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Romesh Chunder Dutt

Romesh Chunder Dutt, CIE was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, writer, and translator of and .

Formative years

Dutt was born into a distinguished Bengali Kayastha caste family well known for its members' literary and academic achievements. His parents were Thakamani and Isam Chunder Dutt. His father, Isam Dutt, was a Deputy Collector of , whom Romesh often accompanied on official duties. Romesh was educated in various Bengali District schools, then at , Calcutta, founded by the philanthropist, David Hare. After his father's untimely death in a boat accident in eastern Bengal, Romesh's uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, an accomplished writer, became his guardian in 1861. Romesh wrote about his uncle, "He used to sit at night with us and our favorite study used to be pieces from the works of the English poets. He was a relative of , one of nineteenth century Bengal's most prominent poets.

He entered the , Presidency College in 1864, then passed the First Arts examination in 1866, second in order of merit, and won a scholarship. While still a student in the B.A. class, without his family's permission, he and two friends, Beharilal Gupta and , left for England in 1868. Only one other Indian, Satyendra Nath Tagore, had ever before qualified for the . Romesh aimed to emulate 's feat. For a long time, before and after 1853, the year the ICS examination was introduced in England, only British officers were appointed to covenanted posts. The 1860s saw the first attempts, largely successful, on the part of the Indians, and especially members of the Bengali intelligentsia, to occupy the superior official posts in India, until then completely dominated by the British.

At University College , Dutt continued to study British writers. He studied law at Middle Temple, London, was called to the bar, and qualified for the Indian Civil Service in the open examination in 1869, taking third place. Civil service

Dutt entered the Indian Civil Service, or ICS, as an Assistant Magistrate of Alipur in 1871. His official career was a test and a proof of the liberal promise of equality to all her Majesty's subjects "irrespective of color and creed" in Queen Victoria's Proclamation of November 1, 1858, which often contrasted with an implicit distrust of Indians, especially from those in positions of authority within the elite colonial administrative system.

A famine in Meherpur, District of Nadia in 1874 and another in Dakhin Shahbazpur (Bhola District) in 1876, followed by a disastrous cyclone, required emergency relief and economic recovery operations, which Dutt managed successfully. By December, 1882, Dutt achieved his appointment to the executive branch of the Service, the first Indian to achieve executive rank. He served as administrator for Backerganj, , Burdwan, Donapur, and . He became Burdwan's District Officer in 1893, Commissioner of Burdwan Division in 1894, and Divisional Commissioner for Orissa in 1895. Dutt was the first Indian to attain the rank of divisional commissioner.

As Dutt's biographer commented, "In the absence of even the rudiments of representative institutions entry into the higher Civil Services presented the only opportunity to an Indian to influence the government of his own country." He sat for a time in the Bengal Legislative Council. Although he won high praise for his administrative work, and the Companionship of the Indian Empire was awarded him in 1892, Dutt did not always agree with official views on the causes of poverty in India or on the problems of administration. As his official recommendations and reports reflected, Dutt was especially troubled by the lack of assured tenants' rights or rights of transfer for those who tilled the land. He considered the land taxes to be ruinous, a block to savings, and the source of famines. He also felt the effectiveness of administrators was limited by the absence of representative channels for the concerns of the population being governed.

Dutt retired from the ICS as the Commissioner of Orissa in 1897 while only 49 years of age. Retirement freed him to enter public life and pursue writing. After retirement in 1898 he returned to England as a Lecturer in Indian History at University College, London where he completed his famous thesis on economic nationalism. He spent the next six years in London before returning once again to India as Dewan of , a post he had been offered before he left for Britain. He was extremely popular in Baroda where the Maharaja, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III and his family members and all other staff used to call him the Babu Dewan, as a mark of personal respect. He also became a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Decentralisation in 1907.

While still in office, he died in Baroda at the age of 61 on November 30, 1909.

Politics

He was active in moderate nationalist politics and was an active Congressman in that party's initial phase.He was president of the in 1899.

Literature

Bengali culture

Dutt served as the first president of in 1894, while and Navinchandra Sen were the vice-presidents of the society. This was the society founded by L. Leotard and Kshetrapal Chakraborty in 1893 to cultivate . Enriched by contributions from Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and others, its collections include over 150,000 books and important Bengali and Sanskrit manuscripts and cultural artifacts, including the only manuscript of Shrikrsnakirtana.

