“‘I want to be an autonomous woman,’ I kept saying to everybody”

In the historian Romila Thapar’s extensive new memoir, Just Being, published by Seagull Books, she looks back at her childhood, education in London, decades of teaching, travels to archaeological sites in Asia and beyond, and much else. Hartosh Singh Bal, The Caravan’s executive editor, speaks to Thapar in this interview about the book, her early years, teaching at the Centre for Historical Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, reactions to her work as a public intellectual, and her approach to history.

Over the last few years, you have been actively engaged in public debate on our times. This is your most personal book. How did it come into being? What led you to write this memoir?

Well, it took a long period of gestation, because I really kept feeling I was incompetent to write a memoir, as I had become so used to writing academic books on academic subjects. Every time I sat down to write something, it would be the academic style that would surface. And I would read it and say, “Oh, no. People are going to be bored by this.”

It took a long persuasion as well. And the big debate I had with the publishers was “Do we publish it now or do we publish it after I’ve passed away?” And I kept saying, “Do it after I’ve passed away.” I’m not ready for reactions to what I say about myself at all. And then I just got steamrolled by friends, family, publishers. And then, of course, with COVID and the lockdown, it was an ideal time to sit and just write endlessly, which I started doing. It became a much bigger book than this. Everybody said, “You can break it into two volumes.” And I said, “But few read the second volume. They read the first and they drop the book.”