Biruddhotar Swar by Romila Thapar [Hardcover]

In 2019, Professor Romila Thapar delivered two memorial lectures in Delhi. Around the time of her second lecture, the anti-CAA-NRC protests, primarily centered around Shaheen Bagh, took on the form of a national movement. In that protesting atmosphere, her speeches became highly timely. After March 2020, the Shaheen Bagh movement subsided due to unavoidable circumstances. However, the relevance of her speeches did not diminish. The context in which her words were urgently needed remains present even in 2023, during the publication of the first Bengali edition of the book. Naturally, whenever a state-supported narrative tries to become a monolithic voice in the country or society, a voice of dissent inevitably becomes audible. Professor Romila Thapar demonstrated that neither the emergence of dissenting voices nor the attempts to suppress them is a new phenomenon.