Written by one of India's best-known public intellectuals, this book
is essential reading for anyone interested in India's fascinating
history as well as the direction in which the nation is headed.
People have argued since time immemorial. Disagreement is a part of
life, of human experience. But we now live in times when any form of
protest in India is marked as anti-Indian and met with arguments that
the very concept of dissent was imported into India from the West. As
Romila Thapar explores in her timely historical essay, however, dissent
has a long history in the subcontinent, even if its forms have evolved
through the centuries.
In Voices of Dissent: An Essay, Thapar looks at the articulation of
nonviolent dissent and relates it to various pivotal moments throughout
India's history. Beginning with Vedic times, she takes us from the
second to the first millennium BCE, to the emergence of groups that were
jointly called the Shramanas--the Jainas, Buddhists, and Ajivikas. Going
forward in time, she also explores the views of the Bhakti sants and
others of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and brings us to a major
moment of dissent that helped to establish a free and democratic India:
Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha. Then Thapar places in context the recent
peaceful protests against India's new, controversial citizenship law,
maintaining that dissent in our time must be opposed to injustice and
supportive of democratic rights so that society may change for the
better.
