Narayani Basu on K. M. Panikkar: India’s Impossible Man

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan. Today my guest is Narayani Basu, who is a historian and the author of the latest book, A Man for All Seasons: The Life of K. M. Panikkar. Her last book was a biography of V.P. Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India. 

We talked about KM Panikkar, his comparison with VP Menon, the Indian nationalist movement in the interwar years, the origins of India’s diplomatic relationship with China, Pannikar’s Zionism and much more. 

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.

Hi, Narayani, welcome to the show. It is such a pleasure to finally have you here.

NARAYANI BASU: Thank you so much, Shruti. It’s a pleasure to be here.

The Elusive K. M. Panikkar

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m a big fan of your books, you know that. I loved your V. P. Menon book, and I’m so thrilled to get this early copy of the Panikkar biography, because he’s always fascinated me. My lens to him was through the Constituent Assembly debates. That’s how I think most of us know him, and that he’s had this whole other life, where, actually, his constitutional work is like this minor chapter of his life, and has had this other rich life [which] is incredible.

I will say one thing though, when I started reading the V. P. Menon book, I thought I didn’t know anything about V. P. Menon, except the transfer of power stuff. By the end of the book, I felt like, “Oh, now I think I know this guy.” The exact opposite thing happened with K. M. Panikkar, because I was like, “Oh, I vaguely know him,” when I started reading this book. By the end of the book I was like, “I don’t know him at all.”

I have read an 800-page book, and I don’t think I still know him. How do you think about this? Is this a good way to think about him? You call him the impossible man, but is it that hard to pin him down, and nail him down? 

BASU: So, His friend, the journalist, K. Iswara Dutt was the guy who actually coined the phrase, “One of India’s impossible men.” I loved it because I genuinely, in all the research that I had compiled on Panikkar, there wasn’t a phrase that captured him better than that, because you’re right, he’s so difficult to pin down. I came across him when I was working at the Institute of Peace & Conflict Studies as a policy analyst, and I encountered him in the role of ambassador to China.

Then, after that, when I was putting the V. P. Menon book together, I came across Panikkar again in the Chamber of Princes. I was intrigued because it’s the same when you’re thinking of V. P. Menon. You’re thinking of him only as Sardar Patel’s right-hand man. In the case of Panikkar, for me, I had thought of him just as ambassador to China, extremely controversial ambassadorship, just that.

Then, I come across him in the Chamber of Princes, and playing a remarkably pivotal role throughout the 1930s and ’40s. I was very intrigued. Then, I began going down a research rabbit hole as one does. I began to discover that this was a man whose career spanned 1915 to 1963. He picks up his pen first when he is a university student at Oxford. He begins writing across immensely difficult themes that, certainly, me as a first-year student, I wouldn’t have dreamed of writing on the subjects that he chose to write about.

He is writing against a backdrop of immense global change, both national and global. The world had just gone to war. India is going through its own national movement. He’s writing these incredibly complex themes of citizenship, immigration, diaspora, international relations, India’s constitutional future, what does that look like post the war. He doesn’t stop writing until the day he dies. His writing has blossomed through his life.

RAJAGOPALAN: What you described is just the nonfiction. He has this whole other life—

BASU: Yes. He has this whole other life.

RAJAGOPALAN: —as a friction writer.

BASU: Yes. He has this whole other life as a fiction writer. He writes Malayalam fiction and he writes poetry. While he is a nationalist, he’s also a writer. He is a poet. He is then an academic, he’s also an administrator in the princely states. He’s also a diplomat. He’s Nehru’s man in Peking, in Cairo, in Paris. He’s the head of the States Reorganisation Commission. He’s everywhere.

When you put together modern India story, he is at every milestone that we’ve achieved. To put together an elevator pitch, so to speak, for a man like that, is next to impossible. Just one career description, or job profile doesn’t fit K. M. Panikkar. Underneath all of that, so he’s a nationalist, he dabbled with anarchism, he is a historian, he’s a lawyer, he’s a foreign policy Mandarin, he’s also a Zionist. He’s all of these things. He’s a very difficult man to sum up in one line.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s also a different shade of Hindu nationalist, not the way we mean it in current times, but in a slightly different way that he thinks about India very much as this Hindu civilizational, historical context, right? He’s also quite radically on the left at different points in life right from Oxford Majlis, to maybe, when you see him in the Constituent Assembly, he’s like a little bit more Fabian-ish, maybe he’s toned down quite a bit.

He’s just this fascinating guy. The other thing, not to make too much of constantly comparing your two books, but the other thing that fascinated me in the comparison between K. M. Panikkar and V. P. Menon, is Panikkar seems like a guy who has really radical ideas, but is actually a very diplomatic, and collegial personality. V. P. Menon almost seems like the opposite, right?

BASU: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s not exactly the easiest person. He’s very exacting. On the other hand, when it comes to the idea level and the drafting level, this is a man who is always trying to find consensus, so that whatever is written on the page, everyone else can agree, and do the same thing. In the later parts of the book, you actually describe how they met, and actually worked with each other, and thought quite highly of each other. What did you find interesting about that? 

BASU: When I’m thinking of V. P. Menon and I’m thinking of Panikkar, they are such different career trajectories. They are such differently made men, also, right? V. P. Menon is an entirely self-made man. K. M. Panikkar, I would also say that in many ways, he was self-made, in that, he didn’t actually sit for the ICS either. He got into where he did through other means, right? He always was clear that politics was his main ambition.

For V. P. Menon, it was always a desire to work behind the scenes. Panikkar was somebody who always wanted to be where the heart of power was in those days. This is an opinion he forms, as early as the aftermath of the First World War in 1919, and early into the 1920s, he’s witnessed Jallianwala Bagh. He’s witnessed the height of the non-cooperation movement, the horrors of Chauri Chaura.

Panikkar’s and the Indian National Movement

He knows that he wants to contribute to the national movement in a really concrete sense of the word. For him, politics is the one way to do that. There’s this crazy hodgepodge career that he takes in order to get there. He’s never in politics as we know it today. I think he’s not a politician in that sense of the word, but he is working in the political part of the national movement.

He’s working to contribute to a political sense of what India would be when transfer of power eventually came. You see that evolution. I think a lot of that evolution was very intellectual for somebody like Panikkar. For V. P. Menon, it was very bureaucratic right from the get-go. V. P. Menon starts off as a typist, and is very much behind the scenes until he becomes reforms commissioner and then secretary, Ministry of States. His role is always a bureaucratic one. 

Panikkar zigzags across, not just the princely states, but also, working with the Indian state to represent the Indian States Committee, and its legal interests as it tries to negotiate its status as far as the Raj is concerned. He’s also a journalist. He’s the founding editor of the Hindustan Times. In all of these positions that he holds, he’s still contributing to a very intellectual idea of where India is going, where he feels India should be headed.

