Summary
Historian Romila Thapar delivered the Second Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on 25 October 2026. She argued that the way Indians read their own history was largely set by colonial scholarship. That scholarship included James Mill's division of the past into Hindu, Muslim and British periods and the European idea of oriental despotism.
She contended that the Hindutva reading of history inherits this religion-centred frame and uses the past to make claims about present politics. Her own school of historiography has faced sustained criticism from scholars such as Dilip K.
Chakrabarti, which makes the method of periodisation itself the real examinable question.
WHY IT MATTERS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
Romila Thapar, 94, delivered the Second Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture at HKS Surjeet Bhawan, New Delhi, on Sunday 25 October 2026, on historiography and early Indian history. She traced popular readings of India's past back to colonial historians, singled out James Mill's religion-based periodisation and argued that the Hindutva interpretation of history is singular and fixed.
Standard News
The Frame Outlived the Empire: Mill's Three Chapters and the Long Quarrel Over India's Past In 1817, a
London writer who had never visited India published a three-volume history of the country. James Mill's The History of British India cut the subcontinent's past into three blocks: a Hindu period, a Mahometan period and a British period.
It looked like a filing system. In fact it carried a verdict. The label on each block was the religion of the ruler. Whatever happened to peasants, traders, guilds, languages or regional kingdoms was quietly folded under that label.
A thousand years of change became three sealed rooms, each defined by who sat on the throne.
The idea underneath the labels Mill did not invent the attitude behind his scheme.
Montesquieu had argued in 1748 that Asian societies were naturally static and ruled by despots and Hegel built the same assumption into his philosophy of history in 1837. Oriental despotism gave colonial scholarship a convenient premise.
If Indian society did not change on its own, then change could only arrive from outside. The British chapter, in that telling, was the one in which history finally began to move. This is the line Romila Thapar drew at the Second Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture on 25 October 2026.
Her argument was that reading India's past mainly through religion is a colonial inheritance, not an indigenous one. She went further, contending that the Hindutva reading of history keeps that inheritance alive in a single, fixed narrative.
In her view, that narrative overlooks the many strands within Hinduism itself and serves present-day political claims more than explanation of the past. These are her charges, made in a political forum and they should be read as such.
Where the
parallel holds and where it breaks The continuity she points to is real in one specific sense. The structure survived even when the verdict flipped. Mill used the "Hindu period" as evidence of backwardness. Later readings that celebrate the same period as a golden age, interrupted by a "Muslim" intrusion, keep his chapter boundaries intact while reversing his judgement.
The frame outlived the empire that drew it. But the parallel has limits and an honest answer names them:
- Post-independence historians, Thapar's own school among them, replaced Mill's labels with Ancient, Medieval and Modern. Critics have long noted that the new names often rest on similar break-points.
- Thapar's own survey of early India closes at AD 1300, a boundary close to the consolidation of Sultanate rule.
- Her approach has itself been attacked. The archaeologist Dilip K. Chakrabarti argued, in Colonial Indology (1997) and a 2012 essay, that her school carries forward colonial diffusionist assumptions and underweights archaeological evidence of continuity.
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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James Mill published The History of British India in 1817, in three volumes.
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Mill divided Indian history into Hindu, Mahometan (Muslim) and British periods.
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The idea of oriental despotism was popularised by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
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Hegel carried the idea into his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837).
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Karl Marx later reworked it as the Asiatic Mode of Production.
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Post-independence historians largely replaced the religious labels with the Ancient, Medieval and Modern framework.
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Scholars including J.F. Richards, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam have proposed an Early Modern period for India, roughly 1500 to 1750.
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Romila Thapar's major works include A History of India Volume 1 (1966), Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002) and Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004).
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The First Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture was delivered by historian Irfan Habib on 15 September 2025.
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Sitaram Yechury, former CPI(M) general secretary, died in September 2024.
Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.
Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:
How Montesquieu, Hegel and Marx built the "static Asia" premise that Mill turned into a periodisation and why that premise mattered for justifying colonial rule.
Why the Ancient-Medieval-Modern framework replaced Mill's labels yet left several of his break-points standing and what the Early Modern (1500-1750) category was designed to fix.
The Somanatha case study: how Thapar's 2004 reading and Meenakshi Jain's critique show the method dispute in miniature.
A way forward for reading Indian history beyond ruler-religion, built around social, economic and regional change.
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