Romila Thapar is one of India’s foremost historians and has made an immense contribution in the field of early Indian history. Thapar is best known for her writings against the communalization of India’s past and right-wing historical fabrications. Through her work on the periodization of Indian history and the history of religious beliefs and communities, she has exposed the chauvinistic agenda of the far right and its efforts to manufacture a falsified view of the past.

Thapar was born in 1931 in a Punjabi Khatri (traders) family. She belonged to a household where male members of the family worked in different echelons of the colonial administration, and received her school education in several different cities of what was then undivided India.

Her parents were close to people like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the anti-colonial activist who was known as the “Frontier Gandhi.” While studying at St Mary’s High School in Pune, she used to go to Gandhi’s own prayer gatherings, and remembers that on Gandhi’s advice, she started wearing khadi clothing for some time.