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Whose History Is She Really Telling? A Critical Look at Romila Thapar’s Marxist Lens
Romila Thapar, long revered within elite academic circles and international liberal platforms as the authoritative voice on Indian historiography, positions her work, Our History, Their History, Whose History?, as an ostensibly impartial inquiry into the political utilization of historical narratives. However, when viewed critically through an Indic right-wing lens, Thapar’s slim but ideologically dense volume emerges less as detached scholarship and more as a carefully orchestrated defense of a Nehruvian-Marxist historiographical paradigm that continues to dominate Indian academia decades after its ideological apex. Central to Thapar’s narrative is the contention that nationalism inherently distorts historical interpretation. Ironically, this critique fails to confront her own implicit nationalist biases favoring the Nehruvian…