Suchergebnisse

Written by one of India s best-known public intellectuals,this book isessential reading for anyone interested in India s fascinating history as well as the direction in which the nation is headed. People have argued since time immemorial. Disagreement is a part of life, of human experience. But we now live in times when any form of protest in India is marked as anti-Indian and met with arguments that the very concept of dissent was imported into India from the West. As Romila Thapar explores in her timely historical essay, however, dissent has a long history in the subcontinent, even if its forms have evolved through the centuries. In Voices of Dissent: An Essay, Thapar looks at the articulation of nonviolent dissent and relates it to various pivotal moments throughout India s history. Beginning with Vedic times, she takes us from the second to the first millennium BCE, to the emergence of groups that were jointly called the Shramanas-the Jainas, Buddhists, and Ajivikas. Going forward in time, she also explores the views of the Bhakti sants and others of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and brings us to a major moment of dissent that helped to establish a free and democratic India: Mahatma Gandhi s satyagraha. Then Thapar places in context the recent peaceful protests against India s new, controversial citizenship law, maintaining that dissent in our time must be opposed to injustice and supportive of democratic rights so that society may change for the better

Migrations have had a role in forming the economies and cultures of practically all countries. Their nature and effects must be studied objectively. In her lecture delivered in October 2020 in memory of Professor Satish Chandra, Professor Romila Thapar discusses the nature and effects of three migrations, distant from each other in time, viz. the Aryan, (second millennium BC), the Kuṣāṇa (early centuries AD) and Arab (tenth century onward). These migrations contributed to both economic change and cultural evolution. These were fundamentally different in nature from migrations accompanying colonial conquests and the forced shifting of people in the colonial era. The current prejudice against migrants, by those who claim this to be an expression of nationalism, should not cloud our judgement of earlier migrations into India and their role in our history and culture

Les 18eet 19esiècles en Europe ont constitué une période où l'histoire s'est affirmée en tant que discipline. On argumenta que chaque discipline avait une histoire, dont la compréhension était un des moyens de systématiser le savoir. C'est pourquoi, inévitablement, dans la rencontre coloniale entre l'Europe et l'Asie, il y eut une quête des histoires indigènes qui fourniraient un mode de compréhension de ces cultures nouvelles et différentes. Cependant, la définition de l'histoire demeura celle qui était issue de la tradition européenne. Les équivalents d'Hérodote et de Tite-Live furent recherchés dans d'autres civilisations et, ce qui n'a rien de surprenant, de tels équivalents n'étaient pas toujours disponibles. Il nous a fallu plusieurs décennies pour réaliser que des sociétés ont dans le passé écrit leur histoire de la manière qui convenait à leurs propres nécessités. De ce fait, l'écriture historique ne se conforme pas à un modèle unique.