Dutt's The Literature of Bengal presented "a connected story of literary and intellectual progress in Bengal" over eight centuries, commencing with the early Sanskrit poetry of . It traced Chaitanya's religious reforms of the sixteenth century, 's school of formal logic, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's brilliance, coming down to the intellectual progress of the nineteenth century. This was presented by Thacker, Spink & Co. in Calcutta and Archibald Constable in London in 1895, but it had formed in Dutt's mind while he managed famine relief and economic recovery operations in Dakhin Shahbazpur and originally appeared under the disguise of an assumed name in 1877. It was dedicated to his esteemed uncle, Rai Shashi Chandra Dutt Bahadur.

Dutt considered , the religious reformer of Bengal, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and to be the founders of Bengali prose literature. History

Poverty and low wages were among the indirect products of colonial rule. Romesh Dutt traced a decline in standards of living to the nineteenth-century deindustrialization of the subcontinent and the narrowing of sources of wealth which followed:

India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as great agricultural country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asia and of Europe. It is, unfortunately, true that the East Indian Company and the British Parliament ... discouraged Indian manufactures in the early years of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufactures of England . . . millions of Indian artisans lost their earnings; the population of India lost one great source of their wealth.

Radhakamal Mukerjee and Romesh Dutt directed attention to the deepening internal differentiation of Indian society appearing in the abrupt articulation of local economies with the world market, accelerated urban-rural polarization, the division between intellectual and manual labor, and the toll of recurrent devastating famines.

Ramesh Chandra Majumdar

Ramesh Chandra Majumdar (December 4, 1888 – February 12, 1980) was an Indian historian of great repute. He is sometimes called "the dean of Indian historians" for his colossal contribution to the study of Indian history.

Early life and education

Born at Khandapara, in Faridpur District (now in Bangladesh) on 4 December 1888, to Haladhar Majumdar and Vidhumukhi , Majumdar passed his childhood in poverty. In 1905, he passed his Entrance Examination from Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. In 1907, he passed F.A. with first class scholarship from Ripon College (now ) and joined Presidency College, Calcutta. Graduating in B.A.(Honours) in 1909 and MA from Calcutta University in 1911, he won the Premchand-Roychand scholarship from the University of Calcutta for his research work in 1913.

Career

He started his teaching career as a Lecturer at Dacca Government Training College. Since 1914, he spent seven years as a professor of history at the University of Calcutta. He got his doctorate for his thesis "Corporate Life in Ancient India". In 1921 he joined the newly established Dacca University as Professor of History. He also served, until he became its Vice Chancellor, as the Head of the Department of History as well as as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Between 1924 and 1936 he was Provost of Jagannath Hall. Then he became the Vice Chancellor of that University, for five years from 1937 to 1942. From 1950, he was Principal of the College of Indology, Benares Hindu University. He was elected the General President of the Indian History Congress and also became the Vice President of the International Commission set up by the UNESCO for the history of mankind.

Works

He started his research on ancient India. After extensive travels to Southeast Asia and research, he wrote detailed histories of Champa (1927), Suvarnadvipa (1929) and Kambuja Desa. On the initiative of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, he took up the mantle of editing a multi- volume tome on Indian History. Starting in 1951, he toiled for twenty six long years to describe the history of the Indian people from the Vedic Period to the present day in eleven volumes. In 1955 Majumdar became the founder-principal of the College of Indology of Nagpur University. In 1958-59 he taught Indian history in the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania. He was also the president of (1966-68) and the vangiya sahitya parisad (1968-69). For some time he was also the Sheriff of Calcutta (1967-68). When the final volume of "The History and Culture of the Indian People" was published in 1977, he had turned eighty-eight. He also edited the three-volume published by Dacca University. His last book was "Jivaner Smritidvipe".

Views on the Indian independence movement

When the Government of India set up an editorial Committee to author a history of the freedom struggle of India, he was its principal member. But, following a conflict with the then Education Minister Maulana on the Sepoy Mutiny, he left the government job and published his own book: "The Sepoy Mutiny & Revolt of 1857". According to him the origins of India's freedom struggle lie in the English-educated Indian middle-class and the freedom struggle started with the Banga Bhanga movement in 1905. His views on the freedom struggle can be gone through in detail in his book "History of the Freedom Movement in India". He was also an admirer of Vivekananda and .

