On August 10, 2022, historian Romila Thapar was interviewed by Karan Thapar for The Wire. In the 42-minute chat, Thapar said that Modi’s India does not represent the fulfilment of the dreams and expectations she had in 1947 when she was a 15-year-old who was terribly excited by independence.
Speaking as a historian about how history is likely to remember Narendra Modi, she made it clear that it is unlikely to be kind to him. He may be a colossus but history finds that all colossi have cracked feet.
This is the transcript of the interview. It has been edited lightly for syntax and clarity.
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Romila, in 1947, you were just 15. What did independence mean for you? What were your dreams and expectations?
I regarded myself and my generation as having grown up on what I always refer to as the cusp of independence, so there were immense expectations. The expectations were largely of the imminence of something exciting that was going to change our society and make us into a new people from what we had been as colonised subjects. So there was tremendous excitement; excitement of a kind that drew in contemporary events and one’s thoughts about them.
It was my last year in school. But we were a bunch of people, as many many people of my age, who the moment the school was over and homework was done, and fortunately those days one wouldn’t have too much homework, we would rush to Gandhi’s prayer meetings. Every time he came out of jail, he held a prayer meeting, and we would rush there and listen and chat amongst ourselves about “did we really understand what he was saying?”, “what was he saying?”, “what was it like?”, and so on.
And then there was this big event in school, when I was told on August 15 we are going to celebrate the independence of India. And so there would be a meeting of the entire school with parents, well-wishers, friends, everybody, a huge gathering. And the prefects of which I happened to be one would plant a sapling, bring down the Union Jack and put up the Indian flag, and that was a tremendously emotional moment for all of us, the change of flags. And then I was told I was to make a speech. I was terrified. What was I going to say? All of these people there whom I didn’t know, and I ran around in circles for two weeks asking everybody “what shall I say?”, “what shall I say?”.
And then one of my teachers, who happened to be the history teacher, said to me: “Look, you are discussing all of these issues amongst yourselves. Doesn’t matter whether they are sensible. Just get up and say this is what we have been talking about.”
So I sat down and wrote my little speech and it began with the usual clichéd quotation from Wordsworth, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven”, and we were all very conscious of the fact that we were young, and we were the inheritors of something that was going to be new and thrilling, and was going to change our lives.
So a new world was opening for the young Romila!
Yes, a new world was opening, and one had immense expectations. The one word that kind of sums it up is “what were the slogans we were shouting?” and now when I think of it, it’s ironic, “Inquilab Zindabad!”, “Azadi!”. “Azadi” was the commonest slogan that everybody was shouting. There was nothing anti-national about it!
But at 15, those slogans had a particularly deep meaning for you?
Oh yes! It had the meaning of not just freedom for the country and independence.
But freedom for me!
Freedom for me to do what I want to do.
So it was a coming of age.
It was a coming of age.
Seventy-five years ago, in contrast to your sense of coming of age, many in the world thought India wouldn’t survive as a united country. And the truth is, we had challenges of caste, creed, ethnicity, region, language and cuisine. What were the strengths and what were the qualities that India found in itself that defied the doubters? Why did we survive united for 75 years?
Well, I would think of three things. One is, we were a very mixed bunch of people. In school, for example, I was trying to remember the other day the names of all my close friends, people who I have moved around with everywhere. So there was Leela Bhandari, a good Khatri Punjabi, Prabha Moite, a good Maharashtrian woman, Zia Sayed, the daughter of a tradesman from the city, Katie Shroff, the daughter of a Parsi entrepreneur, Margaret Kurpale, who’s an Anglo-Indian, whose father was predictably in the railway service, and Gillian Coreman, who’s the daughter of a British officer, working in the civil service. In fact, Gillian was the first person who taught me all about jazz. This was a completely mixed-up bunch of people. We were in and out of each others’ houses, we were talking to each other as if we all knew each other, not just superficially.
Was this the strength of India? That different people could mingle together and be friends?
Absolutely! They were my closest friends and I kept up a correspondence with at least three of them, until a couple of years ago.
So India’s diversity wasn’t its weakness, it was its strength.
