I must be clairvoyant or something. Exactly a week ago, I narrated the five-stage story of the calculated destruction of history writing in India. It appears that today the 33-crore Devatas have decided to heed the prayers of countless Hindus like me. Actually, all these Devatas haven’t heeded our prayers fully. Because the administration of the Jawaharlal Nehru University has merely asked the retired—but not tired—Marie Antoinette of Indian history establishment Romila Thapar to resubmit her CV “to evaluate if she can continue as professor emerita.”
The Devatas would have heeded our prayers one hundred percent if and only if she was made to stand trial for her legion of crimes against Hindu memory committed with nonchalant impunity for nearly six decades. The “resubmit your CV” is not even a consolation prize. Although it is a parody of a parody, it is also a start of sorts. But to be fair, Romila Thapar is not alone. Indeed, this fairness-DNA in Hindus is a prime reason for their practiced perfection of historically snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. For the uninitiated, read Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians for a near-complete list of these ideological and textual criminals who waged almost a century-long war against Hindu history.
Expectedly, Romila Thapar’s admirers and disciples and fans are having highly public seizures of grand proportions merely because the JNU asked her to resubmit her CV, which it is fully entitled to, according to Rule 32(g). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s warning has come chillingly true: “Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.” JNU’s rules were formed by one of Thapar’s own Red Buddies in the heady days of being high on Marx’s heroin. Today, the same rules are being made applicable to her. Hence the unseemly fury at being asked to be even minimally accountable. The seemingly-inexhaustible supply of the Communist fix dried up long ago. Now, the accursed withdrawal symptoms are hitting and hitting hard. Even worse, all the dingy rehab clinics that existed during NDA 1.0 have long since shut down.
Consider some exhibits.
When the intellect – deprived Sagarika Ghose, calls Romila Thapar the “crown jewel of Indian history writing,” it becomes instantly clear as to who deprived Sagarika of her intellect. And when her roadside-ruffian husband Rajdeep Sardesai calls JNU’s move “crazy,” we suspect he’s referring to either his wife or Thapar or both. When murder-accused Shashi Tharoor asks, “Can JNU sink any lower,” we’re sure that JNU is on the right path in its efforts to clean the Leftist drainage both on its rolls and campus.
But the combined apoplexy of Thapar-addicts is understandable. It reminds us of Brendan Behan’s memorable phrase, “The compliments pass when the Quality meet.” Romila Thapar’s “Quality” is now being subject to re-evaluation.
In many ways, the high-sounding title of “Professor Emerita” is the unearned souvenir of her wasted youth. A youth wasted in abusing and profaning the sacred memory her own ancestors who happily sacrificed their lives and families for upholding Dharma. A youth spent celebrating the bigoted murderers of these selfsame ancestors. Even worse, an entire life squandered away in petty politicking, destroying the careers of several genuine and honest scholars, and defacing academic institutions: all these vile elisions to promote a genocidal ideology that killed more than a 100 million people globally in the last century.
For an eyewitness account of how history writing and scholarship as a noble academic endeavor was destroyed by the likes of Romila Thapar, read this masterly account by Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa, who was himself a long-suffering victim of Marxist institutional thuggery.
I offer a comprehensive history of the comprehensive destruction of history writing in India after independence in the chapter titled The Rise and Fall of History Research in India in my book, Seventy Years of Secularism. But here’s a kind of addendum to it.
Sometime in the 1960s when the Marxists began to grow in institutional power and influence, a new term was coined: “Marxist School of History.” It is actually synonymous with “meaningless.” Think about it. A purely academic discipline like History loses its defining connotation of objectivity the moment it is prefixed with a qualifier. Marxism is merely a theory, which sought to “reinterpret” the entire world not only from its obscure origins but arrogantly claimed to have all the answers for how the future of the entire human civilization will be, ought to be. This is why the insightful Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel correctly clubbed it together with Prophetic cults like Islam and Christianity which say the same thing. While these two desert death cults have a Jealous Male God and a Prophet as their central theme, Marxism has “History” as its God. In my view, Marxism is a mound of unreadable gibberish, the textual compendium of a delusional loser named Karl Marx.
This among other reasons is why History is so pivotal to Marxism.
Long story short, thanks to the increasing control of institutions of public discourse, “Marxist School of Indian History” was shortened to “Marxist History,” “Marxist Historian” and variants thereof. You can be a Marxist or a historian. Not both. A “Marxist Historian” is simply a Marxist wearing a Red Tuxedo at the taxpayer’s expense.
But their serial skullduggeries were met with fierce resistance from honest scholars, and there still existed towering academics like Acharya Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar and others. The way out? Use political and institutional power to marginalize, victimize, humiliate, and drive out these giants. After more than a decade of such operose effort, the Marxists were finally successful in creating a condition of imposed historical amnesia in the history establishment. And one of the most assiduous workers in this nation-wrecking endeavor was and remains Romila Thapar.
A comparative example will clarify this much better.