Surendra Nath Sen

Is there a single truth behind the events of 1857?

Of the many volumes of history written about the conflict of 1857, the overwhelming number is by Britishers. The colonials of the time felt a strong sense of moral indignation, which led to images of the black native villains butchering the men (and even women) of the master race. Many of the more popular British histories, written by men of high literary skill, are often biased in trying to show it primarily as a mutiny by some misguided sepoys.

Many Victorian authors take the evidence rather lightly and their moral indignation very heavily. Surprisingly, some of this moral indignation survives even today, in texts such as Andrew ward's our bones are scattered (1996), on the mutiny at Kanpur.

On the other hands, Indian historiography has also had its biases, with some like Savarkar pulling facts out of thin air.

In recent years, a group of serious subaltern historians have pioneered a new view. Their arguments view the period history from the point of view of the peasant, whose voice is generally lost in the volume of documentation left by the ruling race. a related argument is that the cause for this outrage may have been that the ruling races were accustomed to a style of life in which they were the army and the courts - i.e. - the British held the monopoly for inflicting violence to the others. Hence violence by an inferior native race became highly emotional charged, and engendered the enormous volume of literature in Britain.

However, somewhat before the subalterns, there have been some balanced histories written. Of these, Surendra Nath Sen's work stands out, in the objectivity and directness of presentation. it provides a more readable alternative to the colonial vituperation to be found in many British texts, some of them even now popular in India. Certainly the recent accounts provide a greater balance.

A matter of names

One of the problems faced by any historian writing about the uprising 1857 is what name to call it by. Sen has shown his wisdom by avoiding completely politically loaded terms such as "mutiny", or "war of independence". He merely calls his book "eighteen fifty-seven".

In any event, most reconstructions and most of the evidence is based on the extensive (British) records.

Unfortunately this book, though broadly praised by many historians (though largely ignored in the west) remains out of print, as is the sad fate of many books published by the government.

British historiography

The British mainstream narrative tends to view the rebellion as a mutiny by the sepoys of the East India Company, caused by a rumour about animal fat in a cartridge, and possibly other grievances and other ill-understood rumours. The colonial anger at the violation of their privileged status - the established norm - results in moral rage. This arises from a violation of expectations, and may be compared to the visceral anger one feels when after a natural emergency, the shopkeeper charges ten times the normal price for a cup of tea; he has a limited supply (since roads are blocked) and many more customers than he can possibly serve. this is a price at which seller and buyer agree to exchange a good. Yet one feels moral indignation.

Thus, most British histories view the Indian violence as unpardonable, and take a severe view of Indian excesses, often justifying the brutal British reprisals as legitimized by their anger. At the same time, we must remember that a few thousand Englishmen died in 1857, whereas the death toll for Indians, computed based on population records and emptied villages and letters returned to the Dead Letter Office may be about ten million in the Awadh (Lucknow/Kanpur) region alone.

The argument made by Rudrangshu Mukherjee in Spectre of violence) is that the "established norm" itself was disbalanced - it conferred a "monopoly on violence" to the English tribe, disenfranchising the natives. The violation of this monopoly in 1857 was the source of this moral anger, but the starting point itself was not balanced.

One of the saner voices in the British writing about the mutiny is the historian John Kaye, whose record provides the first source for any opinion to be formed about the mutiny. Kaye observed in his official history, written two decades after the events in the 1880s:

An Englishman is almost suffocated with indignation when he reads that Mrs. Chambers or Miss Jennings was hacked to death by a dusky ruffian; but in native histories... it may be recorded against our people, that mothers and wives and children, with less familiar names, fell miserable victims to the first swoop of English vengeance. it may be, too, that the plea of provocation, which invests the most sanguinary acts of the white man in this deadly struggle is not wholly to be rejected when urged in extenuation of the worst deeds of those who have never known Christian teaching.

The time for these native histories have come, and I believe that while some of their arguments may be debatable, on the whole they have achieved a greater balance in this narrative, for example by shifting the focus of the debate from the generals and their wives to the peasants and their aspirations.