What does that mean, also? I found it very interesting that he starts looking at the princely states very early on. For V. P. Menon, V. P. Menon encounters the princely states in the mid-1930s when he put together this prototype of the instrument of accession, and then comes back to capitalize on it a decade later with Sardar Patel. 

With Panikkar, it’s in the mid-1920s. He started flirting with the idea of where the princely states should be in 1919. It comes on the heels of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, because Bikaner has been a signatory, and it’s a moment of huge ceremony, almost, you have Bikaner with this gold turban, and this fountain pen, and signing his name. Bikaner also saying that, “Look, India, as it stands today, contributes to one-fifth of the human race.” The princely states are now setting up post the First World War. Again, asking the Raj, “We have contributed men, material, and funds to you. Where does that leave us? Where do we stand here, as far as our relationship with you is concerned?” The Raj is pretty clear that the princely states cannot be allowed to run away, so to speak.

There’s a constant wrapping of the knuckles that ensues, but the Raj is also very uncomfortably aware that a little more leeway has to be given in recognition to the princely states’ contribution to the war effort. Which is why the Chamber of Princes is created, and it’s entirely an advisory body, so to speak. It’s a rubber-stamp body. It’s a sort of crumb that’s flung in the face of the princes.

Panikkar is noting all of this, and for Panikkar, it’s a moment where he feels almost compelled to take the princely states into consideration. If you look at his earlier writings, it’s almost very dismissive. He sneers at them and says, “They’re driven by the Zenanas,”. It’s very dismissive, and it’s a view that undergoes a radical change towards the mid-to-late 1920s.

It’s interesting that it comes at a point that it does, because in the mid-to-late 1920s, he’s in Europe, his career is at a standstill. The national movement is somewhat also at a standstill. It’s almost running in parallel. Both the national movement and Panikkar are trying to figure themselves out. Panikkar, at this point, has written this tract where he has basically said, “The states need to be taken into consideration now by the Raj. They are excellent laboratories for self-governance. They are excellent laboratories for the preservation of local and regional identity. If we look at them, and if we figure out a way to bring them on board alongside the provinces of British India, there can be a step forward.”

It’s a first step towards a federal system. It’s a first attempt. Because the whole decade of the 1930s for Panikkar is defined by that. Later, we have the word “integration” coming into being, when V. P. Menon and Sardar Patel are undertaking this huge effort to bring the 565 princely states on board. For Panikkar, it’s more of a process of trying to get this vast array of states with their immensely technicolor, larger-than-life rulers on board a common vision that he has, that he feels might work.

As a historian, it was almost eye-crossing to deal with that level of archival material, because you have so many rulers at loggerheads with each other. So many rulers competing with each other, suspicious of each other, doubting each other. You also have the international press, which is lampooning them constantly. Honestly, they make it very easy to be lampooned. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Of course, because they’re a little bit nuts in how they live, and their lavish lifestyle, and their very idiosyncratic behavior and scandals. The other weird thing, also, we forget, we treat the princely states as if they’re just these monarchs that we got handed down. The truth is, they have a few hundred years of history of warring with each other, or allying with each other.

To now say that, “Oh, set all of that as history aside, because you need to get along. You have two different groups you need to battle with the British, and the Congress and the Muslim League and so on.” They can’t quite set everything aside, right? 

BASU: No. Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s so crazy to even expect something like that. I’m astounded by Panikkar’s ambition almost.

BASU: Panikkar was always an ambitious man, and his ambition to me, it jumps off the page in everything he’s writing, in all the steps that he’s taking. His ambition is front and center. When he undertakes a mission like he did with the princely states throughout the 1930s, for instance, it’s baffling almost. And in this sense, I will say, it is when he becomes both a diplomat, and a politician behind the scenes, because you’re negotiating with different egos, you’re negotiating with different personalities, and you are trying to pull them on board.

Like you said, it’s very difficult to put aside centuries of history, and centuries of prior existence in the face of what the Raj wants, what the political movement wants, what a nascent and very rapidly growing popular movement within each state also wants. You see Panikkar’s writing beginning to reflect that when the federal movement goes off the rails in 1939 with the onset of the Second World War; it’s almost as if Panikkar is completely disillusioned, and completely frustrated. It’s been the one lodestar of his life to get the princes on board, and he’s failed. Now, he switches to this point of real pushback against the princely states, because he says, “Look, the writing is on the wall. We have moved into the 1940s. There is another global war. There is a rapidly growing movement for Pakistan as well.” There is no way that the princes cannot ignore the momentum that the national movement is undertaking.

RAJAGOPALAN: The second thing is, between the First and the Second World War, there are a whole bunch of European monarchies that have disappeared, right?

BASU: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Starting with the Russians. This is the other thing. The citizens and the subjects within these little monarchies in India themselves want independence, not just from the Raj, but also from the monarchy. Now, you’re going to either have some crazy revolution, and people with pitchforks, or you’ve got to come to some kind of a sane agreement.

That’s the other interesting thing, because there is this democratic vein running through all of this, even though he’s very much a representative of the princely states. Normally, we associate that very much with Congress, and the Muslim League, and so on. There’s this parallel thing going on, and I feel like Panikkar might be our entry point into that world.

BASU: Yes, because he has been watching this since the 1920s, which I think is what makes him so interesting, because he’s had a ringside seat. Most of it has been through his own machinations. He’s watched the Congress be incredibly ambivalent about the Temple Entry Movement in Travancore. He is being Gandhi’s emissary in Amritsar with the ongoing Akali movement.

He’s seen where ambiguity gets the national movement, which is exactly nowhere. He’s constantly pushing for the Congress to take a stand, as far as the princely states are concerned. All of it stems from what he’s also seen during the First World War, which is when he begins writing about citizenship, what it means to be a citizen of your own country, versus a subject of an empire.

What does it mean to fight for another king in a different country that you’ve never seen, and don’t know? What I found really interesting is that he’s constantly shaped by, and events that he’s lived through, and he constantly brings a sort of understanding to future events, and to future moments in his career. I find that remarkable, because he’s always exactly somehow where he needs to be, in order to give national leaders a sense of where India should be going at a particular point in time.

RAJAGOPALAN: The timing thing you mentioned, this is a man with impeccable timing. The best story on this probably is him telling Nehru that independence should be announced exactly as it was written on paper at the stroke of midnight. Whereas they were going to have it later in the day, because old congressmen went to bed pretty early. The famous, “At the stroke of the midnight hour,” speech, now I realize who we have to thank for that. There’s something lovely about timing. He seems to be aware of ceremony and timing. I don’t know if that’s just experience with princely states, but he’s very acutely aware of it.

