A HISTORY OF OPPOSITION

Indian past and its complexity

- Dilip Menon

VOICES OF DISSENT

An Essay by Romila Thapar SEAGULL BOOKS ₹499; 164 pages

Romila Thapar has been our mentor and guide over a period of half a century in understanding the Indian past in all its complexity. She has engaged with the presence of diversity, conflict, dissonance and debate in the making of what we see as the past of India. The one idea carved with great clarity from her reading of the archives of the pasts is that to invent an idea of Indian civilisation as a monolith would be both false and debilitating to the project of creating and maintaining a civil society governed by ideas of compassion and the ethic of dissent. This new essay puts dissent at the heart of the formation of India as an idea and as a political entity.

In the 1940s, Romila Thapar as a young child meets the Mahatma. Gandhi asks her why she wears mill made cloth rather than khadi. A simple and direct question taken on the face of it. However, the symbol of khadi combines within it an idea of indigeneity, of patient withdrawal into thought and a stern ethics of making centred on the well-being of the many. Sixty years later, she visits the women protesting peacefully at Shaheen Bagh against the Citizenship Amendment Act and has another moment of epiphany. She meets women of all classes invested in an idea of belonging for all and willing to engage in dissent in a patient and deliberative manner. These two moments are at the heart of the book, putting the idea of dissent at the heart of an ethical democracy.