What are the milestones that an individual has to achieve to make their lives “well lived”? Humans have a tendency to describe a person’s life in a couple of words — she was a scientist, he was a martyr, she was a writer.

We write it down on a piece of paper, compile it in a book and call it history. But history, more often than not, is forgotten. And along with it, are the people who shaped our past, in a way, our future.

So when I googled Sardar KM Panikkar, it was evident to me that as the pages of history turned, his work had faded over the years. On deeper research, I found that these pages tried to describe him in a few words — “He was the first president of the Kerala Sahitya Academy”. But was he just another writer and an appreciator of poetics, or are we forgetting something?

A life well lived

Panikkar was born and brought up in Travancore, then a princely state in British India, to Puthillathu Parameswaran Namboodiri and Chalayil Kunjikutti Kunjamma. A multilingual writer, statesman, educationist, diplomat, journalist and independent India’s first ambassador to China, Panikkar is one of the greatest hands in shaping modern India.

After completing his education at Madras and the University of Oxford, he worked as a professor at Aligarh Muslim University and later at the University of Calcutta. Soon, he found his calling elsewhere and became the editor of the Hindustan Times in 1925.

A historian at heart, he wrote numerous books such as Malabar and the Portuguese (1929) and Malabar and the Dutch (1931). Jawaharlal Nehru recommended his book Asia and Western Domination and Krishna Menon said, “He can write a history book in half an hour which I could not........

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