BASU: He’s been acutely aware of it from the start. It’s almost a personality trait. He’s always been aware of where he is in a particular moment in time, and what that sense of awareness, which almost translates to a complacent smugness sometimes, that very much characterizes Panikkar.

Panikkar’s Intellectual Arc

RAJAGOPALAN: One thing I really want to get into the weeds of a little bit, is his own intellectual arc sees quite a shift. Initially, he’s toying with the ideas of federalism versus a loose confederacy of those princely states, and that kind of a thing. As we go along, he is like, “Okay, confederacy is out of question. It’s got to be really federal.”

Then, as he goes further along, he’s like, “Okay, it’s got to be a federation, but in the loose sense that, it’s got to be a very strong central executive to stitch this whole union together.” What do you ascribe this intellectual shift to? Is it just he finally got a look at these 565 monarchs, and their bickering, and realize that none of the standard ways of political self-interest and alignment are going to herd this lot together.

You’ve got to do it by force, or the saam, daam, dand, bhed, which eventually V. P. Menon and Sardar Patel resort to, right? Is that the reason? Is it something else? Is it just he realizes something else peculiar about India, that he thinks India is a union that requires a different kind of centralization? Is the central impetus coming from something like central planning, or the experience of the empire? Because he’s also acutely aware of the strength of nations coming from how self-sufficient they are when it comes to funding their armies, and funding the militaries.

Having 500-odd little groups as confederacy, is not exactly going to help anyone. What do you ascribe this intellectual shift, or arc in his own personal journey, or group?

BASU: I think as far as the princely states in specific are concerned, it comes down to what I was saying, which is that he is observing history being written on the ground. As the secretary of the Chamber of Princes, he’s been privy to so much infighting. One minute, one prince is on board a federal plan, the next minute, that federal plan’s been scuffled by a confederal plan.

One cousin is trying to upstage another cousin. It’s almost baffling to pull that entire scenario together. I think that entire experience, despite the fact that 1935 gives us the government of India at 1935, and it’s a huge constitutional milestone for us, and he does realize that, “Okay, as far as a federal idea goes, this is the best we’re going to get at this point.”

He is also, by this point, and in 1935, he’s working with Patiala. He’s also been, by this point, to Germany. He’s been to Italy. He is watching the clouds of fascism beginning to gather. Strangely, his memoir is incredibly anodyne. It’s almost bland when it comes to this. Which in itself is also a curious insight into somebody who’s actually in the presence of fascist powers, what they take away from it.

He is also beginning to see clouds of fascism gathering on the horizon. He is beginning to see the Muslims, especially under Jinnah, pushing for greater safeguards. He is beginning to see a constant push and pull between the popular movements in the princely states, versus what the princely state rulers want for themselves. All of this is leaving him incredibly frustrated.

By the time you move into the 1940s, he’s actively just very bitter. What is interesting to me also is that he never stopped advocating for the princely states to join a union of India, nor did he stop advocating for the princely states to actively be part of the democratic process. He writes this piece in Foreign Affairs, for instance, where he says, “Okay, don’t discount the princely states. If you actively handle them well, these are actively smart men who can be brought on board, who can contribute to India’s future vision.”

I think a lot of it comes from his personal experiences as well. Also, by the 1940s, we are now in the clutches of yet another global war. He’s now beginning to look at India as a postcolonial nation. He is also looking at it, as you said, as a country with a strong central executive, which can only be possible if Pakistan is carved out of India. Which is also something that I found interesting, because while nobody at this point was advocating for partition, and in a sense, neither was he.

He was just a very bitter man at this point. He writes this letter to his friend Syed Mahmood from Aligarh, and he says, “Let’s just foreswear these ideas of unity that we’ve had. Let’s just consider the fact that Pakistan is going to be a reality.” That’s something that he maintains throughout the 1940s also wherever he goes. He says this at a Chatham House lecture in 1943, also, that India cannot be a strong cohesive federal power without Pakistan being carved out from it. He says it to Mountbatten’s press attaché, Alan Campbell Johnson, where he rather very memorably he says that, “Hindustan is an elephant, and Pakistan has two ears. Hindustan can live without the two ears.” 

That’s something that’s almost fatalistic, I’d say. That’s the one moment where I feel Panikkar was incredibly disillusioned, because he’s watching the world moving through a cataclysmic change yet again.

He’s now also beginning to look at India as what an independent nation is going to be, in terms of its foreign policy, in terms of its geostrategic presence, in terms of its diplomatic presence. By 1945, even though we’re still a colony, our presence internationally is now beginning to be counted for. We are sitting at the table as we have been in fact since the Round Tables, which is when statesmen actually sat down across the British Raj, and actually started bargaining for more rights for themselves.

That’s a process that’s been continuing since the last decade. If you juxtapose the princely states against all this change, then he’s reached a point in his head where he’s like, “Without democratization in the princely states, without some method to pull them onboard a united bandwagon, there is no future for the princely states. We cannot write them off, because they don’t deserve to be written off.” Which is I think something also that he maintains right through, no matter how disillusioned he is.

Unifying an Indian Identity

RAJAGOPALAN: One way of saying it is he’s disillusioned and fatalistic. The other way of thinking about it, is he’s prescient. I wonder how much of that comes from like a few very particular experiences. At the face of it, he is this traditional man from a Malayali family who is very upper crust, and educated at Oxford and so on. On the other hand, his formative experiences in India have been first at Aligarh Muslim University during the Khilafat movement.

It’s not exactly sectarian. I wouldn’t call that a sectarian experience, but it’s very much colored by all the other sectarian experiences in other parts of the world that are taking place. Then, the second is his experience in Kashmir when he goes to serve in that princely state, and how the Muslims are being treated, and their demands and so on, which need to be carved out.

The third is negotiating with the Akalis. All these three experiences, I imagine, gave him a firsthand experience of how difficult it is to find consensus at the core level of people who think they should live together, and have sovereignty based on sect or not, because that’s a binary. You can’t mish-mash around it. Is he just either disillusioned or prescient because of these experiences, or is it coming from a different place, which is this idea of a Hindu civilizational state?

Even though he doesn’t mean that in a sectarian sense at all, does he think that’s the only uniting factor? 200 years of being under imperial rule, the only thing you can really fall back upon is an older civilization, and that is, in some sense, a Hindu civilization.

BASU: I think the answer lies somewhere in all of this, to be honest. I don’t think there’s a clear fork in the road, as far as this is concerned. I think the disillusionment sometimes does make you prescient in a weird way.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Right.