It was its strength. And I think that, you know, we misunderstood a lot of the Indian tradition back then, by making it single, monopolistic, and so on. It’s that spread, it’s that plurality which is really very effective and I know it’s a cliché to say we had plurality. But we must define it in terms of the plurality of living together and the consciousness.
And this is what the world didn’t understand. When they predicted India would fall apart, they didn’t realise that actually plurality, diversity, heterogeneity, were India’s strengths, not its fracture points.
Yeah, because there is always a place for something. I mean religion wasn’t monolithic. It was a whole series of sects that were attributed to various religious movements.
And they all could live happily together?
And they could live happily together, or they could live unhappily, but it would be at the level of the sect. There was no such thing as an all-India religious organisation.
Which is why it didn’t threaten the unity of the country. Today, it’s become fashionable to decry and denigrate Nehruvian India, but almost 90% of the people who do it have no idea what Nehruvian India was like, and yet, those were your formative years.
Absolutely.
How do you remember Nehruvian India?
Well first of all, the feeling that one could do things if one tried. So we were all in a sense, I hate to use that word, ‘pioneers’. I remember when I finished my PhD in London and I was coming back to India, somebody said to me, “I suppose you now chase after a job in Delhi University.” And I said, “No, I’d like to go to a new university.” “Why a new university?” I said, “Try out new ideas, try out new ways of writing history.”
So the first quality of Nehruvian India was that it was a pioneer age?
It was a pioneer age, and one saw in it everything he did. For one thing of course, he was a very dignified politician. We’ve never had a prime minister that was so dignified.
Did you admire him?
I guess so. I’m not given to admiring people.
For the young 15-year-old Romila?
He was certainly an icon. There’s no question.
And he had a particular style about him, with a rosebud in his lapel.
Yeah, that, and more than that you know he was a man of dignity and he was somebody who was for me, very attractive. He was well-read, and it was reflected in his readings. And he had written up his reflections. Now, this really put him apart from the run-of-the-mill. And sometimes I joke about it and say, politicians do very well when they are put in jail for long periods because they can read and write and talk to others.
Jawaharlal Nehru addresses the midnight session of the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi on August 15, 1947. Photo: Wikimedia commons
He had spent 10 years in jail under the British.
Exactly. And this was a great sort of outcome.
So Nehru was someone young Romila Thapar in her late teens and early 20s looked up to and admired?
Yeah. Let me give you a little anecdote about that. I never really met him, in the same way my meeting with Gandhi was momentary. He spoke one sentence and I said, “Yes of course, Gandhi.” My life didn’t change but still, I met him briefly somewhere, there was a students’ organisation in Delhi that hosted the reception and a whole lot of us, 28 of us or so, were introduced to him and we said “Namaste” and that was it. Then someone said to me, when my book on Ashoka came out, someone said to me, “He’s very interested in that subject of history. Why don’t you send him a copy?” and I said, “I don’t like sending copies of my books to politicians. I mean, they won’t read them.” And they said, “No no, you know, he’s different.”
So after much persuasion, I sent him a copy of the book with a little note saying, “I know you won’t have time to read it but in case you are interested…” The next week, I got a letter back from him, saying, “Thank you for sending the book. I’m very interested in this subject and I see that you have also done a translation of the Edicts and so on. I hope I will in the near future have time to read it, and if so I will send you my comments. Yours sincerely, Jawaharlal Nehru.”
And I thought to myself which prime minister would have the courtesy to write back to a young student, a young teacher, starting off in her profession, and say thank you for sending me your book?
Also read: The Nehru That India Cannot Forget
Let’s at this point come to politicians because India as you know is a very political country. The discourse in our country is dominated by politics. So let me start by asking you how much does India today, the sort of country that we’ve become, owe to its first prime minister? How much does the fact that we have survived and succeeded as a democracy owe to Jawaharlal Nehru?
