In the summer of 1978, the historian Radha Champakalakshmi proposed to the Epigraphical Society of India that the Soviet Indologist Nikita Gurov be invited to deliver a special lecture at the society’s forthcoming session. She was member of the society’s executive committee. Some senior members were opposed to the proposal. Gurov was acknowledged as a major scholar of Dravidian studies, but what disturbed the said members was his theory that the Harappan script, which has remained an enigma a century after it came to light, was in fact Dravidian. They were willing to allow Gurov to present a paper at the session, but a special lecture was out of question. All the same, they knew that Champakalakshmi was what she was; she would have her way when the matter came up for discussion in the executive committee meeting. A few hours before the meeting, a leading member of the executive committee and a renowned historian and epigraphist informed her in person that the meeting was postponed to the following morning. The next morning, when Champakalakshmi reached the venue, she learnt that the committee had already met the previous evening as originally scheduled. The member in question told her that several others had expressed inconvenience about the changed schedule and that he had no means to inform her of this last-minute decision.
Champakalakshmi could see through the scheme. This was by all counts an affront to her dignity which she wouldn’t take lightly. She decided to resign from the society. A mere resignation wouldn’t do, for it would only end up as an item on the agenda of the next meeting, where the members present would “respect” her decision and approve the resignation. She wanted to let all members – some 250 at the time – know why she had resigned. She drafted a lengthy letter addressed to the secretary, made 250 cyclostyle copies, and prepared the envelopes for dispatch, writing the addresses on all envelopes in her own hand. But before she could send the envelopes to the post office, communication came from the administration of her university that the historian who had slighted her was nominated as external examiner of the MPhil thesis that one of her best students had written under her supervision. To go ahead with her decision, she thought, might place the student in a hazardous situation (although the said historian is never reported to have harmed a student’s interests). She placed the student’s career before her self-esteem, and with her own hands tore into bits one envelope after another, transferring them to the dustbin.
Such was Champakalakshmi, the human being. She always looked at her students the way a mother looks at her child: kind, caring, ruthless, exacting. It was not for nothing that her old student, now a doyen among early medieval historians of South India, wrote on his Facebook wall on January 29, 2024: “Rest in Peace, my mother (you did not bear me, though)!” Champakalakshmi passed away the previous night. She was 92. She was, even so, as intellectually incisive and engaged as she was in the summer of 1976. With her demise, an era in South Indian historiography comes to an end.
Champakalakshmi began her career in history with a richly documented study of the Vaishnava iconography in Tamil Nadu, which she wrote in the mid-1950s as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Madras. She was already redoubtable as a researcher at the time, encouraging her supervisor T.V. Mahalingam to assign her and a fellow scholar D. Devakunjari the task of preparing the index for his 1955 book, South Indian Polity, which was the final word on the history of south Indian statecraft for nearly two decades, until the works of Y. Subbarayalu and Burton Stein upset the apple cart. Champakalakshmi taught at her alma mater from 1959 to 1972, when she joined the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, as associate professor of ancient history.
In the 25 years that she taught in JNU, she trained some of the finest historians of South India, most notably Vijaya Ramaswamy, Kesavan Veluthat, K.N. Ganesh and Rajan Gurukkal. She was demanding as a mentor, but gave her students all freedom to evolve academically in their own right. Veluthat, Ganesh and Gurukkal went with Marxism, an intellectual tradition to which Champakalakshmi was deeply sympathetic but didn’t embrace herself. The three students differed from one another in their persuasion, Veluthat endorsing political determinism, Ganesh social determinism, and Gurukkal economic determinism. On the other hand, the mentor encouraged Ramaswamy to not only take a non-Marxist position, but also make a powerful critique of an important Marxist position in Indian history-writing, viz., Irfan Habib’s thesis on peasant unrest in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Champakalakshmi was not prolific as a historian. Only in 1981 did her quarter-century-old PhD thesis appear as a monograph. This work, which didn’t have the theoretical finesse noticed in her later writings, continues to be the best study yet on the problem it examines. Her major contributions to South Indian historiography were in the form of research papers, many of them long enough to be little monographs in their own right. In these writings, she came out as a Weberian, foregrounding issues of ideology and legitimation. Weber was largely unknown to Indian historiography until the early 1970s. He began to make a mark in a big way in this decade when in their writings, Romila Thapar, Hermann Kulke, M.G.S. Narayanan and Kesavan Veluthat began to discuss the question of political legitimation. The fascination for Weber came partly from the Emergency of 1975 and partly from JNU’s active participation in the “early state” research initiative of Henry J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik in which legitimation was a major theoretical concern.
