A letter from a student to a departed teacher

Dear Professor K N Panikkar, I read the news of your passing some days ago and had heard that you were ailing for a long time. I don’t know if you remember me, but I do remember you, vividly. I was part of the last MA class you taught at the Centre for Historical Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, way back in the monsoon semester of the year 2000. My cohort was required to credit your course, ‘History of Ideas in Colonial India,’ in the first semester. We soon knew it was such a raging hit that students from other departments audited it, and people from outside attended it. In 2000, you were capping nearly 25 years of teaching at JNU, and for people like us, it was the entry into postgraduate study. Your exit and our entry came with a bang.

In that course, you co-explored society, culture, and attitudes of undivided India at the peak of colonial rule in the late 1700s and 1800s. That cohort had students from nearly a dozen states, even if some of them had been undergraduate students at the Delhi University’s many colleges and were somewhat acclimatised to Delhi. As a historian, like a storyteller, you helped embed in us the qualities of observing and respecting the minutiae and seeming trivia of history. A research essay we read on a subject you mentioned (and wrote) embodied that. It was the one on the British incorporating certain Indian attitudes, like leaving their shoes behind while entering a household or even a court, that magnified the larger forces of history (from your essay The ‘Great’ Shoe Question): How something as small as wearing something, or not, was itself an act laden with sociopolitical meaning.

There was always a close reading of an essay after the close reading of another. The post-class discussions had to be curtailed since lunch at the hostel mess would finish. Your course gave us a rich view of colonisation and the Indian response to it, well before M K Gandhi’s arrival. As was your wont, you took us to unusual places, where we, new students of this kind of history education, never imagined the historian would go. For instance, you discoursed with us on a pioneering Malayalam novel, O Chandu Menon’s Indulekha. That story has many of the attributes of a 19th-century European novel. It also features a controversial narrative disruption that aroused the interest of Malayalam literary critics. You listened patiently to all our thoughts in that class. After a smile and a pause, you gave your answer, much like Holmes cracking a case to us Watsons.

Without spoiling it for the reader, that explanation in class, too, over a work of literature, displayed the historian’s alertness to all kinds of specific social detail at work in any given moment of human history or creativity.

Our first semester was already a heavy feast, and you kept the best for the end of the course. You dove us deep into the Bengal Renaissance and the vexed legacy of Raja Ram Mohan Roy. We read some essays from a critical and controversial edited volume. One of the essays, by historian Sumit Sarkar – Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past – stirred up things in class, for it searchingly reassessed Roy. You gave that essay almost two or three classes, for it required a structured dissection. Not everyone was happy with what you had to say, but you left complex things open for discussion, as if to say some things couldn’t be answered, and that staying with questions was important.

As was evident to us students, you weren’t just a ‘historian’ in the typical sense of someone who examined the Grand Narrative of history. Like many of your peers, you were genuinely invested in the interplay between the so-called Grand Narrative and the everydayness, mess, and chaos of human life. You made us alert and pay attention to the mundane. The more I teach, the more I realise the work my teachers like you did for my preparation as a teacher. Travel well, Sir. I miss you and carry learnings from you to the best I can.

The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.