KN Panikkar, historian of concepts, passes away | India Information

Famous Leftist historian Ok N Panikkar, who critiqued colonial historiography’s simplistic view of tradition and highlighted how indigenous intellectuals supplied another paradigm of modernity, handed away at a non-public hospital in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday. He would have turned 90 subsequent month.Panikkar, affectionately referred to as KN by his colleagues, belonged to a choose group of historians resembling Bipan Chandra, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and S Gopal who created a powerful division of recent Indian historical past at JNU’s Centre for Historic Research.His course on the historical past of concepts in India within the nineteenth century was pioneering. “Panikkar taught it at a time when historical past writing was dominated by financial and political issues. He endeavoured, by way of his analysis, to say a place of centrality for tradition as an essential ingredient each in human motion and enormous political actions,” says trendy India historian Salil Misra.Historian Rakesh Batabyal provides that Panikkar delivered to consideration how the concepts of Akshay Kumar Dutt, Lokahitawadi and different nineteenth century intellectuals wanted no western validation: they had been trendy in their very own proper, and gave us a way of the brand new world opening earlier than us. “When he mentioned the custom of information in Ayurveda, we started to grasp the complexities of the Indian data processes beneath colonialism,” he says.Trendy India historian Aditya Mukherjee was each pupil and colleague of Panikkar. “He acquired the fame of a terrific instructor when he taught in a school in Delhi College, and was invited to affix JNU in 1972. He was a superb instructor who taught us social and non secular reforms within the nineteenth century, making the topic come alive even to college students like me who had no background in historical past, having graduated in economics,” says Mukherjee.Born in Guruvayoor, Panikkar left Kerala after finishing his undergraduate research and went on to earn his Grasp’s diploma and doctorate from Rajasthan College, the place he later married his school mate, (late) Usha Bhargava. He was additionally the founding vice-chancellor of Sree Sankaracharya College of Sanskrit, Kalady.The historian’s books embrace, “Towards Lord and State: Faith and Peasant Rebellion in Malabar”. “His position in presenting Malabar riot in its true historic context and highlighting its elements as a freedom wrestle, agrarian revolt and anti-imperialist motion is of historic significance”, famous Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan in his condolence message. “He was a proud Marxist but he engaged with questions perceived as exterior the mainstream of Marxist ideology, as seen in his essential essay ‘Tradition and Consciousness in Trendy India,” says R Mahalakshmi, eminent historian of South India. Historian M G Sashibhooshan endorses the view. “I keep in mind Panikkar accepting my request to current a paper on Pattanam on the Historical past Congress, regardless of realizing that my opinion on Pattanam (Muziris) was completely different from that of Marxist historians”.Misra recollects Panikkar encouraging his college students to disagree with him. “It was believed that he was extra prone to reward dissenting concepts with larger grades, than those who merely conformed to his concepts. His lecture rooms turned contestatory areas by which he was not the one voice. Many different college students supplied their very own concepts and he warmly endorsed all of them”.