Montgomery Fellow and ancient India historian Romila Thapar scrutinized India's colonial past and the politicization of religion in a lecture on Tuesday in Filene Auditorium.
"As a colonial society, we have to confront colonial explanations of our past," Thapar said. "We are further confronting the ultranationalist versions that are seeking legitimacy."
Thapar spoke little about India's former governing party, the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which attempted to implement revisionist histories in Indian textbooks and threatened Thapar for her multicultural reconstructions of the ancient past.
"So far, there's been a battle going on for the last 10 years or so, but that hasn't stopped us from doing our own research," Thapar said.
These nationalist versions of Indian history segment the nation's past into periods of Hindu, Muslim and British rule, setting up a hostile relationship between the Hindu and Muslim religions. Nationalists used history to legitimize their political ideology and mobilization -- a process Thapar refers to as "the political underbelly of religious nationalism."
According to Thapar, in previous renderings of history, this colonial periodization was generally accepted with little attempt to provide alternative hypotheses on early Indian society.
"[In the past] it was not thought necessary to locate ideas in a historical background," Thapar said.
However, since the 1950s and particularly in the last decade, historians have undertaken a process of questioning and contextualizing, incorporating literature, environmental science, archaeology, economic knowledge and folklore into history, she said.
Now, historians are looking at the way other disciplines study society, specifically recognizing the value of archaeology. The use of new sources caused a growing recognition that "the past had to be explained, understood, and reinterpreted," she said.
But Thapar emphasized the required use of historical method to ground research and legitimize historical interpretations in a field where a complete set of facts can never be fully established.
"There is an awareness that history is a matter of interpretation. There is no such thing as the truth out there," she said.
Thapar is currently teaching "The Perception of the Past in Early India" in the history department.