I would say that the foundations that he laid have kept us going. Not the superstructure, but the foundations. What do I mean by that? He was concerned with the definition of nationalism, which everybody has, it is secular and democratic, and there is a certain nationalist position. It’s secular because he was the one person who insisted that religion mustn’t come in the way of politics. The two have to be, and quite sensibly so, religion is a great thing. It’s a matter of faith, belief, it’s a matter of one’s psychological instincts. It shouldn’t come into politics. At all. He was firm on that. So much so that when the Somnath Temple was being rebuilt, and everyone was rushing around to do a pooja and whatever was required, Rajendra Prasad was asked as President of India to come and do the inaugural pooja.
And Nehru objected.
Nehru objected, Prasad still went, and Nehru’s comment was that “Sometimes I think I am the only secular person in this country.”
So would you go so far to say that the fact that we were for 40-50 years a secular country, that we were democratic and tolerant of dissent, that we had a free press, all of that, in a sense, is owed to Jawaharlal Nehru?
Yes. I mean even democracy, for example, there was this huge debate, I remember, on adult franchise, where people said you cannot have adult franchise because you can’t have people who are not educated or have people who are not sufficiently qualified. And he said nothing doing. A citizen is a citizen. And what did it do? It opened up the vote, particularly, to women and to Dalits, the Avarna category, those outside the caste system.
Nehru was one critical phase in our 75 years. Another was the Emergency of Indira Gandhi from 75-77. As you view it, was it an aberration or was it given India’s inherent contradictions, inevitable?
Actually, I would say neither of those, because what triggered off the Emergency – apart from whatever inclinations Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay may have had – what triggered it off was a judgment. And I don’t think people give enough attention to how crucial that judgment was.
To her career?
To her career and to democracy in the country.
So the judgment that threatened her career was the reason why India’s democracy was derailed for two years?
Well, I wouldn’t say it was the reason, but it had a lot to do with why democracy was derailed by the Emergency.
One woman under threat of her career decided that the way to repair the damage to herself was at the cost of India’s democracy.
That’s putting it in a very extreme way, but roughly yes. I think there is an element of that, there is a strong element of that which has not been given enough attention.
Was India embarrassed by the Emergency? You were, by then I suspect in your 40’s. Were we an embarrassed country? Did we feel embarrassed?
We were embarrassed, yes, again if I may be permitted an anecdote. We were embarrassed because, for example, within days of the Emergency, the British newspaper The Guardian had a full-page advertisement saying the Emergency was completely undemocratic and unrequired, signed by British intellectuals. And the Government of India wished to reply. There was that concern; what is the world thinking of us? So they drafted a reply, and I remember a serial copy of the draft, and there was no way I was going to sign it. And that led to further troubles in my life, but nevertheless.
We did at least in those days care about what the world thought about us.
Very much so.
India’s image and people appreciating what we were doing was important to us.
Yeah, it was important.
The third phase in our 75 years is I suppose the rise of Narendra Modi and his rise of Hindutva and Hindu nationalism. Do you view it as a decisive break with the preceding 67 years, or do you see it as a realisation of India’s inner identity?
You know, one has to then define India’s inner identity and far be it for me to attempt a definition of that it’s much too complicated, but to go back to nationalism, what did nationalism mean to us soon after independence to us? It meant secularism, democracy, and the concept of a nation-state. Secularism meant that religion was not to interfere in politics. The coexistence of religions, yes, but there was to be an equality of religions and religion was not supposed to interfere in politics. It has done so. Democracy meant adult franchise and the voice of every citizen to be represented.
And I presume the tolerance of dissent and difference.
Yeah.
The right to disagree?
The right to disagree. All right. Certainly, the right to disagree and the right to express that disagreement. Elections are seeming to give way to defections. That’s not democracy. You’re voted into one party, you stand for one lot of beliefs, and then you move across to another party that doesn’t endorse those beliefs.
Also read: Full Text | ‘Damage to Indian Democracy Under Modi Is Lasting’: Pratap Bhanu Mehta
It sounds as if you are suggesting that India under Modi’s Hindutva and Hindu nationalism is a reversal of the ideals and cherished traditions of the preceding 67 years.
Well, it’s certainly a reversal of the values and ideals that the Indian national movement for independence stood for.
