Watch on Soap2day. Of Times There Were Before is a portrait of Romila Thapar, one of the world’s most influential historians and public intellectuals. At ninety-four, having lived through much of the making of modern India, she stands at an unusual distance from the past she has spent a lifetime studying. The film began with a simple question: who is the person behind the historian’s name? Shot at her home in New Delhi, it is an attempt to encounter Thapar beyond the authority of her work and the public image built around it. What emerges is a portrait of a life still in conversation with its own time.