KM Panikkar marked the beginning of princely states’ integration: Narayani Basu on his forgotten role in shaping India

As the dewan of the state of Bikaner, Panikkar invited the archaeologist Aurel Stein to excavate what became the first findings of the Indus Valley Civilisation. He was the architect of Independent India’s maritime policy and the country’s first ambassador to China. Panikkar was also part of the States Reorganisation Committee and a key figure to have influenced the redrawing of India’s states on linguistic lines.

Historian and foreign policy analyst Narayani Basu was first struck by Panikkar’s multifarious professional life while working on a biography of V P Menon. In her latest publication, ‘A Man for All Seasons: The Life of K M Panikkar’, published by Context, she puts together a thoroughly detailed and voluminous account of his life. Despite Panikkar being nearly omnipresent in the making of modern India, his name is often missing in popular narratives of Indian Independence.

“We tend to forget that behind the scenes of every revolution and great moment in history, there are people who are working to stitch it together and crystallise it in terms of its shape and identity,” Basu says in an interview with Indianexpress.com. She adds that in her work, she has tried to shed light on how Panikkar worked round the clock to think about what freedom should look like in India, in terms of legislation, the Constitution, and more.

Excerpts from the interview: 

Before we move to K M Panikkar’s diverse professional life, can you tell us how he was as a person?

Narayani Basu: One of his friends K Iswara Dutt, who is a journalist himself, described it really well when he said Panikkar was one of modern India’s impossible men. Because once you start going through his life, it is very difficult to pin him down. He starts off as this very scholarly, non-spotty boy in Kuttanad in modern Kerala, and from there you see him evolving into this unsure but angry young man in a world which was at war. So he was in college in 1914 and in Oxford University between 1914 to 1918, and that is, I think, one of the first phases where you notice that K M Panikkar began to think about what it means to be an Indian.

I followed him from Oxford to Aligarh to Paris to Berlin to founding the Hindustan Times to all the princely states, and this is somebody who never stops thinking about India and what a post-colonial country is going to look like. This is somebody who was very interested in ensuring that Indians tell their own story both to themselves and the world, and you see that reflected throughout his career.

You also see a certain flickering of ambition. This was also somebody who enjoyed being at the centre of power, who enjoyed being where policy was being made, where history was being made.

How does he transition from being a professor and journalist to the secretary of the Chamber of Princes?

Narayani Basu: I think that ties in a lot with the sense of ambition that I was talking about. So when he was teaching at Aligarh Muslim University, there was a sense first of contentment because he had always wanted to be an academic and be surrounded by books. But the national movement is reaching one of its peak periods at this point. The early 1920s were marked by a great deal of bloodshed and angst. You have Jallianwala Bagh, the passage of the Rowlatt Act, the Non-co-operation movement was at its peak, and you have Chauri Chaura happening. It is at this point that Panikkar decided that he wanted to quit academia and join politics because he wanted to be able to contribute to the national movement.

And again, you see a sort of intellectual evolution taking place, because he was figuring out how to do that. Post Aligarh, you see him hopscotching a bit. His first role is as Gandhi’s emissary to Amritsar to sort of mediate in the ongoing Akali problem. He comes back, founds the Hindustan Times, is there for barely a year and a half, and then spends two of what I think are probably the most exciting years of his life in Paris and Berlin. And he begins thinking about the princely states.

A lot of that has to do with the end of the First World War and with the fact that the princes are now sitting up post the big war. They are looking to be counted. They are looking to be compensated for their efforts to aid the Empire in the war effort. Which is why you have stuff like the Chamber of Princes being formed. So the (British) Raj is looking to throw them crumbs.

Panikkar’s first writings about the princely states were in 1920. He wrote about them right in the aftermath of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles where you have the Maharaja of Bikaner being one of the signatories. And he basically says that we as Indians deserve to be counted because we represent one-fifth of the human race.

Panikkar’s early writings on the princes are marked a lot by scorn, and there is a certain sense of dismissiveness also, because he says they are riddled with backstabbing intrigue and they are more concerned with their zenanas (women’s quarters in royal households). In a sense, it plays into the international perception of what the princes are. It sort of detracts from the fact that many of them were actually also very erudite, articulate men who were thinking very seriously about their constitutional rights and sovereignty.

From there, you have Panikkar sort of picking up on the fact that the princes want to be counted far more seriously than they have been before. He also realises that there is a great space that he can occupy as far as forming policy is concerned. You see this sort of instinctive knack that this man has for writing the right thing at the right time, being in the right place at the right time. In his writings then, he shifted his stance on the princely states and said that they are great laboratories for self-governance and preservation of regional identity. We can think about bringing them on board a united model of India. So this was the first step towards federation.