Modern Indian historiography

Starting with the work of S.B. Chaudhuri in the 1930s, a number of texts by Indian historians have taken a broader view, suggesting that participation may have involved more than a group of disgruntled sepoys, with support from a wide section of the population, including a number of local kings and zamindars. In particular, the role of the north Indian villager (peasant class), from whom the sepoy was drawn, has been widely analyzed in the subaltern histories, and has emerged as a mainstream view over the last three decades. The peasant armed: the Indian revolt of 1857 (1986) - largely a response to the thesis of S. B. Chaudhuri and subsequent subaltern authors. While not quite a war of independence, it was clearly much more than a military mutiny.

In 1956, on the eve of the centenary of the rebellion, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, himself a respected scholar, and then the Minister for Education in India's second Lok Sabha, commissioned historian S.N. Sen to write a history of 1857, removing the prejudices of British historiography. The resulting text is well-balanced, and gives a very broad analysis of the causes behind the event.

Subsequent texts, such as Ranajit Guha's British Imagination and Rudrangshu Mukherjee's Awadh in Revolt, build on this post-colonial view with additional material emphasizing the broad discontent with the Company rule, and the many strands of causes that led to that great upheaval.

An Indian Minister supporting criticism

As an young historian on the staff of the National Archives, Raychaudhuri decries the nepotism and corruption in the post-colonial Indian bureaucracy. However, the ministers themselves were men of stature, and he cites Education minister Maulana Azad in particular for his mangnanimous acceptance of criticism.

It turns out that a review of this volume in the official journal of the National Archives was severely critical of Azad's introduction (which is a bit overbearing at places), but Azad unstintingly had Raychaudhuri publish it without any alteration.

Such a situation is almost unthinkable among today's ministers, who mostly lack the self- esteem of an Azad or a Nehru.

Events at Kanpur

However, the gulf with the British position is hard to close. This is particularly true about the events at Kanpur, which were particularly poignant for the British at the time, and are being brought up in more than a hundred mutiny novels - including one from 2010.

Yet a number of authors have pointed out that the only reliable first-person narrative of the events - from Lt. Mowbray Thomson, clearly states that it was the tense Britishers who suddenly started firing when the boatmen suddenly jumped into the water. Sen below, and also others (e.g. see Spectre of violence) have argued that in a tense situation where the two sides were firing at each other till yesterday, such a sudden firing would definitely bring a hostile response. And given that the shores were laden with sepoys, and that the British were sitting targets with their boats stuck in the mud, it is not very hard to see how the entire British contingent would get wiped out.

Yet, the mainstream history continues to maintain that the events were a conspiracy by Nana. Indeed, it is evident that had Nana intended treachery, why would he have spent so much money and labour purchasing the boats and fixing them up overnight - the murder could have been done just as efficaciously on land. Also, Mowbray clearly states that the sepoys who met him and helped him bring his belongings to the river were far from hostile, and certainly they had no inkling of a conspiracy.

It is a situation where a dubious fact of history, just because it has been repeated so often, continues its hold on the imagination.

The following is an excerpt of how Sen views the events at Kanpur.

Excerpt: The Kanpur "massacre"

Background: after twenty days of fighting, the small British contingent in "wheeler's entrenchment" at Kanpur (near the present-day memorial church) are offered terms of surrender,

Each man being permitted to leave with his arms and sixty rounds of ammunition. Conveyance should be provided for the wounded, the women and the children, and boats should be kept ready at the ghat with food supply.

On 26th June evening, a British team inspects the sati chaura ghat and finds about forty country boats "moored and apparently ready for departure, some of them roofed, and others undergoing that process." A team of workers work through the night on this flotilla of boats, while others arrange land transport to the river.

27 June 1857. Morning

On the morning of the 27th sixteen elephants and seventy to eighty palanquins came to convey the fugitives to the boats. But all of them could not be accommodated, and Captain Moore, who was supervising the operations, had to come for a second time. "The women and children were put on the elephants, and into bullock carts; the able-bodied walked down indiscriminately, after the advance had gone."

[Many Britishers have misgivings about the pact, there is a lot of suspicion. some sepoys came to the entrenchment, "inquiring after their old officers whom they had missed," says Mowbray Thomson, "and they appeared much distressed at hearing of their death."

