By SANJEEV CHOPRAI seek the indulgence of my readers for an extended two-part review of about 1250 words each for this well-researched hefty volume of close to 900 pages.
KM Panikkar (KMP) could not asked for a better Boswell to document his life – for Narayani Basu has dug into such details which even KMP may have forgotten in his very rich, eventful and variegated life from 1894 to 1963 : a period which saw him move from the backwaters to Travancore to a salient role in India’s foreign and domestic policy as our first ambassador to both Nationalist and Communist China, and a key member of the States Reorganization Committee (SRC) which marked the restructuring of internal boundaries of independent India.
Narayani Basu’s biography, “A Man for All Seasons: The Life of KM Panikkar” could also have been called “A Man with all the Reasons”. It is indeed a comprehensive account of one of India’s most multifaceted, controversial, sometimes misunderstood man of many parts: polyglot scholar, diplomat, maritime historian Malayalam litterateur, journalist, Gandhi’s emissary, Dewan to princes and a man with a roving eye. Ms Basu takes on a roller coaster ride across the diverse “avatars” of Panikkar’s life. We start with his childhood in Kavala detailing his family’s traditional background and the early intellectual environment that shaped his pluralistic worldview. His earliest and fondest memories are those of his grandmother Kunjipilla Gowri – a gentle, lovable woman who adored her Madhava, reading him stories from the Ramayan and Mahabharat and instilling in him the love of Malayalam. Early attempts at teaching him arithmetic under the tutelage of his uncle Ayappa Pannikar failed miserably – he was often tied to a pillar for his youthful pranks including writing odes to young village belles.
He was then dispatched to Trivandrum, the capital city of the ultra-conservative Travancore state where rulers believed they were the descendants of gods and the guarantors of Hindu orthodoxy with caste-based restrictions at their peak. But change was in the offing – the matrilineal inheritance norms of were being challenged through the Malabar Marriage Act of 1896 and the Travancore Wills Act of 1899. Under the influence of Kerala Varma, primary schooling had been universalized, the Nair supremacy was under attack, the Ezhavas were demanding equality, and the stranglehold of Sanskrit in education was being challenged by the Dravidian format.
While ‘caning’ was a regular feature in Madhava’s growing up years, his love of poetry, philosophy and argument were strengthened by the intellectual environment at his elder brother’s home in Trivandrum which was a salon for the aspiring intellectual, legal and political elite of the town. But even as he was excelling language and literature, science and math’s overwhelmed him, and it was after great difficulty that he cleared the matriculation in his second attempt, which paved the way for his passage to Oxford in 1914 as Ayoung, impressionable man of twenty.
While at Oxford, he made friends with Suhrawardy brothers, John Mathai, Dewan Chimanlal, BK Mallik, Hasanand Datija, VK Raman Menon and KPS Menon, among others. The Indian Majlis at Oxford also included students from Burma and Ceylon, and opened with the stirring lines of Vande Mataram, and ended with a hymn of Ilama Iqbal. The politics of Congress and the pan Islamist ferment among Muslims after the overthrow of the Ottoman Caliph were also high on the agenda. The three important issues that were uppermost in the midst of the young men there were Home Rule (in India), universal adult franchise and the impending war.
Soon he started writing for Annie Besant’s Commonweal, Natesan’s Indian Review, and Bhasha Vilasam (in Malayalam), in which he argued the Dravidian meter was equally, if not more powerful than Sanskrit idiom to which the language pundits had succumbed. By 1916, he wrote ‘Greater India’ for Ramananda Chatterjee’s The Modern Review where he looked at the Hindu cultural influences extending from the Indian sub-continent to South east Asia. He won a handsome prize of Rs 100 for the best essay for the Indian emigrant in which he expanded his concept of Greater India to include, not just the sacred geography of Jambudwip, but also the territories where the Indian diaspora had established its roots.
On his return to India in 1919, he was married to Gouri, the daughter of Ayappa Panikkar and took up his first teaching job at the Aligarh Muslim University where he wrote a seminal essay – The Native states and Indian Nationalism. In addition to writing ‘Indian nationalism: Its origin, History and Ideals’, he was arguing that India had been a cultural entity since the time of the Vedas – and coming from a princely state himself argued that any plan for constitutional and political reform for India’s future had to take the princely states into consideration.
But he was not cut out for AMU, or vice versa, his friendship with Raja of Mahmudabad notwithstanding. So, he left a ‘secure’ job to join Swarajya, the paper established by Tantaguri Prakasam (Andhra Kesari) as an Assistant editor in 1923, which was also the year of the Viakom Satyagraha and the Congress session at Kakinada. It was at this session that the Congress passed the resolution that ‘temple entry was the birthright of all Hindus’. The following year, he went as Gandhi’s emissary to Amritsar to help with the Akali Shayk Sabha and convince the Akali leadership that they had to focus on community issues, rather than the individual case of Nabha’s (forced) abdication. In the process he also convinced two of his main interlocutors to set up a national newspaper in Delhi under the banner ‘Hindustan’, which later morphed into Hindustan Times. Apart from powerful editorials, the paper also ran stories about government profligacy and the scandals surrounding the Maharajas. Understandably, KMP had to quit in February 1925.
Unemployed at thirty-one, he decided to go back to England to become a barrister. His writings for newspapers, and his appointment as an examiner for the Indian history paper of the ICS kept him afloat, and even gave him some extra bucks for a trip to Europe where Panikkar met artists, art historians and freedom fighters from across the world, and had his torrid affairs with Germaine and Juliette Veiller-Duray but these do not find a mention in his rather bland memoir about his time in Paris. Full marks to Ms Basu for showing KMP as he was – a brilliant man with a roving eye who also exercised an old-world discretion and charm about his extra marital affairs,
Meanwhile his book ‘An Introduction to the Study of the Relation of Indian States with the Government of India’ was published in London, and was noticed, among others by Colonel Kalish Nath Haksar. He was the Prime Minister of J&K and was in London as part of the Chamber of Princes delegation to discuss the future of paramountcy of the Emira and the relationship with Indian states before the committee headed by Sir Harcourt Butler
On his return passage to India in 1927 he had, among others, Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru and young Indira as co-passengers, and wrote a 160 page ‘Monarch: The Working of Dyarchy in India’. In the interim, he accepted Haksar’s offer of joining the service of Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of the twenty gun salute state of ‘Riyasat- e Jammu- wa- Kashmir– wa- Ladakh-wa-Tibet’ (the official name of J & K), thereby beginning the next two decades of his life with the Indian princes.
(Sanjeev Chopra is the curator of the Valley of Words: a pan India Literature and Arts festival based out of Dehradun. He is currently a Senior Fellow of Contemporary History at the Prime Ministers Memorial and Library and a Trustee of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial . He is also on the Academic Council of the National Centre for Good Governance and the National Institute of Disaster Management. His recent books include The Great Conciliator: Lal Bahadur Shastri and the Transformation of India, and We the People of the States of Bharat: the making and remaking of India’s internal boundaries.)
