Imagined Religious Communities?

About the Author

Romila Thapar is internationally known historian of Ancient India. She taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her several books include Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, From Lineage to State and Interpreting Early India, all from Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

Extracts from “Imagined Religious Communities”

“The nineteenth-century definition of the Hindu community sought its justification in early history using Mill’s periodization, which assumes the existence of Hindu and Muslim communities and takes the history of the former back to the centuries BC….The more basic question for the historian is to explain the slow and gradual spread of the Indo-Aryan language across a large part of the Indian subcontinent.”