I inquired of another sepoy of the 53d, 'Are we to go to Allahabad without molestation?' He affirmed that such was his firm belief; and I do not suppose that the contemplated massacre had been divulged beyond the councils of its brutal projectors.

The rear was brought up by Major Vibart, who was the last officer in the intrenchment. Some of the rebels who had served in this officer's regiment insisted on carrying out the property which belonged to him. They loaded a bullock cart with boxes, and escorted the Major's wife and family down to the boats, with the most profuse demonstrations of respect."

By 9 o'clock the last boat had received her complement. If anything had happened on the way Mowbray Thomson and Delafosse were unaware of it.

First shots fired from the boats

[The monsoons are yet to come. The water is shallow, and it's hard to launch the boats. tension is mounting.]

The river was low, the boats had no gangway, and the passengers, men, women and children, had to wade through the water. What followed, let Mowbray Thomson relate. No one was likely to know the whole truth, for no one could possibly have witnessed everything. There was a huge crowd on the river banks that morning, and thousands of spectators had gathered to see their former rulers leave. But there were no more reliable witnesses than Mowbray Thomson and Delafosse, two of the four survivors, who escaped the massacre and lived to record their unhappy experience. They were both of them trained observers, but while Delafosse's account is very brief.

Sen's analysis

Thomson and Delafosse had obviously boarded two different boats. Their accounts make it clear that if any outrage had been committed on the way, they were unaware of it. Mowbray Thomson positively states that the sepoys were quite courteous before the embarkation was completed, and as he says, nothing happened until Major Vibart, the last man to leave the camp, had boarded his boat.

It can be assumed that the story of Colonel Ewart being killed in the rear of the column and General Wheeler being beheaded as he was getting out of his palanquin does not rest on any substantial evidence. Ewart would have been missed at the ghat and Wheeler did not ride a palanquin, but walked with his wife and daughter all the way to the river.

It is not clear who fired the first shot, men from Mowbray Thomson's boat or the horsemen on the banks. For, he is definite that when the boatmen deserted they were immediately fired on, and simultaneously the horsemen, who had accompanied Major Vibart, fired a volley.

Other arguments against a conspiracy theory

The boats were collected and fitted on very short notice. They did not belong to the boatmen, but to banias of Maheshwari and Agarwal section. The proprietors were duly compensated for their loss. On the evening of the 26th when the Committee of Inspection went to see them, many of the boats still lacked their bamboo platforms and roofs of straw. But thousands of labourers worked all night to remove these deficiencies.

If Nana meditated treachery from the first, one wonders why so much money and labour were wasted on the boats, for once out of the entrenchment, the English would be as helpless in the midst of a hostile crowd on land, as they were on the river. They had their arms, and it could not be expected that they would let their women and children be slaughtered without a desperate fight.

Meanwhile, Dr. S. N. Sen's book, Eighteen Fifty-Seven, affords a convenient and useful account of the rising as a whole. Greatest general interest attaches to the final chapter in which Dr. Sen reviews the evidence relevant to a decision on the basic character of the 1857 movement. Was it a spontaneous outburst of sepoy discontent, he asks, or a premeditated revolt? Was it a mutiny limited to the army or did it command the support of the people at large? Was it a religious war against Christians? What were the aims of the leaders of the revolt?

The movement of 1857, he concludes, was not pre-planned. It had its origin among the soldiers and took at first the form of a military mutiny. Almost immediately, however, the Mutiny became a revolt and assumed a political character when the mutineers of Meerut placed themselves under the King of Delhi [Bahadur Shah, a lineal descendant of the great Mughal Emperors] and a section of the landed aristocracy and civil population declared in his favour. What began as a fight for religion ended as a war of independence for there is not the slightest doubt that the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien government and restore the old order of which the King of Delhi was the rightful representative.

In Oudh (the area centered on Lucknow and forming the heart of the present-day State of Uttar Pradesh), Dr. Sen judges, the revolt "assumed a national dimension." He warns that the term "national" must be used with care "for the concept of Indian nationality was yet in embryo." Nevertheless, "the people of India felt they had something in common as against the Englishmen." Apart from Oudh and the Shahabad District of Bihar, Dr. Sen finds "no evidence of that general sympathy which would invest the mutiny with the dignity of a national war." He points out that the rebellion aroused only a brief sporadic response from Bombay, drew little support from the Punjab, and left the great presidencies of Madras and Bengal virtually unaffected.

