Celebrating ScholarshipSuchandra Ghosh IRREVERENT HISTORY: ESSAYS FOR M.G.S. NARAYANAN Edited by Kesavan Veluthat and Donald R. Davis, Jr. Primus Books, New Delhi, 2014, pp. 315, Rs. 1195.00 VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 10 October 2015 The editors of Irreverent History begin the preface by stating
that ‘the present work celebrates the life and scholarship of
Professor Muttayil Govindamenon Sankara Narayanan’. Indeed
one of the most celebrated historians of India is offered a bouquet
of sixteen essays by scholars, many of them his students. This
tribute to MGS as he is popularly known, actually celebrates introspective
readings of the past which MGS always stood for. Those
who are acquainted with his work know about his absolute commitment
to historical method. His statements are always buttressed by
solid evidence and his command over the different genre of sources is
amazing. While reviewing MGS Narayanan’s masterpiece Perumals
of Kerala: Brahmin Oligarchy and Ritual Monarchy—Political and Social
Conditions of Kerala Under the Cera Perumals of Makotai (c. AD
800–AD 1124 ), Rajan Gurakkal commented that this book was a
mine of new knowledge enabling other studies. His book could also
be a model for writing regional history as most of the times while
writing regional history authors’ own sentiment overpowers the rationality
of writing from hard evidence. MGS’s book was ‘regional
history at its best, written without any sentiments of regionalism,
and placing Kerala within the larger context of south India’ as Kesavan
Veluthat puts it. Why the book is called Irreverent History is clear
from the opening essay which is written by Kesavan Veluthat, one of
his senior students.
The volume is justifiably divided into two sections, one exclusively
on Kerala History and Culture and the other on Epigraphy,
Connected history and Conceptual frameworks dealing with the Indian
subcontinent in general. The preface by the editors provides a
crucial overview of the admirable range the essays in this volume
offer.
As mentioned earlier the introductory essay by Veluthat first
illuminates us on the use of the word ‘Irreverent’ for Narayanan and
then places his contributions in the historiographical context of
Kerala. Veluthat’s choice of the word ‘irreverent’ emanates from
Narayanan’s own attitude to earlier writings on the history of Kerala
which he dissected and finally rejected. He respected only his sources
and nothing else.
The first section with six essays shows how Narayanan’s own
opus enabled other studies. To begin with we have Cristophe Vielle
whose essay ‘How did Parasurama Come to Raise Kerala?’ traces the
historical processes by which the myth of Parasurama became intimately
associated with the creation of Kerala from the ... Table of Contents >> |