"That this ‘social science approach’ can lead to disaster is suggested by a Ph. D thesis submitted by Shireen Ratnagar under Thapar. While examining the issue of Indus-Mesopotamia trade, this thesis reduced the Indus civilization to the position held by India in the British empire as a supplier of raw materials. Kumkum Roy was another of her Ph. D students and her book on the emergence of monarchy in Vedic India arranges certain portions of the Vedic texts in an arbitrary developmental order and postulates on that basis the ‘emergence’ of monarchy. Exercises of this kind may or may not be ‘social science’, but certainly this is not honest history."