Romila Thapar | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Thapar in 2016 | |
| Born | 30 November 1931 |
| Alma mater | Panjab University SOAS University of London (PhD) |
| Occupation(s) | Historian, Writer |
| Known for | Authoring books about Indian history |
| Father | Daya Ram Thapar |
| Relatives | Romesh Thapar (brother) Valmik Thapar (nephew) Pran Nath Thapar (uncle) Karan Thapar (cousin) |
| Awards | Honorary doctorates University of Chicago, University of Oxford, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, University of Edinburgh, the University of Calcutta, University of Hyderabad, Brown University, University of Pretoria. Inaugural holder, Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South, US Library of Congress; Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner John W Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity, 2008. |
Romila Thapar (born 30 November 1931) is an Indian historian. Her principal area of study is ancient India, a field in which she is pre-eminent.[1] Thapar is a Professor of Ancient History, Emerita, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Thapar's special contribution is the use of social-historical methods to understand change in the mid-first millennium BCE in northern India. As lineage-based Indo-Aryan pastoral groups moved into the Gangetic Plain, they created rudimentary forms of caste-based states. The epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in her analysis, offer vignettes of how these groups and others negotiated new, more complex, forms of loyalty in which stratification, purity, and exclusion played a greater if still fluid role.[2]
The author of From Lineage to State, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, Early India: From Origins to AD 1300, and the popular History of India, Part I, Thapar has received honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, the University of Oxford, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, the University of Edinburgh, University of Calcutta, University of Hyderabad, Brown University, and the University of Pretoria.
Thapar is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where she also received her Ph.D. in 1958, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, Romila Thapar shared the US Library of Congress's Kluge Prize, for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences.[3]
- ^ Peterson, Indira Viswanathan (2019), "Romila Thapar 1931-", in Kelly Boyd (ed.), Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, London: Taylor & Francis: Routledge, pp. 1202–, ISBN 978-1-136-78764-5, archived from the original on 1 September 2021, retrieved 1 February 2021 Quotr: "The pre-eminent interpreter of ancient Indian history today. ... "
- ^ Peterson, Indira Viswanathan (2019), "Romila Thapar 1931-", in Kelly Boyd (ed.), Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, London: Taylor & Francis: Routledge, pp. 1202–, ISBN 978-1-136-78764-5, archived from the original on 1 September 2021, retrieved 1 February 2021 Quote: "Among the major historians of ancient India in recent times, Thapar's emphasis on social history differentiates her approach from that of the cultural historian A. L. Basham, while her rejection of ideological frames of reference sets her work apart from that of the Marxist scholar D. D. Kosambi."
- ^ Garreau, Joel (3 December 2008). "Historians Peter Robert Lamont Brown and Romila Thapar to Share 2008 Kluge Prize". washingtonpost.com. Archived from the original on 11 January 2017. Retrieved 1 February 2021.