Professor K N Panikkar, one of the pre-eminent historians of modern India and a fellow traveller of the 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 of the student federation. He completed his postgraduate and doctoral studies from the University of Jaipur. His doctoral work was on the intellectual history of modern India, an interest which he kept until the last days. He began his teaching career at the University of Delhi, from which he shifted to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He became an active collaborator in the project for drafting a comprehensive history of India’s freedom struggle, led by Professor Bipan Chandra and others. He then undertook his own project on writing a history of the Malabar rebellion of 1921, which proved to be a path-breaking study on the popular struggles against colonial state and the hegemonic classes. In this study, published as “Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836-1921”, he introduced the Gramscian concept of intellectuals as the harbingers of the popular revolts in modern India. He showed how traditional intellectuals like the Muslim Moulavis were able to articulate the grievances of the peasantry against the landlords and the state, appealing to their consciousness regarding righteousness and justice, and appealing to the people to revolt against ruling classes and the state. In his later studies also Panikkar continued to explore the role of the intellectuals in not only the articulation of popular resistance but also building viable alternatives in social and productive life and their literary expressions. He also strongly argued that the importance of the national movement lay not in the fragmentation of national life and 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 cardinal principles of secularism, democracy, social justice and liberation of the oppressed, downtrodden masses decided his social and political activism. Like all other secular-minded intellectuals, he was deeply affected by the surge of communalism in politics from the 1970s. He was in the forefront of the campaign against the RSS attempt to withdraw the NCERT textbooks during 1978-89. The books written by Bipan Chandra, R S Sharma, Arjun Dev and others incorporated the most recent research on history that challenged the Hindutva narrative propagated by the RSS. After a series of protests by students and teachers, the then Janata government was forced to rescind the withdrawal.

The intent of the RSS manifested soon after when its international organisation, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, demanded in 1984 that Babari Masjid in Ayodhya, Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, and Shahi Eidgah Mosque in Mathura be returned to the Hindus as they were, according to the VHP, constructed after destroying Hindu temples that existed in the same spot. Although their demand was rejected, the VHP-RSS mounted a major campaign for their cause by citing spurious archeological evidence and a selected use of colonial archives. Panikkar, along with other eminent historians like Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, Shereen Ratnagar and Suraj Bhan, came out against this travesty of historical research, condemning the open divisive, communal intent of the VHP-RSS. The RSS started a vilification campaign against the “JNU historians” calling them pseudo-secular and anti-national. Panikkar, who was at the forefront of the campaign against the RSS, had to bear the brunt of their mudslinging and vilification. He brought out a series of articles and pamphlets exposing the RSS ideology, and his edited volume “The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism’ was released amid this controversy.

Babri Masjid fell and RSS stepped up its campaign for capturing other mosques and vilification of Muslims. Panikkar retired from JNU, after more than two decades of service as a teacher and an administrator. The scores of students who have been taught by him remember him as student friendly. After his retirement, he had brief stints in several universities abroad. Thereafter, he returned to India, seeking a solution to the problems that were his immediate concern.

One was the question of communalism itself. Communalism was already demonstrating its gargantuan nature, demolishing and devouring everything that came in its way. The “Rath Yatra” of L K Advani and the campaign for the construction of a Ram temple had already exposed deep cleavage in Indian society, and enabled the BJP-led NDA to come to power in 1999. Panikkar, who was returning to Kerala, was concerned about an alternative platform to confront the new communal politics. He pointed out that communalism has been wearing the garb of cultural nationalism and is bent upon reinterpreting Indian culture as Hindu culture and Indian national movement as Hindu resistance against foreign invaders, including Muslims. He believed this can be fought only through scientific and accurate presentation of Indian history, promoting the secular, syncretic traditions in popular art and culture, and fighting for a just egalitarian social order by taking up the causes of the oppressed and the marginalised, including the minorities and Dalits. This is a way of grounding the national popular culture of masses, which is secular, democratic, as the platform for action. Such a platform for cultural action, in which all who are opposed to the fascistic tendencies of the RSS can take part, is the way towards the elimination of the stranglehold that the RSS is achieving in Indian society.

There was another concern which, for him, was equally important: Education. He was sensitive to the RSS interest in education. RSS used children as vehicles for doctrinal inculcation through the means of play, physical activity and rote learning modes, including prayer, which kept them insulated from rigorous critical scientific pedagogy. The present education system which reduces education to drudgery and instrumental learning actually helps communalism to control education. The promotion of transformative with critical modes of learning and enquiry assumed priority in his educational work, which he sought to implement as the vice chancellor of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala 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 towards such a goal. It is, however, true that later trends, which prompted instrumental outcome based learning, have gone a long way towards dismantling the transformative intent of his work.

During his stint as a member of the people's education commission set up by Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad during 1997-98, Panikkar used to emphasise that our efforts should be to build a “just and egalitarian social order”. What the nature of that social order will be, he preferred to leave it unsaid, as he thought that there are many ways of conceptualising the social order. He aligned himself with the left and democratic forces in the country, as he strongly believed that only a strengthened, invigorated left movement could achieve such a goal. He called himself a critical insider of the left movement, but spent a lifetime contributing to it in thought and practice.