In social content, Dr. Sen characterizes the rising as backward. The British, he writes, had taken some steps to improve the status of women, to promote the equality of all men in the eye of the law, and to improve the lot of the peasants. "The Mutiny leaders would have set the clock back, they would have done away with the new reforms, with the new order, and gone back to the good old days when a commoner could not expect equal justice with the noble, when the tenants were at the mercy of the talukdars [great landholders], and when theft was punished with mutilation. In short, they wanted a counter-revolution."

Thus, in Dr. Sen's view, the rebellion of 1857 must be understood as much more than a mere military mutiny. It derived its strength from widespread disaffection among the civil population and amounted in certain districts to a "national" uprising. Its overall direction, however, was retrograde, since the indigenous regime it attempted to reinstate would have been more oppressive than the British rule.

Not Pre-planned

Dr Sen, on the other hand, accepts that the rising of 1857 assumed a national character at least at certain places. He rightly points out that diverse factors operated in the growth of this feeling of national unity, such as feudal loyalty, religious feeling etc. But in many cases, this national movement assumed a very low character, disfigured by communal riots, unnecessary cruelties and excesses. The native chiefs were led by motives of personal gain not by the nationalistic and democratic ideals of 19th century liberal Europe and the sepoys and their peasant associates often betrayed a medieval spirit in their demands on the British government. Both historians are thus far agreed that the revolt was not preplanned or concerted.

It is really unfortunate that such eminent historians as Dr Sen or Dr Majumdar would totally ignore the lot of the common man, the peasant, under the first hundred years of British rule. They could have profitably discussed whether or not British imperialism in India meant real economic servitude for the masses; why such a large number of sepoys of peasant and artisan extraction revolted and fought, so desperately against British forces; why in Oudh and its surroundings, the mutiny received such a mass support: why in Bengal there was a sympathetic peasant rising within a couple of years from 1857; whether or not the common people and the feudal chiefs had initially combined with the sub-conscious aim of throwing off the yoke of foreign' rule; whether or not the revolt of 1857 exposed some vulnerable points in the British armour for the first time, thereby initiating a phased struggle for national independence that reached its culmination exactly ninety years later. These questions remain unanswered in either book.

KAVALAM MADHAVA PANIKKAR

Kavalam Madhava Panikkar (3 June 1895 – 10 December 1963) was an Indian statesman and diplomat also famed as a Professor, newspaper editor, historian and novelist. He was born in Travancore, then a princely state in the British Indian Empire and was educated in Madras and at the University of Oxford.

After a period as a professor at Aligarh Muslim University and later at University of Calcutta, he became editor of Hindustan Times in 1925. Later, he was appointed Secretary to the Chamber of Princes, whence he moved to Patiala State and then to Bikaner State as Foreign Minister later becoming the latter's Prime Minister. When India achieved political independence, Sardar Madhava Panikkar represented the country at the 1947 session of the UN General Assembly. In 1950, he was appointed India's (the first non-Socialist country to recognize People's Republic of China) Ambassador to China. After a successful tenure there, he went as Ambassador to Egypt in 1952. He was appointed a member of the States Reorganisation Commission set up in 1953. He was also India's Ambassador to France and a member of Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament. He also served as Vice- Chancellor of the University of Kashmir and the University of Mysore.

Early life and education

Madhava Panikkar was born to Puthillathu Parameswaran Namboodiri and Chalayil Kunjikutti Kunjamma in the princely state of Travancore in 1895. He completed his basic studies at CMS College School, Kottayam and St. Paul's School, Vepery, Madras. Later on he joined Madras Christian College for intermediate classes. At MCC he was a contemporary of Puthezhath Raman Menon, Nandyelath Padmanabha Menon and Sadasiva Reddy among others. He left for England in April 1914 to read history at Christ Church, University of Oxford. After leaving Oxford, Panikkar read for the bar at the Middle Temple, London.

