Uncategorized – The Red Earth

In Memoriam: Paniker sir

By Gayatri Devi

(forthcoming in a memorial anthology for Dr. K. Ayyappa Paniker)

I was standing in the main office on the first floor of the Institute of English in the summer of 1986 to turn in my mark list. I had just graduated with my BA in English from the Women’s College and was seeking admission to the Institute’s MA English program. The administrative office was empty; the staff must have been on a lunch break. As I was about to leave, Dr. Ayyappa Paniker, or Paniker sir, as we knew him, walked out of his ante-office and into the main office. He was the head of the department.

Entha? He asked me in Malayalam. (Literally, “What”? But discursively, “How can I help you?”).

I lifted up the copy of my mark list and said, also in Malayalam, “I am here to turn this in.”

Paniker sir walked up to me and took my mark list in his hand. He read it attentively. Then he asked me, again, in Malayalam, “Samskritham aanalle padhichathu?” (“So, I see you studied Sanskrit?”). I nodded my head. Paniker sir asked me seamlessly without lifting his head, this time in English, “What is the meaning of “idaneem”?

I stared at Paniker sir. He was waiting and looked at me. My mind went completely blank. I could not recall what “idaneem” meant in Sanskrit. I had studied Sanskrit for five years through high school, two years for Pre-Degree, and three years for BA. Ten studious years, always scoring above 90 percent, and I could not remember what “idaneem” meant.

“I don’t know what “idaneem” means,” I told Paniker sir. I was embarrassed and appalled at myself.

“Ippol,” Paniker sir told me with his twinkling smile. Of course. Now. Idaneem means “now.”

That was my first personal introduction to Paniker sir, though he was beloved in our family. Conversations with Paniker sir were always interesting and never predictable. Often you just listened, and you always learned something. He was friend, colleague and teacher to several of my aunts and uncles, and my mother. Everyone spoke of him with great respect and awe, and when my aunt Savithri used to visit from Montreal, I would accompany her when she went to visit Paniker sir at their house. I would sit there listening to them talk about anything and everything from Brazilian literature to Canadian writers to Stephen Jay Gould to Bengali novels. Paniker sir would joke when he saw us: “Savithri and Gayatri together? One of you would have been enough!” (Savithri and Gayatri both mean the same: Sun). His jokes and puns always made you laugh and put you at ease and were never malicious. Paniker sir was a polymath in my mind, though he had told us once in class, when we described someone as a “walking encyclopedia,” that “encyclopedias should not walk.”

That was not strictly speaking my first personal introduction to Paniker sir. When I was doing my BA in English at Women’s College, he had recruited my friend Sarada Muraleedharan and me to be volunteers at the All India English Teacher’s conference which was held in Trivandrum and hosted by the University of Kerala. As volunteers, we had to make sure the delegates from all across the nation knew where they were going—the conference was jointly held at the Institute, Senate Hall, and University College—and that they got fed. That whole conference was one of Paniker sir’s many prophetic and prolific efforts to connect teachers, scholars and creative writers across the country to facilitate a much-needed conversation on Indian modernity, status of English teaching, idolatry of the traditional English canon, Indian English, postcolonialism, gender issues, the geopolitics of commonwealth literature, the rise of vernacular and regional literatures, teaching of translation, literary theory and even transnational solidarity, though the term would gain currency only some three decades later. The writers who gave the keynotes that year—Raja Rao and Nissim Ezekiel—join the illustrious company of many teachers, writers and artists who visited Kerala and Kerala University under Paniker sir’s watchful tenure.

It was only natural that Paniker sir would organize an English teacher’s conference. Paniker sir was an exemplary and great English teacher, one who believed in the power of a humanities education to inspire and make real the deep well of our human imagination, so that we may nourish ourselves and each other in our times of need. Now when teachers shy away from lectures and opt instead for discussions, myself included, somewhere in my mind, I wonder whether the scholarly lecture has become a lost art. To germinate an idea, to ask a question that impacts the text and the world, to offer a personal interpretation, and then to sustain it extemporaneously for an hour with passion and intensity is not easy. Paniker sir did it every day for us, whether it was lecturing on Shakespeare’s comedies, or explaining the social tensions underlying modern British drama. There was never a wasted or superfluous word in Paniker sir’s lectures; every word was precise, perfect and needed. He was a man of the right word at the right time. His puns are a testament.

