1 1
Romila Thapar

Just Being

Just Being

A Memoir
₹1,499.00
₹1,499.00
| $45 |£32.5
  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Details
  • Shipping

Historian Romila Thapar reflects on a rich, path-breaking life—and the ideas, friendships, and journeys that shaped her.

In Just Being, historian Romila Thapar invites us into her illustrious world—a rich, extensive memoir from a scholar who has profoundly shaped our understanding of India’s past and present.

From her childhood growing up in British India, through her years of education in London, her extensive travels to archaeological sites across Asia and beyond, and her trailblazing role in shaping the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Thapar reflects on a life lived in the service of inquiry and education. Composed over the past few years, Just Being is a testimony to Thapar’s ability to view herself within the larger flow of history, and to illumine it with a scholar’s depth and a storyteller’s sensitivity. It reveals not only an extraordinary, boundary-defying life but a profound conviction that understanding our past in the light of irrefutable evidence is essential to an insight into the present and to shaping a more thoughtful future.

WATCH | Romila Thapar on her memoir, Hindutva, and India’s plurality | SpeakEasy with Amit Baruah Ep 11

READ | An interview with Romila Thapar | The Caravan

READ | Romila Thapar on her memoir ‘Just Being’, battle over history, JNU and the Aryan question | The Indian Express

‘This is a historian’s memoir, a woman historian’s memoir, an Indian woman historian’s memoir, a political Indian woman historian’s memoir, a political, unmarried Indian woman historian’s memoir. Generations of Indians will reap from this work of deeply personal writings that also ruminate on India over the previous 100 years. Thapar’s gaze opens a door that we hesitate to open, for it might show us what we were, what we became, and what we can become.’—Ipsita Mitra, Scroll. Read the full review here.

‘Romila Thapar’s importance lies not only in the histories she has written, but in the kind of intellectual life she has lived. Curious, rigorous, unwilling to be confined by labels and always open to questioning herself. . . . To read her now is to be reminded that thinking itself requires discipline, patience, and a certain courage. And that perhaps is what Just Being leaves behind, not just the memory of a life, but the possibility of a way of being in the world.’—Ehsan Sharma, The Federal. Read the full review here.

If you are ordering from India, your order will be shipped from Seagull Books, Calcutta. Shipping is free for orders above ₹999. It takes a maximum of 7 working days your order to be delivered.

If you are ordering from the US or the UK or anywhere else in the world, your order will be shipped from the University of Chicago Press' distribution centre, Chicago.

Please note: For customers paying in currencies other than Indian rupee or US dollar, prices will be calculated according to the currency conversion rate at the time of purchase and may vary from the printed price.
View full details