'Unfortunately, there is a slight degree of disbelief in a State award's bona fides'

Indian Express Newspapers : "Honoured by the academia, historian Romila Thapar has been in the centre of a bitter battle over the Indian past. Between the Kluge Claire Chair and two spurned Padma awards, Thapar, 73, clarifies her stand in an interview with Santwana Bhattacharya

Q: But you did accept the honour conferred on you by the US Library of Congress...
One of your colleagues-Irfan Habib-has accepted the award...
If there can be a European identity, an American identity, a Black consciousness, why not an Indian one....
That is another allegation. That you refuse to look at the Vedas and the Sanskrit texts as historical documents.
What of the ICHR controversy...of being 'partisan', not academic enough?
You have yourself been branded as a Marxist historian.
This phenomenon is not confined to this country. A similar process is on in Italy.

Wherever there have been historical changes, people are going through this process. One of the most interesting cases is Germany-the books that were used in the schools in East Germany and the ones in the West and how you correlate the two. So these are problems that belong to a much wider world than ours. We have to treat them not as 'leftist vs rightist' historians and that kind of nonsense but as problems in how to treat a body of knowledge.
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