He was the first president of the Kerala Sahitya Academy. After his studies, Panikkar travelled to Portugal and Holland to research the involvement of these countries with Malabar, the results of which were published in the books Malabar and the Portuguese (1929) and Malabar and the Dutch (1931) He was the maternal uncle of the noted poet, dramatist and lyricist Kavalam Narayana Panicker.

Career

On returning to India, he first taught at the Aligarh Muslim University and later at the University of Calcutta. He turned to journalism in 1925 as editor of the Hindustan Times.

For the next 20 years, Madhava Panikkar served the Princely States, becoming secretary to the chancellor of the Chamber of Princes. He also served as the foreign minister of the state of Patiala and as foreign minister of Bikaner, and became the dewan of Bikaner in 1944. He served in China until 1952, building a relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, and remaining there through the Communist takeover in 1949 and the following period. He wrote of his experiences in the book In Two Chinas (1955). This period also saw the completion of his work Asia and Western Dominance (1953). He subsequently served as ambassador to Egypt (1952–1953), and France (1956–1959), before a severe stroke forced him to return to India. On recovering, he took up his academic career again, becoming Vice-Chancellor of Jammu and Kashmir University and later of Mysore University. During his political career Panikkar continued to publish articles and poems, and also translated several Greek plays into Malayalam verse.

Academics and scholarship

Early on Madhava Panikkar had cultivated an interest in Malayalam literature, and was a lifelong friend of the poet Vallathol. He published scholarly works extensively and worked on ancient Indian history and more recent historical developments. Cambridge historian Arthur Hassall wrote that in his "long career as tutor of history at Christ Church" he had "never had a more brilliant student." Madhava Panikkar's interests stretched into diverse fields such as, art, notably novels, poetry and Kathakali and he wrote equally well in both Malayalam and English and published over 50 books and numerous articles.

Madhava Panikkar's interest in European influence on Asia was reflected in his studies of the Portuguese and the Dutch in Malabar (in South India) and especially in his Asia and Western Dominance (1953). In Two Chinas (1955) revealed his sympathy with Communist China.

Notable works in English:

 1920: Essays on Educational Reconstruction in India

 1922: Sri Harsha of Kanauj: a monograph on the history of India in the first half of the 7th century A. D.  1923: Indian Nationalism: its origin, history, and ideals

 1928: The Working of Dyarchy in India, 1919–1928

 1929: The Evolution of British Policy towards Indian States, 1774–1858

 1929: Malabar and the Portuguese: being a history of the relations of the Portuguese with Malabar from 1500 to 1663

 1930: The Founding of the Kashmir State: a biography of Maharajah Gulab Singh, 1792–1858

 1930: Federal India

 1932: Indian States and the Government of India

 1934: The New Empire: letters to a Conservative Member of Parliament on the future of England and India

 1936: The Indian Princes in Council: a record of the chancellorship of His Highness, the Maharaja of Patiala, 1926–1931 and 1933–1936

 1937: His Highness the Maharaja of Bikaner: a biography

 1938: Hinduism and the modern world

 1942: The States and the Constitutional Settlement

 1943: Indian States

 1944: The Strategic Problems of the Indian Ocean

 1945: India and the Indian Ocean: an essay on the influence of sea power on Indian history

 1947: India through the Ages

 1953: Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

 1954: A Survey of Indian History

 1954: In Two Chinas: memoirs of a diplomat

 1956: The Principles and Practice of Diplomacy

 1957: Voice of Truth, a topical symposium: replies to attacks on Christians and missionaries in India

 1957: India and China: a study of cultural relations

 1958: The Determining Periods of Indian History

 1960: A History of Kerala, 1498–1801

 1960: The State and the Citizen  1961: Hindu Society at Cross Roads

 1961: Essential Features of India Culture

 1962: In Defence of

 1963: Studies in Indian History

 1963: The Ideas of Sovereignty and State in Indian Political Thought

 1963: The Foundations of New India

 1963: The Himalayas in Indian Life

 1964: A Survey of Indian History

 1964: Hinduism & the West: a study in challenge and response

 1964: The Serpent and the Crescent: a history of the Negro empires of western Africa

 1965: Lectures on India's Contact with the World in the pre-British Period

 1966: The Twentieth Century

 1967: Caste and Democracy & Prospects of Democracy in India

 1969: Geographical Factors in Indian History

 1977: An Autobiography