have happened,” she explained.

In her talk on the historical traditions of early northern India on day two of The Hindu Lit for Life fest on Sunday, Professor Thapar said that though there may not have been a conventional form of historical writing, there are nevertheless many texts that reflect the historical consciousness of the past.

She said colonial scholars described the Indian past as ‘oriental despotism’, arguing that it was a static society that registered no historical change, and therefore it had no use for recording the past and used only cyclic time. Mentioning various texts, she said that early Indian history was far from static, and in fact it followed both cyclic and linear systems of time.

On the historical traditions of early India, Professor Thapar said there were three distinct historiographies (ways of explaining the past): the Bardic tradition, the tradition of the Puranas and Shramanic traditions, which were parallel but quite different from each other.

The historiography of the bards or sutas, as they were called, lay in their narrating events of heroes in the form of ballads and epic fragments. It is treated as a kind of substratum source of history. She said that in both the Puranic and Shramanic traditions, there was a gradual change in form, information and comment, moving towards creating a historic tradition.

Professor Thapar concluded by stressing on the need to have the perceptions of the early authors, which, she said, could help understand the past. “We have to search for how the past saw its past as a parallel study to see how we see the past,” she said to a packed auditorium.

 

These are some of the ideas that the historian has discussed in her latest book,The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India(2013: Permanent Black and Harvard University Press, 2013).