This book encapsulates Romila Thapar’s thought very well. A collection of essays written in a period of around 40 years on topics ranging from historiography, communal interpretations of Indian history and its use in political mobilisation, caste and class, women in Indian history.

Nehru wrestled with this question of Indian identity a lot in his book “the discovery of India”. He could never reach a conclusion but he rejected the idea of uniformity. In this book she mainly deals with the same questions of identity and culture and especially the reconstruction and fabrication of a distorted past that has become an important part of the modern chauvinistic politics. Are there such things as permanent unchanging identities? How does an identity develop and transform? How do the cultural transformations occur? The idea of Indian nation-state has come through Colonial intervention rather than a series of historical transitions like in Europe. Considering this, what should be an Indian identity? A narrow one based on religious lines and uniform identity that excludes a lot of population or a more secular one?

The colonial reconstruction of Indian history was based on dividing on the religious lines and was based on eternal unchanging identities, which helped their divide and rule policies. They divided the population into a Hindu majority and a Muslim minority, creating a conflict, while the ground reality in India was a lot of diverse number of sects and identities with varying religious practices. For majority of the people, religion was a syncretic and an open ended experience that didn’t follow any formal labels. The partition of India wass one of the major political outcomes of such interpretation of history. Now the Hindu nationalist views are heavily influenced by such colonial views and they have built upon such colonial preconceptions combined with their politics inspired from Italian fascism.

The book has been divided into four sections such as the History and the Public, Concerning Religion and History, Debates, and Our Women—Then and Now. The themes she deals with and the points she makes are the familiar ones from her earlier works. The changing historiography of India,the various interpretations of history, the social structures of lineage societies and the transformation from a lineage society to a state, caste and class, and women in Indian history.

These essays frequently reflect the kind of optimism and hope that prevailed during the early years of Indian independence with people embarking upon the project of nation building with the ideas of social and economic equality and equal social justice to all taking the centre stage, in contrast with the modern politics of division and hatred, the deterioration in the quality of public discourse,political control over arts and the banning of books and articles.

While many of these essays are quite old, they are especially pertinent to the present day concerns where the scene is of politics of religious chauvinism combined with a global market economy with its inherent alienation and insecurity. As she says, a historical consciousness or a better understanding of the past provides a proper context for the contemporary social and economic debates and legislation. The quality of the essays varies and the author makes some unconvincing arguments and because of the nature of the book there is some overlap and repetition. ( )