Early India from the Origins to A.D. 1300

Journal of the American Oriental Society, The, Oct-Dec, 2005 by Ludo Rocher

Early India from the Origins to A.D. 1300. By ROMILA THAPAR. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2002. Pp. xxx 556, maps, figs. $18.95.

Romila Thapar's A History of India, vol. 1, was published by Penguin Books in 1966. Nearly forty years later that "book, written when one had just been initiated into the profession, now being revised late in life, has elements of an autobiography" (p. xvii). This solemn declaration has tempted me to engage in some form of parallel reading, keeping both editions open in front of me and noting some of the correspondences and differences. This review reflects the notes I took in the process.

Basically, the new volume is a re-edition of the 1966 text: as Romila Thapar notes, it "retain[s] some of the older arguments where they are still relevant" (p. ix). More than that, large sections of the book run parallel to the sequence adopted in the earlier volume: numerous successive paragraphs start with identical or only slightly rewritten sentences (most often developed in greater detail in 2002 than in 1966). Speaking of similarities, I may as well add here, that both editions eschew footnotes: even the sparse footnotes of the earlier text have been either eliminated or integrated in the new text.

On the other hand, the 2002 volume is very different from its predecessor, far beyond the obvious difference that the text fills close to two hundred more (and larger) pages than those devoted to the corresponding time period in 1966. In the first place, when A History of India, vol. 1 was written, Percival Spear's companion volume two (1965) dealing with the Mughal and British periods was already available in print. Consequently, the last three chapters in Thapar's first volume (1966: 266-336) had to carry the history of India up to the year 1526. "A major amendment" has been made to that in the present volume: "I have finally persuaded Penguin that the history of India should be covered in three volumes and not be restricted to two" (p. ix; the new text is "[p]ublished by arrangement with Allen Lane, The Penguin Press"). Early India now closes around the year 1300. The period between 1300 and 1800, which suffered from being divided between Thapar's and Spear's books, is now to be treated in its own right in a separate volume, and a third volume will deal with the period from 1800 to the present.

Second, the distance of thirty-six years from the earlier text allows the author to look back and zero in on two distinct elements: at least twice (pp. ix, xvii) she refers to "new data"/"some new data" on the one hand, and to "fresh interpretations of the known data" on the other. A combination of these two has resulted in "substantial changes in the readings of early Indian history" (p. xvii), a process in which Thapar has been a constant and active participant. Those of us who have followed her writings over the years are familiar with her approach, which she formulates as follows:

  My attempt in this book is to treat political history as a skeletal
  framework in order to provide a chronological bearing, even if
  chronology is not always certain. This also introduces a few names of
  rulers as a more familiar aspect of early Indian history. However,
  the major focus of each chapter is the attempt to broadly interrelate
  the political, economic, social and religious aspects of a period with
  the intention of showing where and why changes have occurred and how
  these in turn have had an effect on each aspect. (p. xxv)

In the new volume this objective has been underscored by the introduction of subtitles within the chapters. Whereas in 1966 each chapter ran from beginning to end without any interruption (subtitles appeared only in the table of contents), now more or less parallel subtitles within each chapter make the presentation clearer and more attractive.

Evolving ideas on the writing of Indian history--or on interpreting Indian history, even by individuals or groups who did (or do) not write about it--that were only laid out briefly or just alluded to in the chapter "The Antecedents" (1966: 15-27) have been developed into an important dissertation, not only in the "Introduction" (pp. xvii-xxx) from which I quoted earlier, but also throughout chapters one ("Perceptions of the Past," pp. 1-36) and two ("Landscapes and People," pp. 37-68). Of the many questions raised in this theoretical section I will only refer to Thapar's remarks on periodization. The earlier book (1966: 20-21) objected to the classical subdivision of Indian history into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, viz., Hindu, Muslim, and British, and the same objections are repeated in the new volume, this periodization being "misleading in its emphasis, apart from being questionable in its assumptions" (pp. 18-19). Near the end of chapter two (pp. 31-32), Thapar now outlines a "far from definitive," twelvefold "possible alternative periodization" (note the repeated caveats!). Historians of Mughal India and of the British period will forgive the aficionada of early India for conceding only one of the twelve sections for the period 1550-1750 (no. 11), and only one for British colonial rule and the Indian nationalist response (no. 12).