Eminent historian and former JNU professor KN Panikkar dies at 89

NEw new delhi/Thiruvananthapuram: high historiographer, public intellect, and a devout teacher to many generations of students at JNU, KN Panikkar, passed away in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday, aged 89. He was suffering from age-related health complications and is survived by his daughters Ragini and Shalini. His wife, Usha, preceded him in 2022.“Through his writings, teachings, and speeches, he (Panikkar) constantly reminded people that India’s pluralism was shaped by the course of history, and that its collapse would lead to the collapse of the country itself. His words were like light in the minds of people at a time when Indian secularism was shrouded amid the dark clouds of communalism,” Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said in a statement.Panikkar served as professor of history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. After retirement, he shifted base to Kerala and served as vice-chancellor of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, and chaired the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR) for 10 years between 2008 and 2018. The KCHR was planning special programmes in his honour on his upcoming 90th birthday.Also Read | Renowned historian KN Panikkar dies at 89Born in Guruvayoor, a temple town in central Kerala in 1936, Panikkar graduated from Victoria College, Palakkad, and completed his post-graduation and PhD at Rajasthan University, where he met his partner, Usha. He taught at Rajasthan University and the Indian Institute of Public Administration before joining JNU in 1972 as a professor of history. His doctoral thesis was on British diplomacy in India.Panikkar was part of the galaxy of renowned scholars and teachers at the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU, among them Bipan Chandra, Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, Harbans Mukhia, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, and Madhavan Palat, that attracted students from all over India to pursue history in the national Capital. Thapar remembers him as a much-respected scholar and a very helpful colleague at the Centre. “His knowledge of history, contemporary life, India today, and politics was very helpful to understand the contemporary situation,” she said.As a teacher, Panikkar was much loved by his students, who describe him as a thorough gentleman, a calm and composed scholar who never lost his cool in the lecture hall or outside. “He never imposed his ideas, but gave full freedom to pursue our line of thought. He made us think critically, nudged us to look deep into our subject, but never asked us to follow the way he thought, which was very rare,” says Shobhana Warrier, historian and professor at Kamala Nehru College, Delhi, who did her PhD under Panikkar. Students remember that the Panikkar household was always open to students, who could drop by for tea or even a meal, and, of course, for discussions on any topic under the sun.KN Ganesh, a historian and chairman, the Kerala Council for Historical Research, describes Panikkar as a historian of ideas who unknotted the many complex strands of Indian nationalism and the social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was committed to a just and egalitarian social order and steadfast in opposing all forms of communalism, he adds. Ganesh, who was a student of Panikkar, highlights the varied subjects that his teacher wrote about, among them the seminal work on the Malabar rebellion of 1921, essays on marriage reforms in Kerala, the Ayurveda tradition, Malayalam novel (focussed on Indulekha, a pioneering work of fiction from the 19th century) and social reform, the tradition of and even the “Great Shoe Question”. The last-mentioned essay was on the British practice that disallowed Indians from wearing shoes in courtrooms and highlighted how the colonial administration used public policies to segregate the ruling Europeans and the native colonial subjects. Some of his books include Culture and Consciousness in Modern India; An Agenda for Cultural Action; and Culture, Ideology and Hegemony; Before the Night Falls; and an edited volume on Caste in Kerala.Of the many works that Panikkar published, his work on the Malabar rebellion of 1921, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprising in Malabar, broke new ground regarding the history and lineage of a popular uprising in Malabar against the backdrop of the Khilafat Movement. The rebellion for most parts of the 20th century had been identified as a communal uprising that targeted Hindus. Panikkar’s work established that the Malabar Rebellion was essentially a revolt of peasants, a majority of whom happened to be Muslims, against the British colonial administration and local zamindars, many of them Hindus. He also traced the rebellion’s lineage to the smaller revolts by Muslim peasants in the 19th century against the East India Company and later, the colonial administration, which had introduced an oppressive and exploitative form of revenue extraction.A fellow traveller of the Left, Panikkar was close to the titans of the Indian communist movement, including its founding leaders, PC Joshi and K. Damodaran, and maintained the PC Joshi Archives at JNU. From the 1980s, Panikkar began actively associating with social organisations in Delhi. He was president of Janasamskriti, a broad Left platform founded by Malayalis in the national Capital, for six years in the late 1980s, associated with the politico-cultural group, SAHMAT, and later helped found the activist organisation, ANHAD. Haridas, who worked closely with Panikkar in Janasamskriti, remembers a mentor who made sure that the organisation became a platform to discuss broad issues of the day rather than limit itself to Malayali expat nostalgia. Shabnam Hashmi, who steered ANHAD for many years, reminisces about travelling to Panikkar’s home in Kerala in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat riots to discuss building an activist group to organise and educate people around secular values and communal harmony. Panikkar travelled extensively in Gujarat and wrote about the fractured and polarised society he witnessed.Late into his 80s, Panikkar remained a magnet for young scholars, academicians, and activists who flocked to his flat in Thiruvananthapuram, where he had retired, for conversations and, as an activist put it, for assurances about values. Panikkar leaves behind an inspiring legacy of scholarship, teaching, and activism rooted in democratic and secular values.