BASU: I do feel that his brand of nationalism, and his constant quest for what an Indian identity was, was grounded very much so in a Hindu lens, without it being a muscular, militant sense of Hinduism. It was a very inclusive sense of Hinduism. I don’t think as far as his idea of Pakistan et cetera was concerned, it was grounded in, “Oh, we have a civilizational ethos to fall back upon.:”

For him, the fact that Hinduism was the beating heart, and for him it was, of an Indian identity, was never in an exclusivist sense. It was never a sectarian sense of the world. For him, Pakistan became more or less a reality when he begins to see how strong the push for Pakistan becomes towards the early 1940s and onwards. He’s very, very influenced by that, in the sense that, “Okay, if it is getting this strong, then it might be something that we need to factor in, as far as what our political and constitutional future looks like down the road.”

When he was at Aligarh, and when the Khilafat movement is happening, when non-cooperation is happening, I think Aligarh tends to drive home for him the fact that the dangers of communal fissures, the dangers of one community, or religion uniting against another, are and can be lethal. That’s something that he holds true in all of his writing. You see that in whether he’s writing on foreign policy, whether he’s writing on history, he’s constantly seeking on the theme of unity.

Because for him, unification is what is important, and you see that irrespective whether he is writing editorials for the Hindustan Times, whether he’s writing tracts on history, whether he’s writing tracts on where India is going to be post the war, it is constantly on the question of unity. He’s very clear about the fact that India cannot pull together without ensuring that religious and political fissures don’t get in the way.

That’s something that has influenced him from his time at Aligarh onwards. It becomes a little more problematic when we are a postcolonial nation, because much of his prewar writing, and this is pre-Second World War writing, was influenced by the Greater India school of thought. The Greater India school of thought is essentially this trans imperial, Indo-centric, Hindu revivalist school of thought, which basically says that we were here long before any kind of British Empire.

We were here in a spiritual sense, a cultural sense, a commercial sense. Our influence was very prevalent across Southeast Asia. We were a cultural empire in that sense of the word. For Panikkar, that remains a very abstract concept. It is never a sense of Akhand Bharat, which is defined in terms of territory.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, exactly.

BASU: That’s something that in the early 20th century, you can use as a response to colonialism. In the postwar, postcolonial era, when you’re relying on that school of thought, and you see Panikkar trying to adapt the school of thought to where he is now. Some parts of it are problematic, because when you are relying on it in the mid-20th century, then it becomes almost chauvinistic, because you are then at the risk of erasing communities, erasing histories, which had played such a fundamental role in getting you to where you are now. And particularly, when India is looking to present itself as a cohesive entity in a newly decolonized world, it’s looking to present itself as a stable entity. It’s also looking to champion the notion of Asian solidarity in a so-called third world. This isn’t the kind of language that you want to be using.

RAJAGOPALAN: There are some of these watershed moments, right? India is not the same before and after Jallianwala Bagh, for instance. India is not the same before and after partition. It is the most horrific thing that has ever happened in India. It is one thing to think about a civilizational, or a spiritual, identity, it’s another thing to actually literally be in a train compartment when outside of your compartment, people are being picked based on their religion, and lynched and raped and killed.

He has a ringside view of that. Some understanding of how the abstract idea is going to get very quickly executed. It’s not always going to be through intellectual debates and majlis, but through very violent means. I think it’s useful to keep that somewhere at the back of our minds.

BASU: Absolutely. I think partition influenced everybody, whether they were even remote from it. I think partition touched everyone’s lives. In some sense, the word for Panikkar, as the Diwan of Bikaner, it touched him fundamentally. I think those were his first images of a free India was murder, killing. He’s sitting in this train compartment with his daughter, and outside the train is mass killings and mass rapings.

All he can do is to close the curtains of his train compartment window, and pray that the mob doesn’t come to get him. He hears them shouting, “In the name of Gandhi,” and he puts down the window and he says, “At least, don’t shout, ‘In the name of Gandhi.’” At one point, this young man who’s leading the mass killings comes to him and says, “Okay, it’s done now,” and the train can move onwards. 

It’s this really cold moment to document. When I was writing this particular moment, it still gave me chills, because this is something you’ve worked towards in different senses of the word. For somebody like a Panikkar, you are seeing this happening in front of you, and realizing that the price of freedom sometimes is paid and blood, and it’s paid and tragedy. It’s almost like a cold shower to the soul almost.

India’s Princely States

RAJAGOPALAN: Another important moment of reckoning when you realize that the princely states don’t have the state capacity for the law and order at this scale, then you really need to bring in centralization, and some sort of overall army or central troops to have basic level peace, law, and order, not have slaughter. 

There’s something there that’s going on, where all the abstract ideas of state capacity, or sovereignty, or a particular idea of India, or civilizational state and so on, all of it just comes clashing together. I imagine it’s not just for him, it’s for a whole bunch of people. One thing I think that really got solidified in my head, in a way that it didn’t for me in the V. P. Menon book.

I feel like even after I read your V. P. Menon book, I have continued to judge Patel and V. P. Menon a little bit, because at the end of the day, the means and ends have to square, and they had some pretty dodgy means to get those instruments of ascension signed. They were technically consenting parties, but really they were consenting under the threat of a gun.

That has always sat very uncomfortably with me. I always felt, okay, maybe they could have all been put in a room together, and more concessions. After reading what Panikkar tried to do for 15 years before that, I’m like, “Actually, they tried all of that. I think they ended up at the right place, maybe, because I don’t think there was any other way.”

If the end goal is that you care that the Union of India looks the way it currently looks, I don’t think there was any other way to get there, which I now only realize after Panikkar’s experience. Was that a feeling you got when you were researching this part of his archives?

BASU: I think Panikkar’s experience with the princely states, and trying to get them on board—well, the modern Indian Union, so to speak, plays into everyone else’s experiences. You also have Nehru, Patel, Iyengar, you also have these guys trying to negotiate with the princely states as well. You have formal negotiations  with the States’ Negotiating Committee, and the Union Constitution Committee opening in February 1947, where you actively have Panikkar, and several other rulers sitting across the table with Nehru, Patel, and Iyengar.

It’s at one of these meetings where things start getting very heated. It’s still over the question of boundaries. It’s over the question of rights and all of that. They’re worried about what the future is going to look like in terms of grouping, what it’s going to look like in terms of allocation of seats in the Constituent Assembly, what does that mean for them.

You have tempers being lost on a grand scale often, you have Nehru losing his temper, and saying that, “Okay, by modern standards, princely states are obsolete.” You have C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, who with Diwan of Travancore, losing his temper in retaliation and saying like, “By that standard, certain modern political parties can be turned totalitarian.” You have this remarkable moment with Sardar Patel telling Bhopal, “It’s better if you hand over your rights, which would mean us taking over.” Hand over rather than us taking over, is also another really cinematic moment almost, and it’s portent for what that means.

