Ep. 15: Romila Thapar on “Interpretations of Early Indian History” (2005 Katz Distinguished Lecture)

In residence at the Simpson Center as Katz Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, Romila Thapar conducted a graduate seminar on Early Indian History and contributed to many diverse campus conversations.

Professor Emerita of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Romila Thapar is one of the world’s foremost experts on ancient Indian history, and a clear voice for the necessity of detailed and nuanced historical study as a foundation for understanding the present and shaping the future. She has published over twenty books, among them, Voices of Dissent: An Essay published in 2020, The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India (2013), and From Lineage to State: Social Formations of the Mid-First Millennium B.C. in the Ganges Valley (1985). Her writing can also be found in the Indian online newspaper The Print and in the New York Times. She is an elected Foreign honorary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-winner with Peter Brown of the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity in 2008.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.