By no means was Panikkar the only voice speaking out for federation at this point. There were plenty of other people as well. Where Panikkar succeeds is that he knows people who are connected to the right people. So he gets this manuscript delivered to K N Haksar who was in London at the time. Now, Haksar was an advisor to Maharaja Hari Singh (the last ruling monarch of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir). He was in London in order to seek legal counsel to represent the Chamber of Princes. Why? Because there is an Indian states committee that was formed and was coming to India in 1928 to reassess the Raj’s relationship with the princes. In itself, this was not a new development. The Raj has gone through this process of evolving its relationship with the princes over the course of its existence in India. But the princes were now looking to represent themselves legally and sort of pull together a case for why they needed to be listened to.

Haksar reads what Panikkar has written and is very interested. We have this sort of lovely little scene in Panikkar’s memoir. He writes that while he was walking outside the Ritz where Haksar was staying, he happened to see him through the window and called him in. (Now we don’t know if this actually happened.) However that played out, Haksar met Panikkar and said to him, ‘Look, I really like what you have written, why don’t you come on board this project? And let’s see what you can accomplish.’ And that is how Panikkar’s journey with the princely states began.

It is a relationship that will continue throughout the 1930s till the early 1940s. From there, it was a short step to becoming the Secretary of the Chamber of Princes. He became one of the leading voices, especially during the first round table conference. You can see Panikkar very clearly hobnobbing with political leaders, nationalist and Hindu nationalist politicians and princes. His mandate was basically to ensure that all the princes pull together and unite on board the federal ship.

It is at this juncture that you see the process of integration beginning. So V P Menon and Sardar Patel bring the princes on board to the modern union of India. That is sort of the tail end of that process and Panikkar is at the beginning of that process.

You write that Panikkar was against the princely states joining Pakistan and yet by the early 1940s, he was also a proponent of Pakistan and called himself a ‘Pakistanist’. Can you explain his exact stance?

Narayani Basu: I don’t think he was a proponent of Pakistan. I mean, the term ‘Pakistanist’ comes from this letter that he wrote in 1941 to one of his old friends in which he basically says we need to forswear our dreams of a united India and I now am a ‘Pakistanist’. There is no other way forward but Pakistan. For me, it spoke a lot about his personal disillusionment. I don’t think Panikkar, like everyone else who was fighting for freedom at that point wanted the Partition. Nor did he want Pakistan, but I think what he saw developing throughout the 1920s and 30s, whether it was the dissension in the Chamber of Princes or the growing rage in the Muslim League, and the rising call for Pakistan that was beginning to develop.

And you see him not wavering from the fact that it had become a very bitter reality, and he continued to make this claim throughout the 1940s.

I think everyone’s first and biggest aim was always to pull for a united India, which is why you see Panikkar – despite this bitterness over Pakistan and its existence – also constantly pushing the princely states to acknowledge the fact that ‘in your states alone you have so many popular movements. It is important for you guys to understand that the writing is on the wall. You will have to join a modern Indian union, whatever that may look like.’ He was aware that no amount of democracy was possible without the princely states.

Several decades later, Panikkar advises the formation of states along linguistic lines. Did his stance on princely states change by then?

Narayani Basu: I think yes. It had changed by this point because he was very much of the view that now, in a decolonising world, princely states have no place. There is a democracy that is being built and they must be part of that.

In 1955, this played into his own evolving role in forming and reforming what India is and what India should look like. So when he comes on board the States Reorganisation Commission, he and (Jawaharlal) Nehru were both of the same viewpoint: that post the transfer of power, the Partition, and the immensely tragic fallout of the Partition, nobody wanted to reorganise the states according to linguistic borders. This was irrespective of the fact that the Congress had since the 1920s been very committed to the idea of linguistic reorganisations. But Nehru has seen what the Partition had done, and he was in no mind to acquiesce to a linguistic reorganisation of the states, and Panikkar shared this view.

Now it was interesting for me to see that when Panikkar actually started traveling across the country and started doing the surveys, his mind changed, and he realised that the chief thing that we need to protect is India’s federal core. The only way that we can do that is if we reorganise the states according to language. He co-authored the states’ reorganisation commission report. He also went ahead and added a 10-page dissension, calling for the bifurcation of Uttar Pradesh because he said it was too unwieldy in terms of population and size.

Nehru was not happy with this report at all because it is not what he wanted. He had put Panikker there in order to ensure that the states are not reorganised on the basis of language. Yet, here was this Commission presenting a report that was completely in the opposite direction.

Here, I noticed that no matter how Nehru and Panikkar differed with each other, there was always a respect for the other’s opinion. I also noticed the readiness to adapt to changing circumstances and contexts in India.