Professor Nilakanta Sastri (1892-1975) was a great historian, not just of India but of the world. A specialist in pre-modern South Indian history, he served at the University of Madras as Professor of Indian History and Archaeology. I had the honour of meeting him on two occasions: the first time in Tokyo and the second time in Madras. On both occasions he was kind enough to answer questions and clarify doubts on Cholainscriptions, a field that I as a researcher on South Indian history was greatly interested in. My admiration and respect for him was indeed profound.
He published a large number of excellent books in his area of specialization. The Colas, his seminal work published in the 1930s, is an example of the use of historical sources for an in-depth study of a specific period of history. By contrast, his broad interest in history and issues in regional history, including of South-East Asia, is attested to by the vast collection of articles he wrote, the list of which is given in his Felicitation Volume. In fact, A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar, published in 1955, is a product of the synthesis of these two excellent qualities he had as a scholar, namely, the specialist's attention to source-driven inquiry, and the generalist's broad brush stroke-approach to history. R. Champakalakshmi and Rajan Gurukkal have published a new version of the book with revisions.
This is a collection of 34 articles that Sastri contributed to The Hindu between 1930 and 1961. They deal with a range of issues in South Indian history interesting anecdotes, the particular significance of a source and the method of studying it, information on research trends that emerged after his books were published, and so on. Also included are articles in which he has expressed his views on widely debated 'hot' issues of current concern. As a whole, therefore, these articles provide us an insight into his thoughts and research methods, perhaps more clearly than purely academic monographs, revealing aspects of his personality too.
For example, it is interesting to find in one of these articles his treatment of the bhakti-saint hagiology as a 'narrative' of that period. As Rajan Gurukkal has pointed out in his Epilogue to the new version of A History of South India that I referred to, Sastri seems to have foreseen the importance of the new trends current in historical research. He repeatedly emphasised the unity or harmony. achieved through the interaction of different cultures, even for seeing the misuse of the Tamil people's sentiment for Dravidian culture as Dravidian political nationalism. He pointed out the urgent need to develop epigraphically studies, which are currently in a crisis, and warned against the negligence of the humanities in educational administration.
At the same time, however, a bias that characterizes his academic writings appears in these essays too. Champakalakshmi has rightly pointed out in her Introduction to A History of South India that Sastri's predilection for Sanskrit far outweighs the importance he assigns to the vernacular languages, including Tamil. Some of these articles collected here regrettably reveal not only his preference for Sanskrit, but also hint at his approbation of Brahmins and the caste system. This undermines the concept of 'unity' or 'harmony' he so ardently commends.
In the assessment of Noboru Karashima, the eminent historian, there were two golden periods in South Indian historical studies. The first and foundational of the two began in the 1930s with the writings of K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, Karashima explains. Starting from 1929, Sastri wrote about 22 books and published more than 150 research papers. He is well remembered for his magnum opus, The Colas (first published in two volumes in 1935 and 1937), and the pioneering work, A History of South India (1955), which R. Cham pakalakshmi, an authority on South Indian history and urbanization in South India, considers irreplaceable even after 50 years of its publication. His copious contributions apart, by means of his profound scholarship and rigorous method Sastri set a strong base for South Indian studies and changed the course of histography. Much has been added to South Indian history since his time, and some of his views have been revised, but the consensus remains among his peers that Sastri is one of India's pre-eminent historians. He was conferred the Padma Bhushan for the year 1958.
Kallidaikurichi Aiyyavaiyer Nilakanta Sastri was a regular contributor to The Hindu ever since he came to Chennai in 1929 to take up the professorship of the Department of Indian History and Archaeology of the University of Madras. He regularly wrote articles, reviewed books and even sent long letters to the editor. The Hindu extensively covered Sastri's career and reported in detail his professional lectures. While most of his scholarly works have been published, his writings in newspapers, and other material reflecting his views on some of the important issues of his time such as the reorganization of States, have not been accessible to many readers. In this collection, 34 of his writings published in The Hindu between 1930 and 1961, including four detailed reports of his lectures and a long letter to the editor on the library classification system, are compiled for the first time.
Thematically, the articles lend themselves to being grouped into four categories. The first section is on the Tamil Sangam period, followed by writings on South Indian History and then on the Pallavas. The last section contains Sastri's views on some of the pressing issues of his time. A separate section comprising The Hindu's reports on Sastri's lectures are placed at the end. Three stand-alone articles A unique Tamil diarist (on Anandaranga Pillai), A symbol of Siva, and India, Tibet and China in antiquity are placed under the general category of History.
"The study of the modern history of South India touches us moes intimately and is to be approached, partly for this very reason, with due caution," Sastri emphasised in a lecture in 1930, This caution, demanding concrete evidence and seeking reliable resources to compile history, runs through the writings in this collection. Sastri never wanted to rely excessively on literary resources. Providing "sweeping conclusions drawn from stray facts... is a temptation that must be resisted," he wrote. For instance, commenting on the Ramayana, Sastri mentioned that "it was beautiful as poetry, ennobling as the religious record, but it was not history except in the mode and extent of its influence on the life and con duct of people." He recalled an anecdote to stress this point. When he assigned 2,000 years as the age of the Rig Veda, "a well-known statesman" asked him: why not assign 20,000 years? "Just do not have the courage..... to ignore the evidence of archaeology," Sastri replied sarcastically.
He felt the same with Tamil literature. While he acknowledged that Sangam poems were the earliest and represented the best phase of Tamil literature with "indigenous energy and strength," he was not in agreement with others who assigned an earlier date. for them. He criticised scholars who put "too much trust" on sources such as Sekizhar's Periyapuranam to fix the chronology of history. To him, the historian can be "genuinely artistic" and could make facts clear with the help of the imagination, but he or she must first be "severely scientific" to collect facts through patient investigation and close analysis. In other words, both empiricism and speculative theorising were part of a historian's task, but these have to be in that order? Sastri himself demonstrated how to go about this. As Professor Champakalakshmi points out, "Sastri's grasp of the primary sources remains unmatched," but he also had an "interpretive acumen."
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