Romila Thapar’s memoir, ‘Just Being’: A fearless journey of an autonomous woman

She had come to deliver a special lecture on Kalidasa’s Abhijnana-Shakuntalam. I was in my second year of college, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. A towering persona, Romila Thapar was dressed in black, and her hair, resembling white waves, was tied in a bun. Huge silver rings of intricate designs adorned her fingers. The seminar room at Miranda House, Delhi University, was packed to the brim. Some students had even lined up outside the room, trying to sneak a peek. The central argument of her lecture, as I remember it, was how we must critically understand and analyse the difference between the depiction of Sakuntala in the epic Mahabharata and Kalidasa’s text.

The woman who had agency and spoke truth to power in the epic was somehow at the mercy of patriarchal dogma in Kalidasa’s story. An antithesis to what she epitomises in the Mahabharata, Sakuntala submits to the authority of Dushyanta in Kalidasa’s version. Gender norms and patriarchal dictates of the classical age are unravelled through Kalidasa’s characterisation of Sakuntala, who sought legitimacy by being a conformist and not a subversive woman. All this while, I kept imagining what if the “ring of recognition”, the cure to Dushyanta’s forgetfulness, was what Thapar...

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