I am leaving my books to the library at Shiv Nadar University. It was a difficult decision as I had initially intended to leave them to JNU. Apart from a substantial number on early Indian history, there are quite a large number on other subjects. Now that JNU and state-financed universities have to conform to the new orders from the government that amount to discouraging intellectual activity in universities, I don’t feel like giving the books there. If students are to be discouraged from thinking freely, they will also be discouraged from reading widely and being familiar with diverse views. There has to be a reasonable certainty that they will go to a place where they will be looked after and where the readership will be large and appreciative. SNU’s promise to care for them was attractive.

* * *

As a historian, I feel sad to see symbols of the early years after Independence being reduced to rubble. It was a resplendent period, soaked in aspiration and expectation, and the mood should have been retained. Defacing is not always an innocent activity. Its purpose may not be immediately obvious. What is the logic of removing buildings that are landmarks of time and place? For instance, the current rebuilding of the Central Vista at enormous cost, and the pulling down of some earlier, much-admired buildings in the vicinity remain inexplicable. Raj Rewal’s building on the Pragati Maidan in New Delhi, acknowledged as an impressive statement of contemporary Indian architecture, was removed to make way for something nondescript. Many official buildings of the here and now lack any architectural aesthetic quality and end up being merely banal political statements.

With the pandemic staring me in the face, solace lay, among other things, in the frequent conversations with my few immediate friends on the phone or on Zoom, friends whose acts of friendship overwhelmed me; and with some of the family around, I did not feel isolated. Then suddenly there were times when I became active again with reading and writing. I was aware I should have been sorting out my papers and filing them in some order, so that, if anyone wishes to read them after I am not here, I should facilitate their way around the small collection. Going through them reassures me that my life was not just a banal existence. It breaks me up to think of the connections these letters evoke. I cannot share private correspondence with the public without the permission of those who wrote the letters. This is not possible with those who have passed away. This makes me think I have lived too long, even if I don’t regret doing so.

* * *

I am now facing the other bookend of my life. I began with all the excitement of becoming an adult in a country and society that was mutating from being a colony of the British Empire into an independent nation anticipating a new way of life. Now at the end of my life, I can see neither a free nation firmly established nor the predictability of a fully democratic state in the immediate future. Are we going to have to see the remains of what once began as a free democratic nation? Or, as I am now beginning to think, observing a range of ex-colonies, is this perhaps an intermediary step, a hyphen between the dictatorship of the colonial state and the democratic nation-state yet to come? The latter is attempting to assert its right to being a free entity, both internally and among other nations. Does the temporary nature of this intermediary phase, which may currently be dictatorial or otherwise, lie in its having to give way eventually to democratic nation-states, when frontally challenged, as such situations have been challenged in the past and doubtless will be in the future.

Looking at ex-colonies across the world, there seems to be a pattern in the process of their becoming nation-states, and the pattern is that the process involves an initial struggle between dictatorship—in mild or extreme forms—and the democracy so anxiously awaited with the culmination of nationalism. The former is the inheritance from colonial rule, and from still earlier times when monarchy was the sole prevailing form of government. The latter is hopefully what will be achieved when colonial forms have been leached out of the system and replaced by the freedom anticipated in a democracy. Replacing colonialism by an indigenous dictatorship seems now to be a pattern familiar to many countries. The middle class earlier led the nationalist move towards constructing a nation and it is the middle class again that is now involved in constructing a state that is other than what was envisaged a century ago. The call for azadi / freedom and an independent country in 1931 has been through some trying times in the last century. In some ways, this will be a continuing struggle. The continuity will be required as we have entered the modern world. Modernity promises that democracy will encourage the choice of a more wholesome society. I just hope that we shall have the good sense to choose a secular democracy as that which we aspire to.

* * *

I have been conscious as a historian of the context in which I write. The context is dual: that which refers to the society and culture from which I have emerged as a participant, and the parallel one of the specific historiography from which I have emerged as a historian. The two have to be understood.

The broader context of society and culture is easier to recognize and explain as one begins by observing how and why one lives and thinks the way one does, proceeding then to ask questions about it. I hope that a little of this in my life has been apparent in what I have written here. The historiographical context is more arduous as it involves both extensive reading and comprehending the world in which one lives. This is not open to all but should be made much more available. Fresh readings of sources and new historical explanations led to questioning some of the accepted theories of colonial and Orientalist history, as also a few from some nationalist versions of history, which were either influenced by these versions or were breaking away from them.

