K N Ganesh
Professor Kantiyur Narayana Panikkar, popularly known as K.N. Panikkar, one of the premier historians of modern India and a strong fellow traveller of progressive and democratic forces, passed away in Thiruvananthapuram on March 9. He was 89.
Panikkar was born in Guruvayur. He graduated from Government Victoria College, Palakkad, where he was an activist in the Students’ Federation. He completed his postgraduate and doctoral studies at the University of Jaipur. His doctoral work was on the intellectual history of modern India, an interest he retained throughout his life.
He began his teaching career at the University of Delhi and later moved to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He became an active collaborator in the project to draft a comprehensive history of India’s freedom struggle, led by Prof. Bipan Chandra and others. He later undertook his own project on writing a history of the Malabar Rebellion of 1921, which proved to be a path-breaking study on popular struggles in modern India against the colonial state and hegemonic classes.
In this study, published as Against the Lord and the State, he introduced the Gramscian concept of intellectuals as the harbingers of popular revolts in modern India. He showed how traditional intellectuals, such as Muslim moulavis, were able to articulate the grievances of the peasantry against landlords and the state by appealing to their consciousness of righteousness and justice and by urging people to revolt against ruling classes and a state that denied them justice.
In his later studies, Panikkar continued to explore the role of intellectuals not only in articulating popular resistance but also in building viable alternatives in social and productive life and in their literary expressions. He also strongly argued that the importance of the national movement lay not in the fragmentation of national life or its elitist tendencies, as argued by some historians, but in the integration of national consciousness in favour of secularism, democracy, and social justice.
This strong commitment to the cardinal principles of secularism, democracy, social justice, and the liberation of the oppressed and downtrodden masses shaped his social and political activism. Like many other secular-minded intellectuals, he was deeply affected by the upsurge of communalism in politics from the 1970s onward.
He was in the forefront of the campaign against the RSS attempt to withdraw NCERT textbooks during 1978-79. The books written by Bipan Chandra, R.S. Sharma, Arjun Dev and others incorporated the most recent historical research that challenged the Hindutva narrative propagated by the RSS. After a series of protests by students and teachers, the Janata Government was forced to rescind the withdrawal.
The intent of the RSS soon became clearer when its international affiliate, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), demanded in 1984 that the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, and the Shahi Idgah mosque in Mathura be handed over to Hindus, claiming that these structures had been built after demolishing Hindu temples that allegedly existed on those sites. Although the demand was initially rejected, the VHP-RSS mounted a major campaign for their cause by citing dubious archaeological evidence and selective use of colonial archives.
Historians such as Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, K.N. Panikkar, Shereen Ratnagar and Suraj Bhan came out strongly against this distortion of historical research, condemning the openly divisive and communal intent of the VHP-RSS campaign. The RSS responded with a vilification campaign against the so-called “JNU historians”, branding them pseudo-secular and anti-national. Panikkar, who was at the forefront of the campaign against the RSS, had to bear much of the mudslinging and vilification. He published a series of articles and pamphlets exposing the ideology of the RSS, and his edited volume A Concerned Citizen’s Guide to Communalism appeared during the height of this controversy.
After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the RSS intensified its campaign for the control of other mosques and continued its vilification of Muslims. Panikkar retired from JNU after more than two decades of service as a teacher and administrator. Scores of students taught by him remember him as a deeply student-friendly teacher, always willing to attend even to their personal needs and grievances and to provide help to the best of his ability.
He did not wish to continue in JNU in any capacity after retirement. After brief stints in several universities abroad, he returned to India, seeking to address issues that were of immediate concern to him.
One such concern was the growing problem of communalism. Communalism had already begun to display its gargantuan nature, demolishing and devouring everything in its path. The Rath Yatra led by L.K. Advani and the campaign for the Ram temple had already created deep cleavages in Indian society and helped the BJP-led NDA come to power in 1999.
Returning to Kerala, Panikkar was concerned about building an alternative platform to confront this new communal politics. He argued that communalism had been adopting the garb of cultural nationalism and was attempting to reinterpret Indian culture as exclusively Hindu culture and the Indian national movement as a Hindu resistance against foreign invaders, including Muslims.
This, he believed, could be countered only through the scientific and accurate presentation of Indian history, by promoting secular and syncretic traditions in popular art and culture, and by fighting for a just and egalitarian social order by taking up the causes of the oppressed and marginalised, including minorities and Dalits.
He believed that grounding a national popular culture of the masses-secular and democratic in character—would provide a platform for action. Such a cultural platform, in which all those opposed to the fascistic tendencies of the RSS could participate, was in his view the way to eliminate the stranglehold that the RSS was attempting to establish over Indian society.
Another concern that remained equally important for him was education. He was sensitive to the interest of the RSS in the sphere of education. According to him, the RSS used children as vehicles for doctrinal indoctrination through play, physical activity, and rote learning methods, including prayer, which kept them insulated from rigorous, critical, and scientific pedagogy.
The prevailing education system, which often reduced education to drudgery and instrumental learning, inadvertently aided communal forces in controlling education. Therefore, the promotion of transformative education through critical modes of learning and enquiry became a priority in his educational work. He attempted to implement such ideas during his tenure as Vice-Chancellor of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit (SSUS), Kalady, and later as Chairperson of the Kerala State Higher Education Commission.
The Choice Based Credit and Semester System introduced in Kerala under his direction was an effort toward achieving such a goal. However, later developments that emphasised instrumental, outcome-based learning have, to a considerable extent, undermined the transformative intent of his initiatives.
During his tenure as a member of the People’s Education Commission set up by the Kerala Shasthra Sahitya Parishad during 1997–98, Prof. Panikkar often emphasised that our efforts should aim at building a “just and egalitarian social order.” He preferred not to define the exact nature of such a social order, believing that there could be multiple ways of conceptualising it.
He aligned himself with the left and democratic forces in the country, as he strongly believed that only a strengthened and invigorated Left movement could help achieve such a goal. He described himself as a “critical insider” of the Left movement but spent a lifetime contributing to it both in thought and in practice.
Adieu, Prof. Panikkar, our dear comrade.