You have a constant series of diplomatic negotiations going on at all levels. It’s almost like Panikkar and V. P. Menon bookend that era almost, because they come in at such different moments in the trajectory of the princely states, and in the trajectory of their own individual careers, that it’s almost as if they’re bookends.

Within that whole process, I feel like a stream of diplomatic negotiations continued apace.. I think, at the nth hour when it came to the actual moment for transfer of power, the actual moment for rulers to take their seats in the Constituent Assembly, you have the date of transfer of power being pushed up by Mountbatten. Suddenly, what should have been a matter of months, became a matter of weeks. Things were changing so fast on the ground in 1947 alone, that it becomes almost as if there was no choice left, but to go ahead with the methods that were ultimately chosen.

Panikkar and China

RAJAGOPALAN: Here, right after this moment, he gets into the Constituent Assembly. He’s the representative of Bikaner, and he has an important role. He is on the Subcommittee for Fundamental Rights. He’s quoted very much in the Constituent Assembly, and then he’s off to China. Now, China is a hot mess right from the beginning, the India-China relationship.

A lot of the blame is usually lobbed on Nehru. As I read more and more of history of that time, this is like Nirupama Rao Menon’s book, and now this biography of Panikkar, I’m like, “Okay, maybe Panikkar has made a pig’s breakfast of this situation.” I guess my more fundamental question is, why does he misunderstand China so badly? He seems to have this acute understanding of what it means to be an old civilization, what it means to be rooted in a particular linguistic, or cultural, or spiritual historical identity, and yet he just doesn’t recognize that same thing in the Chinese, which is actually where their demands of how to draw the border are coming from. What is it about China that he just completely misses this core fact, which he recognizes so deeply for India and so well for Europe?? 

BASU: I feel like there are several factors at play here. When I first came across Panikkar, it was in the sense of Panikkar taking the blame of the whole weight of history, as far as the trouble between India and China are concerned. When I dug deeper, and this is a very complex web of events, because he’s our ambassador in nationalist China. He’s then sent back as ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. 

One, we don’t have a trained foreign service at the time of transfer of power. There is no such thing as a career diplomat at that point. We, therefore, have men being sent out to different postings, men and women also, to different postings around the world, which results often in things like Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit being posted to Moscow as ambassador. These are all people that Nehru feels he can rely on in order to give him a proper lowdown of what’s happening in each respective country. 

Which is why somebody like Panikkar is chosen for a posting to China. Nehru has always followed Panikkar’s writings on foreign policy with keen interest. Both of them have known each other since the whole mess with the Akalis in the 1920s. For Nehru, Panikkar is somebody who is a mind to watch, is an intellectual to watch as well. By this point, Panikkar has also put forth several very crucial perspectives on postcolonial foreign policy as well.

He also shares Nehru’s vision of an Asian solidarity based on civilizational history and ethos in which China plays a great role. This goes back right to his time in Europe, where he’s speaking in Brussels in the 1920s. He is basically putting forth this vision of an Asian solidarity where you cannot think of freedom and decolonization without taking Asia and Africa into consideration. As far as Asia is concerned, India and China are the two automatic powers that will and should grow together based on their shared history. It’s not a new line of thought as far as Panikkar is concerned, and as far as Nehru is concerned as well.

That’s one. The other is that Panikkar arrives in nationalist China, for instance, as you said, it’s a hot mess. The civil war is reaching a crescendo. New Delhi doesn’t know which way the war is going to go for a while. When it’s clear that the communists are going to come to power, New Delhi is also feeling its way very much in the dark. Policy is changing minute to minute, day to day, which is why it’s very difficult to go into the weeds of this without being incredibly precise, because one date here or there leads to a completely mistaken picture.

If you read the trail of archival evidence, you see Panikkar constantly writing to New Delhi. New Delhi constantly writing to Panikkar. There are mixed signals from both sides. New Delhi doesn’t know what to make of the communists just yet. It feels like, okay, they’ll take some time to settle in and formulate a vision. Panikkar, on the other hand, in November 1948, has warned them in this famous memo, China Goes Communist, where he said that communist China is very likely to fall back on a policy that nationalist China was already following, which is that it will consolidate territory that it feels it has a historical right to.

It will follow the line of the Hans and the Manchus and consolidate that right. There is that warning that he’s given. Be that as it may, you also have Panikkar’s colleagues in Delhi and the Ministry of External Affairs getting really annoyed with Panikkar because they have completely different views. Sardar Patel has a completely different view. Nehru is choosing also to not listen to that and to go with what his man in China is sending across to him.

RAJAGOPALAN: What are the others saying? How different are the bouquet of options before Nehru, really?

BASU: The bouquet of options are literally watch your step, which is what the MEA officials and Sardar Patel are saying, versus Panikkar, who, apart from that memo, has been very shaky on the ground. His reportage is shaky. Nehru is still choosing to listen to Panikkar because now the United States is also in play. India has also entered a world of Cold War. There are other considerations also to take into account here for as far as the prime minister is concerned. There are so many pushes and pulls here that when you look at the archival material, again, it’s eye-crossing material because you have so many voices. It’s almost a din.

You also cannot ignore the fact that, despite this pause between, nationalist China becoming the People’s Republic of China, Panikkar is still chosen as the ambassador to go back. When he goes back and he sends back reports on Zhou Enlai and Mao, just reading those reports alone make for slightly hilarious reading because he’s comparing Zhou Enlai’s fingers to tender green onion shoots, and he is comparing Mao to some kind of new-age Moses who will lead his people to a new land. These are decidedly biased pieces of reportage.

Definitely, you have a New Delhi that is uncertain about a lot on the ground. For instance, there’s a very ambiguous policy as far as Tibet is concerned. New Delhi really doesn’t know which way to go as far as that is concerned. You have the prime minister clinging to a very idealistic vision of shared Asian solidarity. You have him writing to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and saying, “Look, we cannot go into the United Nations Security Council at the cost of China,” and this is something that has been disputed for ages, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

BASU: All of this is still going on while Panikkar is sending his reportage, which in communist China is even shakier. You have a melange of problems here. You have a New Delhi that doesn’t really know what’s going on. You have a prime minister that’s still choosing to rely on Panikkar. You have Panikkar sending decidedly odd reports on the ground.

You have the MEA that’s livid at this point, because by this point, people like Girija Shankar Bajpai, K. P. S. Menon, they’re very angry because they cannot understand why they are not being listened to at this point, and Panikkar is being listened to. On what grounds? When you look at the history of Panikkar in China, his mistakes on the ground have led to a very long and dark shadow on India-China relations.

