As a high-school student, I never considered any future other than joining the history guild. In school and college, I received all of the required marks, and thereafter applied to only one department at Dhaka University: it was history or nothing else. A few anxious days later, I was admitted – and my life changed. Serious politics, serious liquor and serious history all struck me and my new classmates like a thunderclap. In retrospect, we never really recovered.
It is not that the classes themselves were riveting. After the initial thrill of university had dissipated, my studies soon became little more than a distant priority. The world had to be saved, and tutorials were a bit of a bore. Indeed, for many above-average students, university courses in Southasia are not tough enough. History is a notable example. With few applying for these programmes, standards are kept at a level that, it is hoped, will accommodate the less academically inclined. The result is that history inevitably becomes a mediocre subject, taken up by those who could not make it into economics or international relations. History became everyone's distant, poor academic cousin.
It was not always so. At one point, history was considered one of the top departments in any university of the Subcontinent. As a teacher once told me, history used to be the domain of future officers of the Civil Service of Pakistan. The department rolled out large numbers of these future bureaucrats. At that time, it was a subject that you studied to get out and move on.
The best thing about my own MA studies in ancient history and archaeology was my introduction to the works of D D Kosambi, H K Dani, H D Sankhaliya, B B Lal and, of course, Romila Thapar, as well as a host of others whose books were generally meant for 'specialists'. The very bland textbooks used at the graduate level gave way to something rich and strange, and I loved it. Soon thereafter though, unlike what was usual in those days, my Master's results did not lead to an immediate invitation to teach. There was no opening for me, and I was crushed. By then, however, I was working on a project on the history of the 1971 war, and my intellectual life was about to undergo some drastic changes. The year was 1978.