As with all historical writing, the contextual moment of the author seeps into what is written and argued, either marginally or centrally even where a sensitive historian recognizes this and attempts to keep the present at bay. The argument that early history cannot be viewed by asking questions that arise from contemporary concerns does not hold; nevertheless, the questions should relate to some context of time. Questions assume a degree of reasoning, of rational analysis, of logic determining causal connections, which makes some of them seem almost liberated from a time-frame but they seldom are. The time-frame cannot be set aside. One of the many facets of history that make it both curious and attractive is the one when a particular explanation of the past also illumines some aspect of the present. Given the link between the past and the present, this is almost to be expected, yet when it occurs it comes as an invitation to explore.

History, when it was recognized as being in part a social science, encouraged, for example, more intense investigations of evidence and readings, and the questioning of those statements that were based on outright imagined histories. Ideological positions therefore do have a relevance, but the historian must be aware of his or her ideological readings and where necessary set them aside to the extent possible. A glaring example of not doing so took the world to war in the last century. This was the rise of fascism in Europe between the two World Wars. Nationalism is meant to bring together the communities that live in a territory and constitute the nation. But fascism perverted the idea of a nation by defining it as reflecting the dominant community with the largest numbers, the thought-to-be superior Aryan and Teutonic races claimed as ancestral to the German population. This descent differentiated them from the others and was the basis on which the majority was said to constitute the nation. The others were considered inferior and racially impure, and whose annihilation was considered acceptable to the fascist regime. In this case the concept of race—which has now been set aside—was thought to be at the root of individual and social identity. However, nationalism cannot be defined by a single qualifier like race, religion, language, ethnicity and so on. Given the diversity of origins and identities that come together to contribute to the making of nationalism, the nation cannot be defined by a single qualifier that excludes all others.

Political movements invent slogans that are said to capture the essentials of the movement. Slogans are their own idiom and can evoke diverse meanings. Some have been significant for us in modern times, but their connotations have sometimes unnecessarily been altered in varied political climates. I was thinking back to my early life and the popular slogans of those times which we repeated on every possible occasion. The words and phrases continue but their connotations have even been reversed in some instances. I remember that the two most common slogans we constantly shouted as teenagers, were ‘azadi’ and ‘inquilab zindabad’. I felt a thrill when we shouted them in support of India as a free nation and against the British colonial government. Today, one never hears the latter and the former has been delegitimized and treated as an anti-national slogan. This is the contradiction of our times.

Yet it was the context of these slogans that reflected the strength of our nationalism. In turn they evoked those associated with Gandhi, such as svaraja, ahimsa and satyagraha. These retain their original meaning, perhaps because they are seldom heard in current times. The slogan of the last 10 years which seems to have replaced the earlier ones, and is now current, ‘Jai Shri Ram’, invokes the Hindu religion, its political imprint having a different connotation. However, not unexpectedly, the religious nationalism of yesteryear, be it Hindutva or any other, has its own anxieties.

The slogans of Indian nationalism were used on any occasion that people chose to use them, and by one and all. They carried a strong message and were widely understood and appreciated. They addressed the widest possible audience. Azadi was in essence against the British but was more an evocation of Indian nationalism and its purpose. The Gandhian slogans addressed an audience far beyond a single religious community.

* * *

It might be useful to recall from time to time which of our activities since 1947 have contributed to the creation of a secular democratic nation as against those which have been obstacles to this aspiration, even if sometimes one is unwillingly reminded of the latter. Have we succeeded in converting the earlier Indian who was treated as a subject of the British crown in the colonial state into the free citizen of the modern Indian nation? That was one of the intentions of the national movement. In this situation, the Constitution becomes primary and has to be familiar to every citizen. Hence the significance of the women in the anti-CAA protest at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi and at other places, repeatedly reading from the Constitution and singing the national anthem. Our dependence on the colonial interpretation of our past, through which cultural and political patterns and colonial ideas about us have been imprinted on us, has to be questioned and reassessed.

Romila Thapar is a historian, author and emeritus professor of history at JNU. Excerpted with permission from Romila Thapar’s Just Being: A Memoir, Seagull Books (2026).