RAJAGOPALAN: Until today.

BASU: Until today. For instance, he doesn’t discuss the border with Zhou Enlai. He just doesn’t discuss it. He makes this assumption because the maps are a certain way and because the prime minister of India has spoken a certain way in parliament, the Chinese should assume that the border is defined. He leaves out the issue of a border settlement in negotiations with China in 1952. Again, colleagues in the MEA are furious, and they’re saying, “Why hasn’t a border settlement been arrived at? Why was it not included in negotiations with China?”

RAJAGOPALAN: Because it’s such a blanket “no”, this becomes a core philosophical issue, which even today is a philosophical issue. Who has the sovereignty to determine their border? Is it an imperial power or is it two independent nations?

BASU: Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is what I find very strange in the China chapter of Panikkar. Everywhere else where he goes, he’s this guy who’s always trying to mediate and find some middle ground and things like that, and he just doesn’t seem to do that in China. He’s a master avoider in China. What is that about? Is it just he’s unfamiliar, he doesn’t know the language? It’s totally different. It’s not like a guy who speaks English and is still part of the English elite landing in Patiala; this is a little bit different. What is going through his head at this point? There must be something he must have said in defense of all this craziness.

BASU: Essentially, what is happening right now for Panikkar is a sense of immense disappointment. He’s not a trained diplomat. This does not take away from the fact that his reportage on the ground has been decidedly unreliable. He is also very aware of the criticism he’s getting, not just from the MEA, but also from the international press, from the US State Department. He’s being called “Panicky Panikkar.” Dean Acheson has called him “Panicky Panikkar,” and it’s humiliating, because he continues to believe in this vision of Asian solidarity.

He is very disappointed that things are panning out the way they are. It plays down to one of the inconsistencies that I found very hard to adjust to as far as writing the China section was concerned, because for me, it falls somewhere between what Nirupama Menon Rao writes, which is that he shouldn’t have made the assumptions. Where Avtar Singh Bhasin writes that an ambassador in China, or in any other country, could not take the actions he did without New Delhi’s backing or with New Delhi’s briefing, because ambassadors to every country are sent out with a certain briefing.

It was understood as far as the People’s Republic of China was concerned that the brief was that you keep them as happy as possible for the time being. Does that take away from Panikkar’s mistakes on the ground? No. In fact, it underscores the mistakes on the ground because some of those mistakes are crucial and have been crucial throughout history.

He’s called on to defend that mistake for the rest of his life. You have this incredibly sad moment in 1959 when he is a member of the Rajya Sabha and he’s had a stroke. There’s uproar at this point because there’s trouble between India and China. He’s being called on to defend his actions in China, right? He can’t speak for long. He’s basically clinging onto the last of his physical strength to make a speech to defend his actions in China.

You have this very poignant, very sad moment, which really needn’t have happened, where Nehru defends his man in China and says, “He was our man on the ground. He took these decisions, and we stand by him for doing that.” In parallel, it highlighted to me the fact that here was a prime minister who was willing in some sense to take accountability for what had gone wrong with China. Even though the downward spiral between India and China shattered Nehru, in some senses of the word, it also shattered Panikkar. And he continued to be appointed to various public posts after that, which is another great measure.

RAJAGOPALAN: He did well in some of them.

BASU: He did well in some of them.

RAJAGOPALAN: He did a pretty good job in Egypt and things like that.

BASU: In fact, after all of this, after this whole refusing to mention the border in 1952, he’s sent back again, 1954, for a little while.

RAJAGOPALAN: I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I would count that as a mistake.

BASU: My point being that Nehru really—well, I don’t know if stood by his man is the right thing in this context. 

RAJAGOPALAN: No, but I think that’s fair that you’re accountable for the actions of your cabinet and your government. As head of government, this is what you’re supposed to do, and that’s fair enough.

BASU: Like I said, Panikkar continues to be appointed to several public posts thereafter. If you look through the archives, you can see a prime minister who is clearly still very annoyed with Panikkar, but concedes to the fact that Panikkar is a mind that cannot be discounted, especially in a postcolonial world.

Panikkar and the 1950s

RAJAGOPALAN: In this postcolonial world, there’s an interesting thing going on. One is there’s this big impetus to free yourself from the imperial past and say we’re the separate sovereign nation. All of that is fine. Yet all their actions are as if they are British civil servants. Their point of view, the way they approach the world, a lot of it comes from that. This is something I find fascinating about that entire group. I think it’s quite remarkable that in one sense, India’s founding fathers didn’t have malice towards the British by the end of all of it.

It’s quite exceptional. That is not the case in most countries that have this big freedom movement. Yet the byproduct of that is you continue behaving as if you are part of this big empire when actually you have a very different set of interests and you need to very quickly have some situational awareness of what’s going on. I don’t think they manage it quite as well in the early ’50s. Maybe they get to it later. The ’50s are just this complete disaster when it comes to foreign affairs. How do you think about Panikkar from that point of view?

BASU: I think, honestly, again, this is somebody who is present at every step of India, trying to understand itself as a postcolonial nation. In Egypt, for instance, he’s present when India is trying to form a policy towards the Middle East, which at that point is just protect Indian interests against Pakistan. He’s also present in Egypt when the Non-Aligned Movement begins assuming some kind of structural parameter. He’s very influential in bringing Nasser and Nehru together to have the first series of talks that would move towards the Non-Aligned Movement.

He’s also there during the Suez Canal nationalization, which, for him again, it’s an incredibly pivotal moment for us, and it’s an incredibly pivotal moment for Panikkar as well. Until then, his reportage on the ground and his delineating way India’s stance should be is remarkably prescient and remarkably well used also by New Delhi and Nehru. When he comes back thereafter to India, to head the States Reorganisation Commission—and I’m saying this in the sense of foreign policy also, because we are still looking to present ourselves as a cohesive entity to the outside world.

Is linguistic reorganization something that Nehru wanted? No. This is despite a very committed program from the Congress for linguistic reorganization from the 1920s onwards, but partition had changed so much, and the world had changed so much. We had just gone to our first elections, a hydrogen bomb had been dropped on Japan. The Second World War had just finished. The world had changed forever. The cost and price we paid for independence was partition, and it was incredibly bloody. It was huge.

Nehru now didn’t want to suddenly go through more internal eruptions to present a destabilized front to a world that still was assessing who we were as an independent nation. This is despite the fact that from the 1940s, right till now, mid-1950s, we had become very much a voice to be reckoned with, despite the fact that we were a colony in the 1940s. Even then, we were still a voice that was to be reckoned with. We were in the early 1950s projecting ourselves as an important voice on global conflicts, as emissaries of peace, as holders of Asian solidarity, all of that.

