by JAWED NAQVI
Historian Romila Thapar delivering a lecture in New Delhi on Sunday. PHOTO/S. Subramanium/The Hindu
Increasingly of late, Prof Romila Thapar is required to assume the nearly impossible role of Emperor Akbar, who, according to the official plaque at his tomb near Agra, had “created a nation out of a mob”. To her credit (and sorrow), the ageless historian stands firm among a handful of public intellectuals left in India who have refused to be pulverised by the rise of right-wing Hindutva mobs.
Indeed, the more the lumpen hordes seek to turn what remains of Nehruvian India into a veritable mob, running amok at academic institutions, in art galleries, bookstores, movie halls, and other assorted areas of public discourse, the more worriedly Prof Thapar’s liberal devotees seek her out for help.
The state-backed hordes pose a clear challenge to India’s hard-won democratic spaces. What can an erudite historian do to check the slide? On the other hand, with the entire political opposition swamped by its ceaseless failures to thwart Hindutva, does she have a choice but to yield? Prof Thapar’s mantra to tame the threat, I noticed at her lecture on Sunday, primarily if not exclusively lies in invoking India’s questioning spirit, which she fears may have sadly gone adrift.
“There are more academics in existence than ever before but most prefer not to confront authority even if it debars the path of free thinking,” she lamented to a packed hall of listeners at the third Nikhil Chakravartty memorial lecture. “Is this because they wish to pursue knowledge undisturbed or because they are ready to discard knowledge, should authority require them to do so?” (The previous two lectures in honour of one of India’s most respected journalists were addressed by professors Eric Hobsbawm and Amartya Sen.)
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(Thanks to Feroz Mehdi)