So this is not a continuation, it’s a break.
It’s not a continuation, I see it as a break. And also, let’s not forget, that the big change, here I am speaking as a historian but nonetheless, the big change with the coming of independence, was yes independence, but it was a change from being a subject people. You were subject to the Raja, who called you his Praja, his infants; you were subject to the colonial crown, the British Crown; but you were the citizens of Free India.
Now, what did this change mean? It is a huge change, which I don’t think we fully understood. Citizenship is a free person. Is a person who has rights, and the rights of what? The rights of a citizen are to water, food, shelter, to education, to health, to employment, to social justice and social equality.
Independence and the constitution gave us all that. Let’s then in that context talk about what the last 75 years have meant for the people of India. To begin with, let me raise you this controversial concept of a ruling class because India clearly has one. I’m talking of leading politicians, top industrialists, stars of Bollywood, captains of the cricket team, academics, authors, whatever. Do these people, in your eyes, the ruling class, constitute the best of India, indeed, are they even representative of India as a whole? Or is it a class that is separate from, on top of but not connected to the rest of the country?
You see, the ruling class, the qualifier, the ruling class, automatically makes it into a small segment of the population, because the entire population doesn’t rule. It rules through representatives. So the question really is to what extent are these people representing the population?
What is your answer?
My answer is that they are creating a kind of society in which they and their likes, and I include myself in that because I am very much a member of the middle class which is what we are talking about in effect, we are talking about members of the middle class, believe they are working for the good of the country and believe they are working for the welfare of the country.
But are they actually working for their own interests?
They’re more largely working for their own interests because the kind of welfare that one expected in 1947 as a 15-year-old hasn’t happened. And what do I mean by that? Let me just conclude this. Two things that have really bugged us badly right through history: caste and poverty. We have not, leave alone eradicated, even marginally affected the functioning of caste as a body of power, political power, economic power, and so on. We may be trying to do that., but there is no way.
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Are we trying to do it? I know we have an Adivasi president at the moment, and we are proud of that fact. I know we have had Dalit presidents, but the truth is, and you know this better than me, that India’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are amongst the most deprived in our country. Have we done enough to wipe away their tears, as Gandhi would have wanted us to do?
No, I think we haven’t at all and remember that people like a tribal president or a Dalit president, these are tokens. With the best will in the world, you can say that these are tokens of intention, but they are not actually registering change.
A sand sculpture of Droupadi Murmu, India’s first Adivasi president, made by artist Ajay Rawat, in Pushkar, July 22, 2022. Photo: PTI
So tokenism is what we have gone for rather than substantial…
Rather than the actual, because the actuality in this case, if we are going to be talking about the change in the lives of tribals and of Dalits, and so on, the actuality would be precisely bringing in laws, bringing in structures, where there is no caste and where poverty is annulled.
And that we haven’t done, at least not sufficiently.
No.
You also mention poverty. It is often said that India is a fantastic country for the rich, the powerful, the influential, and people with contacts. But India is also a democracy or meant to be one. What sort of country is India for the poor, for people without influence, for people without contacts? In other words, what sort of country is India for the majority of the country?
For the majority, I would imagine a very difficult country. There is no guarantee from the state of fulfilling the rights of a citizen. What I just mentioned. Is there a guarantee of food and drinkable water?
Technically there is a guarantee of food.
Technically, but actually. Food, water, shelter; absolutely no guarantee for large numbers of people. And what happened, for example, with the migrations during COVID. That’s not a demonstration of advanced citizenship.
So whatever the rhetoric of governments, and I’m saying that in the plural, the ordinary poor Indian citizen is left on his or her own to fend with the trials of life.
Absolutely! To fend with the trials of life. To try not to give in, because you are born you have to live, you have to live your span, you have to do something to keep going.
So India is not a country for poor people?
No. Certainly not.
The poor are forgotten.
The poor are forgotten, or they are sidelined, or they are not taken seriously enough.
When talking in the context of the ruling class, it’s often said that the ruling class of today is very different to the ruling class of the 50s and 60s, because today’s ruling class is more representative of the people, it’s more rooted in the soil in the country. Would you agree with that?
