“In the generation (or two generations) before mine, the leading Indian historians (judged in terms of scholarly books and papers written and read) included Irfan Habib, R. S. Sharma, Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Amalendu Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, all of whom were influenced to a lesser or greater degree by Marxism; and Ashin Dasgupta, Dharma Kumar, Parthasarathy Gupta, Amales Tripathi, Rajat Kanta Rai, Mushirul Hasan, and Tapan Roychowdhury, all of whom were liberals. The leading political scientists included the liberals Rajni Kothari, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Ramashray Ray; the Marxists Javed Alam and Partha Chatterjee; and Ashis Nandy, an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi who like them stoutly resists being classified in conventional terms. The pre-eminent sociologists of that generation were M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille, both of whom would own the label ‘liberal’; and T. N. Madan, who while working on classically conservative themes such as family, kinship and religion would most likely see himself as a liberal too. Even the best-known or most influential economists of the 1960s and 1970 tended to be on the left of the spectrum, as the names of K. N. Raj, Amartya Sen, V. M. Dandekar, Amit Bhaduri, Krishna Bharadwaj, Pranab Bardhan, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra (among others) signify.”

— Ramachandra Guha

[Guha, Ramachandra, Where Are The Conservative Intellectuals in India?, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/where-are-the-conservative-intellectuals-in-india-caravan.html, Caravan, March 2015]

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Ramachandra Guha 6

historian and writer from India 1958

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“Since some ignorant dupes of these Marxists denounce as “McCarthyist” anyone who points out their ideological inspiration, it deserves to be emphasized that “eminent historians” like Romila Thapar, R. S. Sharma and Irfan Habib are certified as Marxists in standard Marxist sources like Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxist Thought. During the official historians' Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute in 1991, the pro-mosque team's argumentation and several other anti-temple pamphlets were published by the People's Publishing House, a Communist Party outfit. One of the recent textbook innovations most furiously denounced as “saffronization” was the truism that Lenin's armed seizing of power in October/November 1917 was a “coup d'état”. And in early 2003, while they were unchaining all their devils against glasnost, the Marxists ruling West Bengal deleted from a textbook a passage in which Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer called Stalin “at least as ruthless as Hitler.””

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“The Dutch historian and indologist Andre Wink writes, referring to Prof. Sharma's chief claim to fame, his book on Indian Feudalism in the early medieval period : 'R. S. Sharma's Indian Feudalism has misguided virtually all historians of the period… Sharma's thesis essentially involves an obstinate attempt to find 'elements' which fit a preconceived picture of what should have happened in India because it happened in Europe (or is alleged to have happened in Europe by Sharma and his school of historians whose knowledge of European history is rudimentary and completely outdated)… The methodological underpinnings of Sharma's work are in fact so thin that one wonders why, for so long, Sharma's colleagues have called his work 'pioneering.”

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“Contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the press, there are many fine historians in India. From my own generation of scholars, I can strongly recommend — to student and lay reader alike — the work of Upinder Singh on ancient India, of Nayanjot Lahiri on the history of archaeology, of Vijaya Ramaswamy on the bhakti movement, of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the early history of European expansion, of Chetan Singh on the decline of the Mughal State, of Sumit Guha on the social history of Western India, of Seema Alavi on the social history of medicine, of Niraja Gopal Jayal on the history of citizenship, of Tirthankar Roy on the economic consequences of colonialism, of Mahesh Rangarajan on the history of forests and wildlife, and of A. R. Venkatachalapathy on South Indian cultural history.”

Ramachandra Guha (1958) historian and writer from India

[Guha, Ramachandra, Captive ideologues, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/history-beyond-marxism-and-hindutva-the-telegraph.html, The Telegraph, July 26, 2014]

“So my answer to why I wrote this book [about Pakistani textbooks] is: I have written for posterity. (Sometimes I feel that I have written all my books for the generations whom I will not see). In a hundred years' time; when the future historian sets out to contemplate the Pakistan off an age gone by and look for the causes that brought it low, he might find in this book of mine one small candle whose quivering flame will light his path.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

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“Proposals to include Sanskrit in the course offerings were rejected numerous times by scholars who wanted to protect JNU from what they considered to be a majoritarian or Hindu Nationalist agenda. When I questioned Romila Thapar, a well known historian from JNU, about this issue in July 2000, she explained that if students want to learn Sanskrit, “there are so many Maths and Piths around where they can go.””

Yvette Rosser (1952) American activist

She added that “most of the regional colleges have some kind of Sanskrit program”.
Rosser, Yvette Claire (2003). Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Dissertation). University of Texas at Austin.