An excerpt from Chapter 16 of Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present by Romila Thapar and Namit Arora, Penguin Allen Lane, November 2025.

NAMIT: Prof. Thapar, early Indian culture is often described as relatively nonviolent and tolerant. To what extent was this true? I mean, people often cite Buddhism’s and Jainism’s advocacy of nonviolence, which even extended to animals. This is significant. But ideals are one thing, reality another. As Walter Benjamin said, ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ A fundamental attribute of every state society is organized violence. States enforce class hierarchies, property rights and taxation through violence—or threats thereof. State societies typically grow through war, and they aggressively expand urban and agrarian spaces at the expense of forest dwellers, pastoralists or other marginalized groups and natural ecosystems. While some might see early India’s religious syncretism as relatively tolerant—and I’ll come to that in a minute—its caste system had intolerance and violence baked in, as did its patriarchy.

By ‘violence’, I mean not just physical violence but also systemic psychological violence and abuse which is often no less debilitating to a person’s well-being than physical harm. The threat of violence can be pretty awful too. My definition also includes violence to non-human species, the ecology and fragile ecosystems.

So I have two related questions: (1) How do you assess early India’s record on nonviolence and tolerance in the social realm, and (2) What is the record of early India’s dominant social groups on ecological stewardship of the kind we historically associate with adivasis and indigenous peoples worldwide? This question may seem odd, but I’m raising it because there is a trend among certain Hindutva ideologues who superficially speak of decolonization while pushing Hindutva as the path to achieving it (rolls eyes)! Their narrative asserts that Hindu Sanatan Dharma—touted as an ‘eternal way of life’, despite the historical implausibility of anything being eternal—once embodied sound ecological stewardship, which they claim was disrupted only with the arrival of European colonizers. Because it suits their purpose, they cleverly ignore the wide gulf in ecological sensibilities between the expansionist Brahmanical elites and the adivasis, who are now classified as Hindus by the Indian Constitution but who were historically very distinct.

So yeah, first, how do you see India’s record of nonviolence and tolerance in the social realm?

ROMILA: The record of nonviolence and tolerance in early India is similar to that of most other societies. There really isn’t anything especially different. It may have gone up or down over time. There were, however, the Shramana teachers—largely Buddhist and Jain—who preached the centrality of ahimsa (nonviolence) and karuna (compassion) as taught by the Buddha and some others. That is notable. Contrast the Buddha’s views on violence and how it is to be avoided as far as possible with the Hindu tradition, where it is sometimes discussed as contingent violence. If there is a really nasty situation, then violence is allowed but by and large, it is preferable not to be violent. Some have argued that this form of contingent violence is present in the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita. I have often thought that if the Buddha had been Arjuna’s charioteer on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, there would surely have been a different discussion on violence and nonviolence. There is a difference between rejecting violence, irrespective of the circumstances, and allowing it to be contingent in a situation that may require it. However, this could be a debatable point.

In Hindu and Buddhist literature, violence is not altogether discarded or banished, but one could say that whereas Hinduism accommodates it to some extent, Buddhism in the same situation would tend to disallow it if possible. The presence of violence is challenging to an ethic that disapproves of it, hence the tendency for nonviolence not to be absolutely insisted upon. Buddhist teaching may be more sensitive to the presence of nonviolence.

The examples of violence are plentiful. There is the violence related to survival—of hunter-gatherers, of cultivators when clearing land and the animals on it, of traders in their caravans who would kill animals that threatened them. But then there’s all the unnecessary violence, driven by greed and expansionary pursuits. The burning of forests and consequent killing of animal life, including hunting for fun, is referred to. A consequence of agricultural expansion was conflict between sedentary farmers and mobile pastoralists whose ranges were threatened. The much-applauded conquests of conquerors—and I am not just talking about foreign conquerors but also those within the subcontinent—were examples of large-scale violence. All the little Indian kingdoms that were at war with each other, they were indulging in intolerance and violence.

Major statements on this come from the edicts of Ashoka. Why would an emperor call for tolerance among the different sects, if tolerance was already in place and there was no violence? Obviously, there was a problem, so he had to ask for peace to set it right. In the early edicts he does not refer to violence ensuing from wars. That comes later. In the thirteenth Rock Edict, where he confesses to being contrite at having caused so much suffering because of the Kalinga War waged by him, the ethic of ahimsa and tolerance that deeply moved him, seems to have come from his sense of the value of human life. Significantly, he does not quote from any text when addressing the public. There are many conquests, of later rulers such as Samudragupta, or Harsha, and the constant wars between the many dynasties, which were not lacking in violence, and this was happening all the time. Most of the rulers, including the well-known rulers in the subcontinent, spent much time in battles and consequent violence.

The image of the great king is of one who is a conqueror, and conquest assumes violence and intolerance. So I really don’t buy the theory that early Indians were especially nonviolent or tolerant.