But today’s ruling class is not making the fundamental changes that would be required. You see the problem for me, the way I see it is if we take these two parameters of caste and poverty, in order to decrease their ill-effects, leave alone annul them, you have to make very major changes in the social and economic functioning of your society.
Also read: What Does the Caste Wealth Gap Look Like in India?
And today’s ruling class is not doing it.
Will not do that.
Just like the ruling class of the 50s and 60s didn’t, nor is the ruling class of 2020.
I mean when you say take away their tears that Gandhi talked of, what are we doing with our tribals? We’re making them face a nightmare of corporates coming in and mining the very land that they are cultivating. They’re insecure because they’re holding on to the land that they are cultivating…
But you’re saying something deeper that the ruling class is letting the country down.
To that extent, yes. I mean the ruling class should have a plan of advancing the economy to the degree that poverty is reduced.
That vision is missing?
That vision is missing, because that vision requires a very fundamental change of Indian society.
Let me at this point raise with you something that has happened increasingly in the last six, eight, ten years. It’s the way history is written, interpreted, and understood in our country, and you are, as I said in my introduction, possibly the foremost historian in our country. Increasingly, the period from 1200 to 1800 is viewed in terms of religion, and interpreted in terms of a Hindu-Muslim divide. No doubt that accords with the ideology of the ruling establishment of the day, but as a historian, who sees the writing and interpretation of history being almost turned on its head, how do you respond to this?
Now that question will set me off. So you have to give me a full five minutes, don’t worry if I carry on. It begins with colonials coming to India saying “where is your history?”, and not finding the equivalent of the Greek historians and the Chinese historians, and saying “we have to write the history of this country”. So they set out to write the history of this country. They write about many things which have come up to the surface, which we’re contesting.
One, James Mill, for example, writes about there were two nations in India, the Hindu nation and the Muslim nation. And he uses the word ‘nation’, and they are constantly in conflict. James Mill 1870, The History of British India. That statement is repeated again and again and again by colonial writers. Historians, writers, everybody. It’s picked up by the Indian middle class and becomes part of the fundamentals of the history of the second millennium AD. Now the crisis comes when 50 or so years ago, historians started saying “are you sure this makes sense in historical terms?”
In other words, was Mill right or wrong?
Was Mill right or wrong? Then you start analysing the history of that one millennium, and find that Mill was hopelessly wrong. This is not what was there.
But by then, we had accepted the Mill interpretation.
We have accepted the Mill interpretation, and what we are now arguing is that first, there is no such thing as a Hindu nation and a Muslim nation, because nationhood comes in a post-colonial phase. It doesn’t go back to the past. There are no nations that belonged to the earlier centuries.
Secondly, where’s the evidence for talking about a Hindu nation and a Muslim nation? There’s nothing. If you say that the Muslims, as is said by Hindutva today, the Muslims victimised the Hindus, and therefore, we have had 1,000 years of slavery, and you know, many dramatic statements of that kind are made, when you look at the texts and the sources, you find that there are all kinds of mixtures going on. Artisans and craftsmen repairing the Qutub Minar in Delhi have little inscriptions saying, “I, Bhondu, Dhodu, Hundu, Handu”, all of these pet names that people had, are masons who repaired this destruction over here, and we are very grateful to our God Vishwakarma for helping us. Inside the Qutub Minar.
In other words, Muslims and Hindus worked side-by-side on the same project.
They worked side-by-side. Or you had traders. I mean the whole of the west coast of India, which has Khojas, Bohras, Mappilas, Nawayas, and so on. These are Arab traders who married locally and became communities of mixed religion.
Another example of this is the fact that Akbar had Hindu generals, and Prithviraj Chauhan had Muslim generals.
Yeah.
Akbar’s court. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
And they fought against each other, but it wasn’t Hindu versus Muslim.
And only last night, I was reading an interesting book on the history of the horse in India, in which it was said that the Mughals and the Rajputs – high-caste Rajputs – had 27 marriages that took place in the families of both.
