Namit Arora and Romila Thapar. In the recently published book Speaking of History, a conversation between historian Romila Thapar and Namit Arora, the writer and social critic who also practises public history, the participants touch upon many interesting matters of cultural and social history that provoke further conversations.Since a large part of the book revolves around India’s cultural history and the debates around it, I would like to primarily take up the question of culture.To begin with, Thapar describes how the new idea of culture incorporates social “patterns of life,” while, conversely, society is defined by the “pattern of culture”....