Beyond Gargi and Maitreyi: Exploring the Theri and Thera Apadanas

Romila Thapar has been an inspiration, an inimitable role model as a scholar, teacher and, more visibly in recent times, as a public intellectual for several generations of students. I have learnt from her for many decades, and we have had stimulating and difficult discussions on the significance or otherwise of gendering history. What I will attempt to do here is to draw on some of the insights from her work on Sakuntala (Thapar 1999) and on her more recent discussion on the definition of heritage (Thapar 2018) including the challenge she throws out to visualise knowledge as part of heritage (ibid., 134–77).