I think therefore, Panikkar’s role in all of this, whether it’s in Cairo, whether it’s as the head of the States Reorganisation Commission, and whether it’s in France later on, which is his last ambassadorial posting, all of it is to present India as a geopolitical power that is to be reckoned with. Apart from his diplomacy, he is continuing to write. I think that his writing on foreign policy is intellectual contribution to us and our projection as an independent entity on a global stage. Those two things are key contributors in his diplomatic effort in presenting us as a package to a postcolonial world.

Panikkar’s Thought vs. His Government Work

RAJAGOPALAN: The reason I find this so interesting is if you go back to something very important in Panikkar’s resume, which is a survey of Indian history, now, that is a decidedly different type of historical narration of who we are relative to other historians. Because other historians were typically commissioned by the monarchs. It’s a long list of who ruled where and how, who won which war and who fought, and whatever, martyred themselves.

This is a very bottom-up history in one sense. His history is really coming from culture, from religion, from language, how it is that people think about themselves and how these societies have transformed over a very long period of time as a civilization.

Now it almost feels like Panikkar is a little bit schizophrenic in his writings versus his government work. In his government work, it’s exactly the opposite of what he’s doing. He’s repackaging India as this very, “we were once upon a time X, and then we were a subject of the empire, and now we are the sovereign nation.” The sovereign nation has to be packaged in a particular way, almost a historical way, if I may say that.

There’s no description of culture, religion, and language. We’re going to look like we’re nice, British civil servants and officers in front of the Western world who package one of the largest and most populous countries in the world. It’s such a jarring difference when I read your book. What I think about is Panikkar’s own views and what he actually does in his diplomatic work; it just seems so contrary.

BASU: I struggled with it in the sense that when you’re writing in 2025 and you’re reading it in 2025, it’s almost like we’ve forgotten that there was a time when you could be conservative/traditionalist without being ultra-militant or muscular about a certain point of view. While Panikkar wrote history very much from an Indian perspective, it was driven a lot by identity. It was driven a lot by this quest for what does it mean to be Indian? What does it mean to be India? The idea of India was such an evolving idea at that point, and you see the evolution of this idea in all of his writing.

When it comes to his diplomatic work, particularly with the princely states, I think some of his writing reflects what he’s doing on the ground, which is that, okay, princely states need to be part of a modern Indian union, and they need to take democratization and constitutional reform into account. Otherwise, they’re going to perish. 

As far as our projection as a geostrategic presence is concerned, I find it also incredibly prescient because his work, even if it’s foreign policy, it’s always grounded in history. It’s always grounded in our historical presence, our geographical presence. He is remarkably prescient about how we need to project ourselves post the Second World War. In fact, his most influential tract on maritime policy is written in 1943. We’re still a colony. The world is at war, yet he’s written this tract in the aftermath of watching the Japanese transform into this military juggernaut storming the Pacific, storming Singapore. They have arrived at the doorstep of India in the northeast.

His takeaway from that is, we declined as a power, particularly in the peninsular region, when we lost control of the oceans in the 16th century. His idea of that is that cannot be the way going forward. You need to build up your naval presence and your naval power. You need to supplement it with air power because now he’s seen what happened also with Japan’s advance, and with the advance of air power, is that the Himalayas are no longer the huge natural barrier that they have historically been. You need to supplement your naval power with air power.

You need to build bases, forward bases across regions like Singapore, Sri Lanka, Mauritius. You need to have some kind of regional order in place. Also, with powers like Australia, South Africa, Great Britain, all in important positions in that order. If you look at it from 2025 and you look at when he is writing this, it’s remarkably prescient as well, even though it is grounded incredibly in history, but he is still looking forward. When he is writing about history is where it can get problematic because, like I said, a reliance on a Greater India school of thought, which even if you adapt it to what he did, eventually calling it Further India rather than Greater India.

Then, as he got older, continuing to lean very heavily on a Hindu call around which the country could unite, this becomes problematic in a postcolonial world. It becomes problematic once transfer of power has taken place, once we are looking to establish ourselves as a power on the world stage. For me, the presentation of his historical work, that can be problematic if you read it from the point of view, particularly of 2025. There is chauvinism there, and there is a distinction, I think, which again, we forget, given that it’s 2025, that there’s a distinction between chauvinism and supremacism. Panikkar doesn’t cross over into supremacism.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, but for me, honestly, I definitely didn’t interpret his work as the supremacist view from the 2025 lens, this very macho nationalist view. Nor did I think of it very much as chauvinism.

BASU: Right.

RAJAGOPALAN: I thought of it more as, hey, we need to reclaim who tells our stories. There is a benign version of that also, which is not chauvinistic version. It is, if we don’t tell our stories, who will? Is the way I thought about it. If the view is, “Hey, we need to tell our stories and we need to tell our stories from the point of view of the people and not who ruled us,” because there’s a very interesting motley crew that has come in and out of India, depending on which decade and century you pick.

Now, if the idea is that we get to tell our stories, then I guess, how does that land or sit well with someone who’s a diplomat where a big part of the job is, “We need to craft our story in a way that’s palatable to everyone else,” as opposed to how do we tell our stories and how do we view ourselves? Do you know what I mean? To me, that seems to be the central point of tension that I see in his postcolonial career.

BASU: It is a central point of tension in that these are two strands that go together. One, when you are talking about Further India, like I said, it erases certain communities, it erases certain classes, which, as a diplomat in a Cold War world, you should be more cognizant of when you are phrasing an argument. I think there, it is chauvinism. It is also, we are telling our story from our perspective. This is who we are. Our core is a Hindu one. We have long united around this culture. It has never been an exclusivist culture. It has always been a very all-encompassing philosophy/way of life.

I think both can go hand in hand. I think one layer of it was very important, where you do need to tell the Indian story to the rest of the world. This was a project that was in motion since the early 20th century with many Indian nationalists telling their version of what the Indian story should be and trying to remind the world that, “Look, we’ve been here for millennia and we have contributed too much across Southeast Asia,” but it assumes a different context when you are speaking in the aftermath of the transfer of power, I feel. I think he could have phrased his words a little better in the aftermath of that.

Panikkar’s Blind Spots

RAJAGOPALAN: That would again be judging him from today’s lens on both counts, both his writing and his words. The other question I have is, is he a closet communist? I have to ask. I’ll tell you why I’m asking. His early years, this Oxford Majlis business. He’s quite fascinated by many radical ideologies. Economics is one among many. Like every young person, he dabbles in different things. He reads, he grows, he changes his mind, and that’s fine.