After I finished my master’s degree, in 1989, I did an year’s worth of M.Phil. work with Paniker sir before I went to the US to work on my doctorate. I didn’t complete my MPhil, but those were joyful years. Paniker sir vastly opened up my intellectual circles while I worked with him. Once, Paniker sir sent me and my friend Jayalekshmy to the home of G. Parameswaran Pillai, freedom fighter, lawyer and multifaceted personality from India’s independence and post-independence phase. Over a period of several weeks, Jaya and I systematically went through his papers and arranged them and catalogued them in a coherent form for archival use. That was my first foray into archival research. Paniker sir also sent me to SNDT Women’s University in Bombay to attend a women’s studies conference directed by Professor Shirin Kudchedkar. Women’s Studies was just beginning to be recognized as an intellectual discipline in India in the 80s, and Professor Kudchedkar was one of the first academicians to work in the area. He also made it possible for me to attend a Canadian Studies conference with Dr. Jameela Begum at M. S. University in Baroda. It was during Paniker sir’s tenure that Canadian Studies began as a research field at the Institute.

Paniker sir introduced me to the novels of the Canadian writer Margaret Laurence and helped shape the direction for my research. With Paniker sir, I worked on the novels of three Commonwealth writers: Margaret Laurence (Canada), Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai (India) and Patrick White (Australia). I had always been interested in land and landscape in literature, the power of places and cultures on stories. So that is what I started studying with Paniker sir. Under Paniker sir’s guidance, I read their novels against a framework of Sangam literature and “thinai” theory. Each week, I selected a text for discussion and then wrote about 5-7 notebook pages reflectively on any aspect of the reading that appealed to me. Then I would meet with Paniker sir for an hour and we would talk about my thoughts and ideas. It was wonderful. It was wonderful in the sense that I would spend the entire hour mostly listening to Paniker sir talk about “thinai” theory, “thinai” poetry, Akananooru, Purananooru, and the novels. However, he left brief but excellent written feedback on my notes spurring my research forward. Later, in graduate school in the US, one of my first research presentations would be a reading of Thakazhi’s novel Chemmeen and Patrick White’s Voss as Thinai novels. My professors at the University of North Dakota knew of Paniker sir when I introduced the paper describing my research with Paniker sir. Similarly, on one of my return visits to Trivandrum, when I told Paniker sir about my doctoral work, he knew of Sadegh Hedayat and his novel The Blind Owl; my dissertation advisor Michael Beard is one of the foremost scholars of Persian modernism and Hedayat. My mentorship had come full circle.

When in 1989 I received two higher education scholarships for doctoral work on the same day– Commonwealth scholarship to go to the UK, and a Rotary scholarship to go to the US—my mother called to ask Paniker sir where I should study. Paniker sir’s advice was very simple: if she wants to come back to India, he told my mother, let her accept the Commonwealth scholarship. If she does not want to return to India, let her go to the US. I went to the US, with thoughts of return, but Paniker sir was right. I stayed.

When I told Paniker sir that I was going to study in the US, sir told me to read Gary Snyder’s poems. Paniker sir was not amongst the poet-activists of Kerala, but his special recall and recommendation of Snyder, a poet deeply associated with ecopoetics and the environmental movement in the west surprised me. But there it was. That was Paniker sir’s recommendation: Gary Snyder. In a way, that was not surprising; Paniker sir’s canvas was wide. He was a poet of the human tribe and of our toils and turmoils. Even more, Paniker sir knew the direction of English studies in India and in the world: the postcolonial moment, the gender critiques, environmental humanities, textual studies, vernacular studies—he anticipated them all, and prepared his students and faculty to meet those new directions competently and confidently. I, and his other students, were indeed blessed to have studied with this great teacher.

Bio of the author: Dr. Gayatri Devi is Associate Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania, United States. She was Dr. Paniker’s student at the Institute of English from 1986-1990.

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