ABSTRACT
Romila Thapar is India's pre-eminent historian. A specialist in early Indian history, her scientific approach to history and her focus on social and economic history changed the way India's early history is studied and understood. Notwithstanding her eminent status among scholars, Thapar is also India's most attacked historian. She experienced censorship, political assaults, government harassment, and online trolling campaigns. Hindu nationalists seeking to rewrite Indian history in order to fit their ideology do not attempt to develop knowledge of India's past, but to silence her scholarship. Spanning over five decades, Thapar's academic and popular rebukes to these attacks help to protect Indian history from contemporary and future fantasy history and form a body of insightful work on the nature of the use and abuse of history. Her responses can be viewed as the harvest of doing history from a position of loss. Thapar demonstrates that writing history from loss can come in many forms and that at times the categories of “winners” and losers can even overlap.