So what Hindutva is doing today, and has been doing for the last six, eight years, is to read back Mill’s interpretation of Indian history, which was untrue in 1870 when he wrote it, but then are reading it back six centuries to reinterpret the past.
I mean what is really happening, to put it in a nutshell, is the revival of the colonial history of India, by pretending that this is the indigenous history.
And that’s not true?
And that’s not true. And this is our problem today, that the professional historian who says “but look at the evidence” is dismissed because the evidence for them doesn’t exist. It’s just what you make-believe of the past that holds.
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In other words, an ideological predilection that suits a particular group is being read into history, and as a result, history is being misinterpreted, because the misinterpretation suits a political body.
You see, let me just be a little pedantic over here. The good historian today has to be aware of a huge number of sources. Texts are not the only sources, there is archaeology, there is even genetics, that is coming into the writing of history all over the world. Environmental factors, all over this. So, the sources have gotten very much wider. The interpretations, therefore, have become much more exploratory. Was it really this that explains the change or was it also that? And the two may be rather different, but somehow are connected. And the historian is looking for these connections.
Then you come to the methods, which have changed completely. History is not a narrative of the past. History is an attempt to understand and explain what happened in the past, so as to understand the present better. So, you go for evidence, and it has to be reliable. You can’t say “such and such a God came and then this happened” or “such and such a Rishi had supernatural powers and this happened”. You have to have reliable evidence, and when you talk about A and B being connected, you have to be logical in making that connection.
So you are saying that the writing of history is increasingly becoming, as you said exploratory, which makes it more fluid. You’re taking more factors and sources into account, which also means that certainty of an opinion, particularly of the Mill’s variety is Hindu versus Muslim, is not possible any longer.
The certainty of an opinion is not possible. You have to say that you know all of us as historians, start off with the premise that this is my understanding, my generalisation. But, something may come along and it will change it all together.
Also read: The Hindu and the Muslim in India: A Communal Conflict?
So, is the rewriting of history we are seeing over the last six, eight years, simply a rewriting, or is it actually a distortion done with political motivation in mind?
Well, some of us think it is a distortion done with political motivation in mind.
Do you think it is a distortion?
I think it is a distortion, and I’ve been heavily heavily attacked in the worst, in the most disgusting of ways, because I am a woman and you know, women are easy targets, especially for sexist attacks. And I’ve been heavily attacked, but I still maintain that the history that is being propagated as “Hindutva history” is not history.
Representational image of Hindutva groups. Photo: Reuters.
In other words, what we are seeing in 2022, 2021, 2020, 75 years of independence, is actually an undoing of history and the truth.
Yeah.
As far as history is concerned, we’re not advancing, we’re regressing.
Let me qualify that and say that it’s a strong attempt to undo history because fortunately, so far, we do have some excellent young historians who are not buying this.
But there is an attempt being made not to further the understanding of history, but to regress it.
Yes. To formulate it into terms they think is the correct formulation. History is becoming a catechism. You’re given a question and you are given an answer. You stick with that question and you stick with that answer, don’t ask another question and don’t look for another answer.
This is the stultification also of young minds.
Which is why one is so worried about the New Education Policy.
Well, coming to the end of this interview, let me raise with you, directly, the figure that, like Colossus, stands above all of us, our prime minister. Clearly, Modi has had an impact on India that very few of his predecessors did, with the exception of perhaps Jawaharlal Nehru. He’s been prime minister for eight years, he’s got two years more, arguably he could have five more after that. As a historian, is there any way we could get some sense of how history will remember him?
Well, yes I mean history of course, or historians of the future, will explore a lot of things. And they’ll dig up a lot of things, which are today being quietly pushed aside. So, the image that will emerge will be, if they are good historians, the image that will emerge will be a rather different image I suspect. Not completely, but there will be nuances that will not be the same.
Historians look at past figures at two levels. One is the human being; “what kind of human being was this ruler?” I mean we do that with all our kings and queens and this, that and the other. And there, the human qualities come in, and whereas with someone like Nehru, you can see the human qualities, because they are palpable, they’re apparent.
With Modi?
They seem to be hidden.
Deliberately?
