Overview

Short, rigorous intervention on history-writing in public life. How does the present reshape what a society chooses to remember as its past? Recent interpretations of India's history have replaced careful inquiry with narratives that mirror contemporary anxieties and ambitions, sidelining the evidence, debate, and plurality that once characterized India's long intellectual tradition. At stake is a shift from understanding history as a method to treating it as a tool of identity and authority. In The Present Colonizes the Past, Romila Thapar asks: How have cultural and religious identities evolved through interaction rather than isolation? How have dissent and accommodation shaped social change? How have education and public discourse influenced what is accepted as knowledge? And, most urgently, how might weakened institutions and selective pasts redefine our heritage and citizenship?

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9781803096612

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Romila Thapar is emeritus professor of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. A former General President of the Indian History Congress, she is a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and SOAS, London. In 2008, she received the Library of Congress’s Kluge Prize.

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