By: Naveen Kishore Published in: *The Telegraph* Date: May, 18, 2026 Source: https://www.telegraphindia.com/life/living-history-writing-life-romila-thapar-on-nationalism-dissent-and-memory-prnt/cid/2160960 *Note: *Please access the source to read the entire article
Romila Thapar in conversation with Naveen Kishore about writing a memoir. Seagull Books recently published Romila Thapar’s *Just Being: A Memoir*. *Naveen: For those of us who are responsive and responsible beings, a certain reluctance to write about ourselves, our journeys, our political actions, our desire to do the “right thing”, does create a checkpoint of sorts. A barrier. If this reticence comes with a desire to protect one’s secret introspective cave, space, retreat, then it becomes a constant and often self-adversarial battle between what to share and what to omit. And yet as a historian of stature, an intellect that often jumps into the fray, lends a hand and shoulder, and your name, to political causes, issues that most people turn a blind eye to, this is almost a contradiction. The public figure as a seeker of privacy! But those of us who pick up your “life” as a book, crave insights. Not the instant gratification served up by algorithms. No, we seek life lessons. Again, not necessarily because we wish to act upon them, or adopt them, but out of the desire to turn our own introspection into a participatory activity in these dark times.* *Romila:* It is a memoir in a way but it’s also capturing an age, which I think is very important, something we tend not to do too much of. Memoirs are not just a catalogue of routine existence, they’re terribly important. Even the mundane and the ordinary have a place when you’re trying to reconstruct an age, an age of thinking and acting and asking — What was it like? Why was it like that? Why did people behave like that? Why did people think like that?