In a trailblazing 1978 paper on the “bhakti movement” in Tamil Nadu, Narayanan and Veluthat had confronted a long historiography on devotional conventions in India, which regarded bhakti as either an individual’s unqualified surrender to the divine or as a protest against power and orthodoxy. The duo argued, provocatively, that the Shaiva (Nayanar) and Vaishnava (Alvar) bhakti of Tamil Nadu was a state-sponsored ideological initiative that served to legitimize political power in the Pallava, Chola, Chera and Pandya realms. For all its rough edges as a pioneering statement of the thesis, the paper made waves, and was widely discussed, endorsed, restated and contested.
It was Champakalakshmi who developed the thesis in empirically grounded and theoretically nuanced ways. She picked up for examination the claim which Narayanan and Veluthat had made about the nature of the geographical spread of bhakti by plotting its course on a map. She argued that bhakti had arisen as a protest movement which the state soon appropriated. Her studies on economic processes, especially trade and urbanisation, presented temple-centred bhakti as an ideology that determined the course of urbanization in Tamil Nadu. The temple was the great legitimiser. “The acts of validation,” she wrote in a paper on Kanchipuram and its hinterlands, “mainly centred round the temple, its construction, participation in gift-giving and ritual activity in a ranked hierarchy.” Her approach to architecture and iconography was no different; she posited that the spread of Vaishnava concepts led to the making of sculptural traditions among the Pallavas and Pandyas in determinate ways. Whether it was the suggestion that the Tamil Tevaram texts created the sense of a community, or the view that royal trade policy informed the patronage extended to religious establishments, her later writings were informed invariably by the primacy of ideology over material conditions. Most of her papers were anthologised in two widely read volumes, Trade, Ideology and Urbanization (1996) and Religion, Tradition and Ideology (2011).
Her methodological preferences made Champakalakshmi’s studies rich in insights, especially when they showed, as they often did, a keen eye for mundane historical details. They presented a gripping picture of the making southern India at the complex interface of power, religion, trade, urbanisation and an expanding agrarian infrastructure. Her work showed that a theory of urbanisation in pre-colonial South Asia was perhaps incomplete without a corresponding theory of religion, statecraft and the market.
Yet, the love for the ideology-legitimation nexus often led her to look for ideologies where they might not have existed. In her assessment of the chieftaincies of the Sangam era, she regarded the tinai, floral symbolism for aspects of love and war in the early Tamil songs, as a marker of geographical and economic reality, as had several of her peers and students done. She went a step ahead to argue that two of the five tinais, the neydal (littorals) and the marudam (tracts of settled agriculture), were politically decisive, so much so that the three major Sangam chieftaincies of the time had a headquarter each in neydal and marudam. Such vanities often punctuated her work. At least on some occasions, glaring inconsistencies were seen. For instance, a chapter in Religion, Tradition and Ideology identified the Kalamukha Shaivas as representatives of “the vernacular hymnal tradition.” The preceding chapter had called them agents of “Sanskrit learning” who were opposed to the vernacular!
Champakalakshmi could at times be obstinately merciless in her criticism. In a conference held in 2009 in Kottayam, where the who’s who of Indian historians were present, she came down heavily on one of South India’s groundbreaking historians, asking him to read the text before commenting on it! The historian was a former PhD student of hers – and in my assessment, her best student ever – and the paper he presented in Kottayam was, in my judgement, the finest that was ever written on the subject. Nearly everything that he said about the subject, Sangam literature, was new and carefully thought out. “You were unfair to him,” I told her over lunch. She only smiled.
These limitations, copious as they are, scarcely overshadow Champakalakshmi’s work of vast learning and erudition. For her writings represented an era in historiography, providing an astounding gaze of historical processes in South India from the Sangam period to the fall of the Vijayanagara state. The flaws will soon be discounted, and the appeal for the legitimation theory, already on the decline among historians, will one day be forgotten. The work will remain, and will be read for generations to come. Rest in peace, Professor Champakalakshmi.
Manu V. Devadevan is Associate Professor of History at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi.