With the death of Professor Kandiyur Narayana Panikkar, India has lost one of its premier historians. He combined his academic work with social activism, and was an indefatigable fighter against communalism and authoritarianism. He was attracted to the progressive movement during his student days, and he retained that association until the end of his life. Professor Panikkar did his Master’s and PhD in history at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur, where he also taught. He moved to the University of Delhi, and then to the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, where he remained until his retirement. Scores of students are indebted to his enthusiasm and encouragement as a teacher and research supervisor, not just in JNU, but in all universities where he worked or lectured. After retiring from JNU, he worked as Vice Chancellor of the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit in Kerala, Vice Chairperson of the Kerala State Higher Education Council, and the first Chairperson of the Kerala Council for Historical Research. During this entire period, he was associated with the Indian progressive cultural movement in various ways.

Professor Panikkar was an intellectual history scholar of modern India, of what he called the “history of ideas.” Although his work dealt with many individual intellectuals, he did not dwell on their personal dispositions, but concentrated on the ideas with which they were engaged or on such ideas as they appeared in modern Indian society. This approach can be seen, for example, in Professor Panikkar’s papers on marriage reforms in Kerala, on how the traditional medical practice of Ayurveda came to be reinvented in modern Kerala, on the social context of the Malayalam novel Indulekha, or on the debate and litigation surrounding Indians wearing shoes in colonial India. In all these studies, he dealt with the tenuous and sometimes confusing relations between ideas and social practices, and the positions taken by various intellectuals regarding them.

It is perhaps the problems that he faced during such research that made Professor Panikkar identify himself as a Marxist historian. He did not consider himself a doctrinaire Marxist, and liked to say that there are as many Marxisms as there are Marxists. Nevertheless he associated himself with the Left movement, choosing to be a critical insider rather than an “independent” Leftist with a propensity to make pronouncements about the movement from a safe zone outside. This also meant that he addressed the needs of the Left movement through a continuous engagement with Marxist theory, and by combining theory with practice.

Professor Panikkar’s concerns led him especially to engage with Marxist cultural theory; such engagement, he believed, was a lacuna in Marxist practice in India. Although India has had a progressive cultural movement that greatly influenced the national movement and popular struggles, the contribution of that movement to cultural theory has been limited (although its participants were familiar with works of socialist realism from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries). Professor Panikkar turned his attention to the work of Antonio Gramsci, particularly to his contributions to cultural theory and the study of intellectuals. Under the influence of Gramsci, he classified intellectuals in modern India into traditional and modern – the traditional including conventional Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian scholars, mullahs, and priests; and the modern including all English-educated intellectuals. He argued that while both these classes of intellectuals could become anti-colonial, their perceptions on what is meant by colonialism could be different. This was made clear in his study of the Malabar rebellion of 1921, and of the intellectual and political trajectories leading to the revolt (as elaborated in his classic book, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921). The Mambram Thangals, who were the initiators of the Mappila revolts against the British in the nineteenth century, were traditional intellectuals who saw colonialism as the intervention of a foreign power against the traditional rights and privileges of the Mappila Muslims. Panikkar pointed out that not all traditional intellectuals were opposed to colonialism, as in the case of Sanaullah Makti Thangal, who in fact welcomed the impact of British rule on education and employment, and did not favour the Mappila revolts.

Gramsci’s influence also led to Panikkar exploring the ideas of historians of the Subaltern Studies group, whose volumes appeared before his study of the Malabar rebellion was published. He was not, however, directly involved or associated with the Subaltern Studies historians. He had differences of opinion with the views propounded by several of them, particularly with Ranajit Guha’s views on the “autonomy” of the peasantry, and Partha Chatterjee’s views on national community and the fragmentation of subaltern groups. Panikkar used to speak of writing a paper on the work of Partha Chatterjee, and in fact presented the draft of such a paper in a workshop on cultural studies; but he did not get down to publishing it, at least not in the same form. He refused to characterise the Mappila Muslims of Malabar as an “autonomous peasantry,” and presented evidence to show that the Mappilas were very much integrated into the British colonial revenue regime and were victims of that regime. While they did use religion as a form of mobilisation of the peasants against the landlords and the colonial state, that proved to be their undoing when inter-religious conflicts arose, followed by brutal suppression of their struggle. Panikkar also took exception to Partha Chatterjee’s notion of fragmentation, as the Mappilas, despite being a minority religious group, were very much inspired by the national movement through Khilafat and Gandhi, and at the same time were alert to the shifting fortunes of nations in World War I, which ended in the defeat of Germany and its allies, including Turkey. The formulation of a “frontier” for the Malabar rebellion put forward by Stephen Frederick Dale, another historian of the Malabar rebellion, was also rejected in the process.

With the shift of emphasis among the Subaltern Studies group under the impact of poststructuralism, the “subaltern” approach towards the events in colonial and post-Independence India also underwent change. There was a marked emphasis on language and culture, along with a clear communitarian emphasis; caste, ethnicity, and gender, and class movements of the working class and peasantry found a place in the discussion only in so far as the new emphasis could be addressed. This meant that contemporary concerns of communalism and Hindutva politics, resulting in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, could not adequately be addressed as they could also be treated as community assertion of kar sevaks against a monument of the Mughal “elite.” Such difficulties, along with the colonial framework in which the discussion was conducted (such as the use of the Beveridge translation of the Baburnama) created problems for the notion of “community” as an autonomous entity. It was clear that Hindutva ideologues, particularly V. D. Savarkar, based their Hindutva reasoning on colonial texts, which made the communitarian positions themselves an example of “derived discourse.” A fresh approach to cultural studies was necessary, and these studies had to be linked to popular action, particularly after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

It was after the demolition of the Babri Masjid that Professor Panikkar’s anti-communal position came under attack by Hindutva ideologues as being “pseudo-secular” and “anti-national.” This spurred him to redefine his understanding of secularism and nationalism in the Indian context, and to study the impact of communalism on different walks of life. His efforts to organise workshops on cultural studies and to work with groups adversely affected by the impact of communalism, including Dalits and women, were a result of these concerns. He also began to pay attention to the prospects of reforms in the education system, in the context of attempts by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to communalise education in schools and colleges.

While it cannot be said that these efforts resulted in a large amount of research output, Panikkar himself wrote a series of articles and gave lectures that emphasised the political relevance of cultural action, and the necessity to develop the social consciousness of the people against authoritarianism and communalism. His Presidential Address to the Indian History Congress in 2009, titled “Culture as a Site of Struggle,” sums up his ideas. Cultural action had to involve the dissemination of ideas and their performative representation through literature and art. Panikkar tried to achieve this by bringing together intellectuals, writers, and artists through his many workshops, and through his work in progressive socio-cultural organisations such as Janasamskriti in Delhi. Panikkar was active in the work of cultural groups against the communal attacks in Gujarat in 2002.

Professor Panikkar had a growing premonition that a threat to secular democracy was imminent, a premonition that he conveyed through essays collected in volumes such as Before the Night Falls: Forebodings of Fascism in India (2002) and History as a Site of Struggle: Essays on History, Culture and Politics (2013). It is possible that in his steadfast opposition to communal fascism, he may have underplayed the danger posed by neo-liberalism and its role in the corporate–Hindutva nexus. He was very worried that secular democratic forces had been unable to forge a united front that would facilitate the defeat of communal forces. His concerns and convictions, to which he held fast for more than half a century, will continue to stimulate social and political action in the years to come.