It’s one thing to be fascinated by this at a conceptual level, but it’s another thing to view China right after the revolution, and deeply admire the people who birthed this revolution and want to birth this communist state. That is a very muscular communist state. That is not the cute movement in Travancore. That is serious business. It’s so different, and yet he admires that so much.

Is he really this closet communist who tempered all of that stuff because it doesn’t quite work in the Indian situation, especially when India was an imperial colony and he’s trying to negotiate with different interests, but actually, really, truly, he’s communist? Or is it just that he’s the person for whom it depends on each individual. He hugely admires Mao. He might not admire the next communist who he encountered. Who is this guy, really? I can’t put my finger on that part of it.

BASU: Honestly, he had a couple of blind spots in him, which I also as his biographer, could not for the life of me understand. There is this definite, almost school girlish crush situation happening as far as the communist leaders are concerned. You can see it jumping out in his descriptions of them.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s crazy.

BASU: It is slightly nuts. 

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s not like his other writing at all, which is so much more tempered and measured. He’s a very good writer. This is not a naive amateur who encounters his first diplomatic mission and is writing fan girl letters—do you know what I mean? It’s so weird.

BASU: Yes. It was very strange because nothing about him has suggested that he was an ardent communist, but this sense of Asian solidarity, civilization history, we must unite. Together, our future is one. It’s almost naive when you look back at it today. Honestly, his descriptions of Zhou Enlai and Mao were a little hilarious to read because it’s remarkable.

This and his Zionist tendencies are traits that I genuinely don’t understand because, like you said, this was not his first rodeo in any sense of the word. He was a remarkable historian. He had seen the fallout of two world wars by this point. He had seen a national movement taking place. He had seen transnational imperialism. There was very little that, by this point, Panikkar had not seen.

When you look at this, because even the flirtation with Zionism was not a flirtation, it was an active support all of the movement right to the end of his public career. You couldn’t even dismiss it as, he was young and he flirted with the cause of Zionism. This, as well as his representations of what was happening as far as communist China was concerned, are blind spots in his personality that, look, even as a biographer, I don’t understand, and therefore I’ve presented the facts as they were because there’s no way you can understand it.

Once you actively look at the body of work that he wrote and once you look at how erudite this man was, how very progressive and prescient he was on so many scores, there are just some things that you don’t understand and that do not, especially in current context, sit well with you as a biographer. I think these two were two examples of them.  

RAJAGOPALAN: The Zionist tendencies, I’m able to somehow track that a little bit better in the sense that if you take the idea of this, we are going to take, not a few decades or a couple of centuries old version of who we are, we’re going to take this very long view, which now automatically includes where did people originally come from, what they think is their motherland and their home, and where they think is their holy place and so on.

Again, I’m not defending it one way or another, but I can still see, based on his writing on India, that he might extend that to another culture, which may logically end up in Zionism. I can see that thread a little bit more neatly. The communist thread, I can’t see at all, because on the one hand, he’s warning us against the excesses of Stalinism and things like that, and he’s very much toned down. On the other hand, it’s like this very Pollyanna-ish view of what’s happening in China.

That, I have a slightly greater trouble with the whole thing. Again, we’re looking at all of this from today’s lens, which is so complicated. At that time, the sands are shifting. Even the Zionists of that time and the communists of that time didn’t quite imagine that anything like what’s happening today with China and Israel and all is how it would’ve ended up. Maybe we cut him some slack and leave his little bit of mystery to him.

BASU: Yes, because, like I said, as far as China was concerned, if he gets a very bad rep as far as that’s concerned because the whole burden of history and historical blame is laid on his shoulders, and while yes, he does have a large role to play there, I just felt that once you look at archival material in chronological order, and you put it really well when you say the sands were shifting all the time because the sands were shifting and often far too fast for anyone to keep balance. I think that blame has to be shared equally among all the stakeholders. There were many stakeholders on the ground at this point.

RAJAGOPALAN: Starting with, they should have sent someone to China who was actually fluent in Chinese. Let’s just start with that. It’s a little bit remarkable that for a country which is so obsessed with its linguistic diversity and sovereignty, we didn’t imagine that it would be useful to send people who actually knew the language. There was a lot of Chinese trade in India. There were a lot of people who actually knew Chinese fluently, so it wasn’t this crazy ask. We could have done it, but we made this crazy, bizarre choice, almost.

Panikkar and Today’s India

One last question before I let you go, and I know this is a very unfair question to a biographer. What do you think Panikkar would make of India today if he were to view it? The way I think about how he would think about it is, on the one hand, it is so obviously a success that no one expected. India has managed to stay united, which was a very big deal for him right from the ’20s. India has actually managed to stay sovereign. It’s not devolved into other kinds of constitutional crises and messes and coups and things like that.

It’s managed to keep whatever the original constitutional soul was largely intact. This is especially looking at the neighbors. You look at Pakistan and Bangladesh and China and everyone else, and you can see this massive drift even from their original ambition. On that margin, I feel like you would have said, “Hey, two cheers, maybe not three.” On the other hand, a lot of the things that he warned about have also played out and come to bear. How would he really view the world we’re in today?

BASU: I think, honestly, what you said makes a lot of sense because certain tenets and pillars of our republic have held true. I think certain others stand in danger of crumbling. I think for Panikkar, that would have been a real point of concern. His main thrust was always on unity. His main thrust was always on projecting yourself as a power to contend with. He was able to do that even when we were a colony. I think in these respects, he would feel a little bit let down. I want to be confident enough to say that.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I think what happened in Manipur would have horrified him, for instance. That kind of sectarian violence which couldn’t be contained by a strong state. Those are the sorts of things I think, oh, we couldn’t solve this with diplomacy. We couldn’t solve this with a strong center. We just couldn’t solve it at all, and we let go. Like that kind of stuff, I think, the Punjab insurgency, these things would have horrified him.

BASU: All of this would have horrified him for sure. Any communal officials would also have appalled him. He was never somebody who believed in any of that. He didn’t believe that we could progress unless we were cohesively united. I think that that’s something that he would have been slightly appalled by.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, this was incredible read. It’s a long book. I have to tell the readers, but it’s actually a very quick read, I have to say. When I first got the manuscript, I saw like 800 and something pages. I was telling Narayani how it took a while to load on my Kindle. I must have read it in two, three sittings, it went really fast. It’s absolutely fascinating and just so much detail about not just him, but the time that he lived in, and the problems that he was confronting, about which we actually don’t know that much. The making of India is not like a birthing moment at the stroke of a midnight hour. Even though that’s a very ceremonial and charming in terms of its timing, it’s actually a decades-long process. I think that’s crystal clear in your book; it just comes out so well.

BASU: Thank you.

RAJAGOPALAN: Congratulations on the book. It was a joy to read.

BASU: Thank you so much, Shruti.