Hindutva reading builds on colonial interpretations of Indian history: Romila Thapar

Historian Romila Thapar, 96, on Sunday (October 25, 2026) argued that colonial historians fundamentally shaped the way Indian history came to be understood, reducing complex social and political processes to simplified religious narratives that continue to influence historical interpretations today and propagate the Hindutva reading of Indian history.  

Delivering the Second Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture on the theme, “Historiography and Early Indian History”, Ms. Thapar said the subject stemmed from a brief conversation she once had with the late CPI(M) leader. 

Reflecting on her career as a historian of ancient India, Ms. Thapar said she had expected a quiet academic life when she entered the profession. “History is playing a public role, which it never did in the past,” she said, noting the growing public contestation over interpretations of the past.

Tracing the origins of many prevailing ideas about Indian history, Ms. Thapar said colonial scholars viewed India through the framework of “Oriental despotism”, portraying Asian societies as static and unchanging and governed by despotic rulers. She argued that the tendency to read Indian history primarily through a religious lens was also inherited from colonial scholarship.

Had greater attention been paid to physical evidence such as inscriptions, Indian history might have been interpreted differently, she said. Referring to the period after the Gupta era, Ms. Thapar noted the abundance of inscriptions documenting governance practices, caste relations and various aspects of social life, providing a richer understanding of the past than reliance on religious texts alone.

‘Own invention’

“Those writing the history of the colony were writing their own invention,” she said, pointing to British historian James Mill, whom she credited with advancing the idea of India as divided into Hindu and Muslim nations permanently hostile to each other.

Ms. Thapar said colonial historians oversimplified a wide range of social and political conflicts by presenting them as manifestations of religious antagonism. Such accounts created “mono-causal” explanations that ignored other factors.

Citing the Battle of Haldighati, she said the conflict was essentially a territorial contest. She noted that Rana Pratap’s forces included Afghan soldiers, while the Mughal army was led by a Rajput commander. Yet, the battle was now frequently presented as a defining confrontation between a Hindu ruler and a Muslim invader.

Ms. Thapar also criticised Mill’s periodisation of Indian history into the “Hindu”, “Muslim” and “British” periods, arguing that such categorisations imposed simplistic divisions on a far more complex historical experience.

In this context, she said the decolonisation of history should depend on the new evidence available, thanks to the advances made in archeology and genetic, instead of building further on the colonial reading of history emphasising on religious fractures. 

The Hindutva reading of Indian history was “single and fixed”, she said, which did not take into account the multiplicity within the Hinduism itself, citing the example of Vishnu’s avatar Jagannath in Odisha and Vithal in Maharashtra being two distinct entities. “In this interpretation, the purpose of history is not to explain what happened in the past, but instead to construct statements of contemporary political views. These statements deny the centrality of secularism and democracy as the essential component of the new nation,” she said.