NAMIT: That’s a very good point. Why do we instinctively regard conquerors and ruthless empire builders as great? Rather than see them as antiheroes, we adore aggressive power, military triumphs and expansionary pursuits in kings, especially if they’re now seen as belonging to ‘our people’. We equate domination of others with civilizational strength and well-being. We also tend to value the ‘high culture’ that empires often encourage through courtly patronage while ignoring their awful costs and downsides: their ethos of coercive extraction and concentration of wealth, their organized exploitation of nature and people, etc. I’m not singling out Indians here; it’s a global malady. I think this lopsided way of looking at things now infects too many of our assessments in the modern world too.

Returning to violence in early India, Upinder Singh offers a similar view to yours in her book, Political Violence in Ancient India. It’s also interesting to me that like the Iliad, the Mahabharata too is suffused with violence and slaughter, though it powerfully laments its consequences in the Stri Parva. And speaking of state violence, another aspect of it comes to mind—punishments meted out by medieval Indian states, some documented by foreign travellers, as in Vijayanagar. It seems no worse than the violence of medieval European states, but it was still utterly awful: torture, dismembering, beheadings, elephants goaded into tearing men apart, thrusting wooden stakes through the belly and so on. Horrid stuff!

But what do you make of the argument that because of a certain syncretic streak in early India’s big religions—and Indians not obsessing over some divine writ in a book and so on—they were relatively more flexible and tolerant in the religious dimension? At the same time, they made life much harder for people in the social hierarchy dimension. Every caste had to know its place and rules of engagement with other castes; else, it would be punished with violence and/or social boycotts. So-called honour killings still continue. This overlapped with violence that was baked into Indian feudalism, including bonded labour, land seizures, and collective and individual punishments such as flogging and mutilation. Then there is the long history of gender violence, as in dowry murders, various kinds of abuse, etc.

So it seems to me that Indian culture has doled out its violence and intolerance in some similar but also in many dissimilar ways than cultures elsewhere. Its forms and their distribution were different across social and familial spheres. I suppose such differences are part of what it means to be a different culture.

ROMILA: I think there is that difference, yes, and there are contradictions. For instance, if sati is taken as a religious ritual, does its implicit violence define religion? And yet, at the same time, the same religion can also endorse meditation as almost a form of ritual, which is entirely non-violent and tolerant. The same religion can be preaching non-violence yet have major rituals that are violent, say if animals are sacrificed. So how do the two become part of the same religious belief?

NAMIT: Yes, I think such contradictions exist in all religions. In medieval times, many relatively pacifist strains of the Bhakti Movement coexist with periodic incidents of violence against people over cow slaughter, or even the mere suspicion of it. Such lynchings continue to this day—largely against Muslims and Dalits—and that’s an example of religious violence. Untouchability, too, is suffused with violence, both physical and psychological, and it has long enjoyed the impunity of religious sanction. All these contradictions certainly exist within Hinduism though they’re different from those in Abrahamic and other religions.

Let me then return to my earlier question. Could we say that, when it comes to violence in our ancient and early medieval past, there was less violence between religious groups but no less of the other types of violence: social, military, etc.? Could we say that religious groups indulged in less violence against each other in early India?

ROMILA: I don’t think so because these sects could be quite antagonistic if they chose to. There was a possibility of friendly relations but also the possibility of hostility with violence. Small groups working out their relationships and their rank in the social hierarchy using religion, can be a very complex exercise.

Ashoka speaks of Brahmins and Shramanas as two distinct categories, each with its own meaning. The grammarian Patanjali, in the Mahabhashya, compares their relationship to that of a mongoose and a snake. For me, this is a very telling statement. This tension continues over time: the Rajatarangini refers to the Brahmins’ ill-treatment of Buddhists, while inscriptions from South India record Shaivite hostility toward Jains. These were not cordial or peaceful relationships; they were often marked by conflict and violence.

NAMIT: Yes, violence was certainly a factor in the decline of Buddhism in India. The Chinese pilgrims mention some of it, but other Buddhist and non-Buddhist texts speak of it too. Many Buddhist monuments were destroyed by Brahmanical groups—not just in India. The Mahavamsa, the great Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicle, has some gory details on the Cholas’ treatment of Buddhists in Sri Lanka in the tenth–eleventh centuries.

To your example of Shaivite violence against Jains in Tamil Nadu, one can add examples of Lingayat violence against Jains in Karnataka and of periodic violence between Shaivites and Vaishnavites. While researching my documentary film on the Maha Kumbh Mela of 2013, I learnt that even within the Shaivite fold, the centuries-old akharas—such as Juna, Avahan, Niranjani, Atal and other akharas of ascetic monks trained in basic martial arts—have often resorted to violence and even fought pitched battles. Deep down, their conflicts are over social and political dominance, only ostensibly triggered by questions such as who will take the first dip in the holy Ganga on the auspicious shahi snan days of the Mela!

Now, about my second question. How do you see the historical record of early India’s dominant social groups on ecological stewardship? Were they any more responsible than their counterparts in other parts of the world?

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