loading . . . Romila Thapar’s ‘Just Being’: In Search For Autonomy Romila Thapar’s recently released memoir, Just Being, is many things at once. It is a manifesto for historians, a touchstone for academic researchers, a chronicle of familial relationships and emancipatory friendships, a travelogue where every anecdote detonates into a larger question about history, ethics, language, and civic responsibility. Yet beneath these various strands is the portrait of a fiercely autonomous woman, one who insists on the right to live her life, to simply be, on her own terms. Arranged with the tidy chronology that one expects from a historian, the memoir begins with the unlikely circumstances of Thapar’s arrival into the world and moves through an almost novelistic childhood in the North-West Frontier province, Peshawar, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, weaving together family homes, British cantonments, visits to the zenana of Pathan women, and political aftershocks of the partition. https://feminisminindia.com/2026/06/25/romila-thapars-just-being-in-search-for-autonomy/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=jetpack_social
