My prayer to God has finally come true: Romila Thapar is dead. Although she was, as Mac DeMarco would say, “my kind of woman”—ever a hottie, never a saddie—her intellectual fraudulence outlasted those of her tribe who thought she was the grande dame of ancient Indian history. I hear them say, “We still do at JNU!” as they sip their favourite bubbly.
Having received honorary doctorates from the likes of Oxford and at the same time, ruining a tradition of scholarship in India and bastardising its civilisational ethos in the name of academic knowledge production, she spawned the story of a caste-ridden nation of evil Hindus, which is taught to innocent students in the name of social science today. South Asian history would have been a better subject to learn had she chosen a different career path like swimming, where you need a fit body to win. Unfortunately she was not able to swim in swimming pools nor out of India to her rightful home in Pakistan.
But to me, even though she had a face only Karan Thapar could love, every moment of my life has been spent drooling over JNU’s secular aunty who complained about Hindu nationalism ad infinitum. As nobody saw Romila donate to charity, for she was incapable of following her innermost desire, she fancied herself a “professional historian” who promoted “science” all the while displaying her absolute hatred for Hinduism’s spiritualism, plurality and openness. She wrote a book with her ally, the self-coined rationalist Meera Nanda, called Hindutva vs Science. It was a path-breaking study on the effects of weed on the mind that only a potent antipsychotic like Hinduism can cure. I hear Rajiv Malhotra say, “No shrink will tell you that!”
Except those from the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies where Romila and I studied. All my professors and their students were psychiatrists-cum-patients from varied mental clinics (UK universities) who spoke of the need for countering the curse of the far right. Romila, under the great A L Basham who had once praised India, had been trained in the habits of Marxian analysis there and remained a staunch supporter of her beloved party throughout her life, never deflecting from her stated stand even once.
And I, under the guidance of a gaggle of fools, was equipped with nothing but ways of sucking up to mentally unhinged Brits and their coterie of brown sahibs who possess Maoist sympathies to date and who chew on beef with a vengeance. I recall the Indian lefties at SOAS keeping an eye on me for I heckled someone in an other-worldly state at one of their conferences on caste. Mercifully, I managed to convince the non-South Asian crowd that I was one of them. They published a paper I wrote that I did not understand myself. It continues to be there on the internet. Dhruv’s hoax!
Sycophants to the commies like Krishna Mohan Shrimali in Writing India’s Past were quick to call Romila’s guru A L Basham’s embracing of the real plural Hinduism, about which we do not hear, an instance of bearing “communal overtones”:
“But somewhere down the line, his [A L Basham’s] romanticization of
the vast sweep of India’s history and his fascination for inclusive
aspect of Hinduism (sic) leaves resonances of communal overtones
masquerading today as ‘cultural nationalists’.”
It is sad indeed that praising Hinduism’s quintessential accommodativeness leads one to being “communal”. So did Romila become disillusioned with her guru after having found out about his soft spiritual inclinations? We did not know, do not know and will never know. Romila was that ideological mentor to social scientists who would later occupy high positions at both state-run and private institutions in India at a time when no camera could film secretly the workings of privileged upper-caste loonies who did nothing for the poor and who, in fact, hated them. Their clipped English accents and language skills were the source of their power and stronghold over academe, robust now even more then.
Lord Ram would have been upset with Romila’s brand of ideology continuing to seep into our colleges. After all, she was one of the first to criticise the Babri Masjid demolition. Her passing has left a void in the hearts of fans who say, “What a loss!” Say the treacherous believers of karma, “She was indeed a monster.” And monster she was.
She singlehandedly decimated our history. She mocked and socked Hinduism and its political manifestation in ways that make her seem like the progenitor of anti-Hinduism couched as anti-Hindutva. I remember reading her article in the journal Social Scientist in college where she wrote that one ought not to discriminate against people who thought the Mahatma was a poof. At that time, Joseph Lelyveld’s book on Gandhi was doing the rounds. It got me thinking of how normative sexuality and history were being challenged in the most extraordinarily unelevated manner.
The only good thing about her—the antinatalist in me kicks in here—was that she never had kids (or maybe sometimes). Having remained single all her life, there is no record of her romantic interests. Of course, who would have wanted to date her remains completely beyond the pale of this tease, but what we know about her is what we know about the rest of them: They play God and like the atheists, only when they are overcome with grief and reach the final end, they think of how to escape the misery.
The damage she did to our country is not over. Her many children remain rooted in the hallowed classrooms of our universities. They continue to find fault with everybody but themselves. So like most right-thinking Indians I want to forget not only her but also her devotees and their body of work. Goodbye and all the very worst in hell, Romila. You will not be missed.
