In the sixteenth century, Dutch traveller Jan Linschoten noted the absence of lions throughout the Indian subcontinent. Two hundred years later, echoing similar comments made by various hunters and observers of Indian wildlife, the British shikari and writer, Captain Thomas Williamson, emphatically declared: 'There are no lions in Hindustan.' Much the same was said about the cheetah in the region. These observations piqued the interest of well-known naturalist Valmik Thapar. After an enormous amount of research and study he now believes that, contrary to existing scientific theory, neither of these animals were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. Remarking on the lack of accounts of encounters with these animals - as opposed to the tiger and the leopard which are extensively documented - as well as inconclusive genetic studies, he argues that, over the centuries, the lion and cheetah were brought into the country from Persia and Africa by royalty, either as tributes or to populate their hunting parks and menageries. Enlisting the help of renowned historian, Romila Thapar - who analyzes historical accounts and representations of the lion in early India - and scholar, Yusuf Ansari - who looks back at the lives of the Mughals and their famed hunts - to further validate his theory, Valmik Thapar concludes at the end of this thought-provoking book that the Indian lion and the Indian cheetah were, in fact, exotic imports, and not indigenous subspecies. Tracing the history of the lion and the cheetah for over 5,000 years, and substantiated with pictorial evidence, Exotic Aliens is a pioneering work that could turn field biology on its head.

Nations need identities. These are created from perceptions of how societies have evolved. In this, history plays a central role. Insisting on reliable history is therefore crucial to more than just a pedagogic cause. Delicate relationships between the past and present or an exacting understanding of the past, call for careful analyses. Understanding India's past is of vital importance to the present. Many popularly held views about the past need to be critically enquired into before they can be taken as historical. Why is it important for Indian society to be secular? When did communalism as an ideology gain a foothold in the country? How and when did the patriarchal system begin to support a culture of violence against women? Historian Romila Thapar has investigated, analyzed, and interpreted the history that underlies such questions throughout her career. Through the incisive essays in The Past as Present, she argues that it is of critical importance for the Indian past to be carefully and rigorously explained if the legitimacy of the present, wherever it derives from the past, is to be portrayed as accurately as possible. This is particularly crucial given the attempts by unscrupulous politicians, religious fundamentalists, and their ilk to wilfully misrepresent and manipulate the past in order to serve their present-day agendas. The Past as Present is an essential and necessary book at a time when sectarianism, false nationalism, and the muddying of historical facts are increasingly becoming a feature of our public, private, and intellectual lives.

Written by one of India’s best-known public intellectuals,  this book is essential 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.      

Every society has its cultures: patterns of how people live and express themselves and how they value objects and thoughts. Recently, there has been considerable debate about what constitutes Indian culture and heritage and about how much diversity those categories ought to contain. Romila Thapar begins by explaining how definitions of culture have changed over the past three centuries. She suggests that cultures can be defined as a shared understanding of selected objects and thoughts from the past, but this understanding is often stripped of its historical context. Thapar touches on a few of these illuminating contexts, such as social discrimination, the role of women, and attitudes toward science and knowledge. This thought-provoking book is sure to spark productive debate about some current shibboleths in India’s culture.

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. Written by one of India's best-known public intellectuals, Voices of Dissent will be essential reading not for anyone interested in India's fascinating history, but also the direction in which the nation is headed.

The figure of Sakuntala appears in many forms throughout South Asian literature, most famously in the "Mahabharata" and in Kalidisa's fourth-century Sanskrit play, "Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection." In these two texts, Sakuntala undergoes a critical transformation, relinquishing her assertiveness and autonomy to become the quintessentially submissive woman, revealing much about the performance of Hindu femininity that would come to dominate South Asian culture. Through a careful analysis of sections from "Sakuntala" and their various iterations in different contexts, Romila Thapar explores the interactions between literature and history, culture and gender, that frame the development of this canonical figure, as well as a distinct conception of female identity.

The claim, often made, that India--uniquely among civilizations--lacks historical writing distracts us from a more pertinent question, according to Romila Thapar: how to recognize the historical sense of societies whose past is recorded in ways very different from European conventions. In The Past Before Us, a distinguished scholar of ancient India guides us through a panoramic survey of the historical traditions of North India. Thapar reveals a deep and sophisticated consciousness of history embedded in the diverse body of classical Indian literature. The history recorded in such texts as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata is less concerned with authenticating persons and events than with presenting a picture of traditions striving to retain legitimacy and continuity amid social change. Spanning an epoch of nearly twenty-five hundred years, from 1000 BCE to 1400 CE, Thapar delineates three distinct historical traditions: an Itihasa-Purana tradition of Brahman authors; a tradition composed mainly by Buddhist and Jaina scholars; and a popular bardic tradition. The Vedic corpus, the epics, the Buddhist canon and monastic chronicles, inscriptions, regional accounts, and royal biographies and dramas are all scrutinized afresh--not as sources to be mined for factual data but as genres that disclose how Indians of ancient times represented their own past to themselves.

This is a set of four volumes aimed at bringing together the best research by Romila Thapar to showcase her academic contributions to the understanding of history and historiography in India. The four volumes will focus on bringing together all the lectures and papers on an area of her work-historiography, Mauryas and Mauryan India, Social and Cultural Transaction, and Religion and Society. Each volume also includes a detailed interview with the author and a reflection on her work by an expert in the field, who will introduce the essays in that volume. The introduction to the set by Romila Thapar will explore her academic life and approaches to early Indian history and history writing. It will incorporate a detailed analysis of all the trends and transformations in historical thinking and history writing that have shaped the last six decades of Indian history. The set of volumes would conserve and reflect on the life and work of an eminent historian of India.

The author attempts to define Indian society in the crucial period of the mid-first millennium BC and examines the change that took place from a lineage-based society to the establishment of state systems, taking into account the emergence of a peasant economy and the process of urbanization.

In 1957, renowned Indian historian Romila Thapar visited China, where, together with Sri Lankan art historian Anil de Silva, she worked at two cave sites that were the locations of Buddhist monasteries and shrines from the first millennium CE. The first site was the then lesser known Maijishan in north China, and the second was the famous site of Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi desert in Northwest China. Now, decades later, she is supplementing the academic work that emerged from that trip with a captivating travelogue: Gazing Eastward takes readers back to midcentury China, through the observations that Thapar made in her diary during her time at the two archaeological sites and her trips there and to other sites. Traveling by train or truck, Thapar met people from throughout the country and all stations in society, from peasants on a cooperative farm to Chairman Mao himself. An enchanting document of a long-lost era, Gazing Eastward is a marvel, a richly observed work of travel writing that brings a time and a place fully to life.