I don’t know.
Or are they missing?
Well, maybe, maybe he doesn’t wish to publicise them.
So you’re suggesting – if I can interpret what you said – that the man who is viewed as a Colossus today, might be seen by future historians as a Colossus with cracked feet.
Look, everybody has got cracks, there’s nobody who is a Colossus without cracks.
But today those cracks in Modi aren’t visible. They’ll be written about in the future.
They’ll be written about in the future and let’s not forget that when we talk about somebody, a politician or some public figure being a Colossus, this is an imagination of publicity. People aren’t colossi no matter what position.
They’re just projected as that.
They’re projected as that. And I think that…
Which suggests the colossi of their own making.
Maybe, of their own liking of their own making, how they project themselves or like to see themselves projected. How others project them.
History will see through all of that.
History will see through all of that and the sense that history doesn’t believe in the domination of colossi. It believes in the working of men and women.
Again you’re suggesting that history won’t be kind to Modi.
Well, history is never kind to any Colossus.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks during the opening ceremony of the 44th Chess Olympiad in Chennai, Thursday, July 28. Photo: PTI
Well coming to the end let me ask you a personal question. You have the good fortune of not just living through the 75 years, but being old enough to observe it, understand it, feel it, respond to it, and react to it. Today, in 2022, do you like the sort of country? Do you personally like the sort of country Modi is making India?
Look, I like the country because I have had ample opportunities to pick up and leave. No dearth of good jobs elsewhere.
But I’m asking you…
Why have I stayed? I have stayed because for me it’s very important, when I go through a security check at the airport, and the guy who is doing the checking looks at my passport and identity and says, “Toh accha aap wohi hai?”, and I say “Kya matlab?”, and he says “Jo itihas likhti hai?”. And then I say to him, “Have you read anything?”, and then he says, “Yes, I have read this or I read that. I liked it very much.” “Why did you like it? and, “It has a feel of reality to it, which other books on history I have read…”. That is a tremendous bonding. That is a tremendous sense of being responsible for what you are doing to a public that is more than just XY and Z.
And, this is a perfect explanation for why Romila Thapar loves her country, but I’m asking a different question.
I know
Do you like the country Modi is making India?
No, I don’t. I don’t.
You don’t like Modi’s India.
No, I think it’s too narrow, it’s too limited, it’s too one-sided. It hasn’t got the richness. It hasn’t got the anticipation of possibilities of what could happen. It hasn’t got that fantasy of the kinds of human beings we could make of ourselves.
Modi’s India is not the dream of India you had when you were 15?
No, it is not.
It’s the antithesis of it?
Hm?
It’s the antithesis of it?
Yeah.
Finally, when you look at people, when you look at institutions, that haven’t stood up and defended the ideals of our constitution adequately, or sometimes you could say, at all, that haven’t done their bit to fulfil the dreams and expectations 15-year-old Romila had in 47. Of all those institutions, which do you blame the most? Parliament, the Election Commission, the judiciary, the media, or does it go deeper than that? Is it the Indian middle class that is increasingly enamoured of Modi, Hindutva and the vision he has of India? Which of these?
Well, I think it goes deeper and I think it’s the Indian middle class because if it wasn’t the Indian middle class, you wouldn’t have the weaknesses that have come into these three legs that the constitution speaks of. But when I say the middle class, I include myself in it. I mean I’m not staying out and saying “they”. All of us. And I think the basic factor has been that we, or maybe my generation, took it for granted that whatever we were aspiring to in the national movement, will eventually come about. And we didn’t push hard enough.
Didn’t work enough?
We didn’t work enough to ensure that those basics of secularism, democracy, nationalism of a nationalist kind, that these should be constantly there and should not be tampered with.
So the Indian middle class is guilty of taking things for granted and not doing enough to ensure they happen?
Yes, I would say that.
Is there a sense in which the Indian middle class has let us down?
I think so, I think the Indian middle class has not been sufficiently loyal to the ideas of the New India that the Indian National Movement held out.
Romila Thapar, a pleasure speaking to you.
Very nice talking to you too, Karan.
