Romila Thapar on the emergence of a common Indian identity

What did it mean to be “Indian” before the modern nation came into being? In this excerpt from Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present (Penguin India, November 2025), the historian Romila Thapar and the writer and social critic Namit Arora reflect on how identities were formed, imagined and contested in early and medieval India. Ranging across foreign travel accounts, Sanskrit texts, caste hierarchies and colonial transformations, the conversation probes whether any shared sense of Indian identity existed prior to the colonial era, and why the question itself has become so politically charged today.

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Excerpted from Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present by Romila Thapar and Namit Arora (Penguin India, November 2025)

Namit Arora: Let me move on to the matter of Indian identity. Over the centuries, many foreign travellers passed through India: Megasthenes, the Chinese monks, Alberuni and others. These travellers noticed a cultural distinctiveness about the Subcontinent, and called its inhabitants Hindus – then a non-religious term for all peoples east of the Sindhu River in al-Hind. They saw them as different from people elsewhere in the world, though their perceptions were seemingly based on their interactions with the dominant and literate groups, or the “visible people” of the time – elite groups who created texts, monuments and other durable artefacts.

But did Indians themselves broadly share any sense of a common identity, whether religious or secular, in early or medieval India? Did they see themselves, in any sense, as “us here” versus “them outsiders”, roughly aligned with subcontinental boundaries? If not, when did the first semblance of such a common identity emerge across India, at least among a significant subset of its people?

Romila Thapar: If you speak in subcontinental terms, I would say very late. Megasthenes doesn’t mention the similarity all the way across. He refers to different groups, different practices, and makes a distinction between them. The Chinese pilgrims are Buddhist monks, and India is for them the western heaven, the holy land of the Buddha. This is where the Buddha was born and lived, so they are in awe of India. Alberuni is very practical. He is interested in Brahmanical culture almost as what today we might call an anthropologist, because he is a scholar and he regards the observations of this culture as part of his scholarly interests. He is trying to understand it, not just record it. 

When one reads about people coming to India, one has to ask who they are and what they are pursuing in India. We don’t know for sure. Possibly the most rational, logical perceptions come from Alberuni, but then that’s because his intellect is extraordinary. It’s not that the Chinese pilgrims didn’t have high intellect, but their purpose and function was to pursue their interest in Buddhism – not the same as that of Alberuni or Megasthenes. The Greeks were curious; they didn’t think the Indians were superior to them but just different. And so their whole attitude was: let’s record the strange differences we see or hear about here, such as the story of a man who had such long ears that at night he curled up and slept in them. Their descriptions of first-hand observations are more to the point. In his account, Megasthenes refers in some detail to the seven subdivisions of Indian society. This is interesting as a perception of an outsider of how Indian society – or at least its upper sections – was structured. So these are differences that have to be understood by us as recording how he saw the working of Indian society. 

A common identity has a reason – why was it required? There was little reason for it in those days. The local boundary may have mattered but the distant one hardly did. Then there is the question of what that identity might have been. If the common factor was belonging to a kingdom, then these changed their boundaries, sometimes from reign to reign, so what was the territorial definition? I am raising the question of territorial definition because one’s home territory was obvious, easily identified and known. The other evident identity would have been that of the cultural pattern of the elite, which would have been similar at least in adjacent regions. Those of lesser status would doubtless have followed diverse local patterns.