Voices of Dissent : An Essay

Romila Thapar

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People have disagreed since time immemorial. They have argued or agreed to disagree, or eventually arrived at an agreement. But we live in times when any form of dissent in India is marked as anti-indian, suggesting that the very concept of dissent has been imported to India from the west—an argument made by those who visualize the Indian past as free of blemishes and therefore not requiring dissenting opinions. But, as Romila Thapar explores in this timely historical essay, dissent has a long history in the subcontinent, even if its forms have evolved through the centuries. Thapar looks at the articulation of dissent—focusing on non-violent forms—that which is so essential to all societies, and relates it to various moments of time and in varying contexts as part of the Indian historical experience. Beginning with Vedic times, she takes us from the second to the first millennium BC, to the emergence of groups that were jointly called the shramanas—the jainas, Buddhists, and ajivikas. Going forward in time she explores the views of the bhakti Santa and others of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ad, and brings us to a major moment of dissent that helped to establish a free and democratic India: Mahatma Gandhism satyagraha. Throughout her argument she emphasises the use of the idiom of religion as reflecting social change, ending with the eventual politicization of religion in the present. She places in context the recent peaceful protests against caa and NPR in places such as br>shaheen Bagh, Delhi. Implicit in this is the question of whether or not the idiom of religion is necessary. Thapar maintains that dissent in our time must be audible, distinct, opposed to injustice and supportive of democratic rights. The articulation of dissent and debate through dialogue is what makes of it a movement that changes society for the better. Written by one of India’s best-known public intellectuals, voices of dissent: an essay has immense relevance. It is essential reading for anyone who contemplates not only the Indian past but also the direction in which the society and nation is headed.

Romila Thapar

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. Thapar is a Professor of Ancient History, Emerita, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New 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 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. 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, the University of Calcutta, the University of Hyderabad, Brown University, and the University of Pretoria. Thapar is an Honourary 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.

Title	Voices of Dissent : An Essay
Author	Romila Thapar
Publisher	Seagull Books
Number of Pages	163
Language	English (US)
Category	Politics History
First Published	OCT 2020