Stalwarts like Acharya Majumdar et al took deliberate care in not only providing evidence from multiple primary sources, they also invariably stated that their finding was merely temporary and subject to correction and revision in light of new evidence. On the other hand, Romila Thapar and her ilk arrogantly proclaimed and “proved” “historical truths” with an air of finality. And they didn’t merely stop at that: they casually dismissed and abused every single finding by past masters like Sarkar and Majumdar calling them, “right wing, regressive propaganda.” The selfsame Romila Thapar, for the last six decades, has strutted around as an “expert” on ancient Indian history without knowing a single word of Sanskrit!
Without going into too many details, I’ll point to some excellent rebuttals to Thapar and her gang:
Heroic Hindu Resistance to Muslim Invaders: Sita Ram Goel
Historians Versus History: Ram Swarup
Fabrications on the way to the Funeral: Arun Shourie
Nationalism And Distortions In Indian History: Dr. N.S. Rajaram
An Interview with Koenraad Elst about Romila Thapar
These are just some of the prominent ones. But in passing, here’s Arun Shourie mincing no words when he blasts Romila Thapar and her gang. I urge the reader to read it carefully.
As I have had occasion to document several times in the past, such forgeries, such allegations are the standard technology of this school. Fabricating conspiracy theories is their well-practiced weapon. And they have a network… They were the intellectual guides and propagandists of the Babri Masjid Action Committee. They represented it at the meetings Mr. Chandrashekhar’s Government had convened… These leftist “historians” attended the initial meetings. They put together for and on behalf of the Committee “documents”. It is a miscellaneous pile. It becomes immediately evident that these are no counter to the mass of archaeological, historical and literary evidence which the VHP has furnished, that in fact the “documents” these guides of the Babri Committee have piled up further substantiate the VHP’s case, these “historians”, having undertaken to attend the meeting to consider the evidence presented by the two sides, just do not show up !But these are not just partisan “historians”. They are nepotists of the worst kind. I had documented several years ago the doings of some of them in regard to the appointments in the Aligarh Muslim University. Their doings in the ICHR have been true to pattern. How is it that over twenty five years persons from their school alone have been nominated to the ICHR ? How come that Romila Thapar has been on the Council four times ? Irfan Habib five times ? Satish Chandra four times ? S. Gopal three times ?…. The same goes for the post of Chairman.Arun Shourie
Needless, the apogee of Romila Thapar and gang’s sustained Marxist assaults was reached during the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement. That was when this bunch of rogue historians stepped up the accelerator from merely distorting history to denying it wholesale. The story is well-known but needs constant repetition because history is too sacred a calling to be left to the hands of destructive Leftist ideologues. Here’s what the distinguished scholar of history, D.K. Chakrabarti says about them:
Since the coming of this group to power, the world of Indian historical studies has been largely criminalized.D.K. Chakrabarti
And more acidly that Romila Thapar
has not done much empirical research but considerably embellished her writings with smooth references to different vignettes of social science literature… Thapar’s attempt to paint herself and others of her ilk martyrs in the cause of historical studies is downright amusingD.K. Chakrabarti
Equally, the judge of the Allahabad High Court who heard the Ram Mandir case in 2010 devoted numerous pages to severely condemn the crimes that Romila Thapar and her clique and their academic brood had inflicted against Indian history. The interesting fact is that when the court summoned her and other “experts” for the hearing, they failed to show up but sent their minions to face the flak that they knew the judge would hurl at them.
At a very fundamental level, there’s a reason only Romila Thapar has attracted the maximum public opprobrium when compared to other eminent distorians like Satish Chandra, D.N. Jha, Irfan Habib et al, who were her contemporaries. It is directly linked to her clan’s proximity to the Sultanate of Nawab Nehru even before her birth.
The infamous Thapar clan is marked by two major distinctions. The first is by the clan-founder himself — Dewan Bahadur Kunj Behari Thapar who supported the Jallianwala Bagh genocide. The second is by General Pran Nath Thapar who as the Indian Army Chief was directly responsible for India’s loss in the 1962 war against China. Read the gory details in The Himalayan Blunder. The Thapar clan is one of the original Lutyens courtiers who sold their soul to the British crown for a few pennies more. And Romila Thapar who hailed from such distinguished lineage was naturally one of the prized catches that the Communists netted early on.
A courtier is as a courtier does: takes favours from royalty, distributes pittances of varying amounts to others lower in the venal food chain. The “network” mentioned by Arun Shourie earlier in this essay is a euphemism for this. The bleeding hearts who have now lapsed into the said seizures because JNU has asked Romila Thapar for her CV are merely showing solidarity with their benefactress. This is what Prof. D.K. Chakrabarti meant when he said more than a decade ago that
Romila Thapar has long been a Prima Donna… and her admirers go into tantrums at any kind of criticism of her.
So far a good first step by JNU. But it would be fitting if JNU begins a comprehensive project documenting its own criminal Marxist past. That would be national service of a high order.
The Dharma Dispatch is now available on Telegram! For original and insightful narratives on Indian Culture and History, subscribe to us on Telegram.