Much of Parameswaran Thankappan Nair’s work was done in times when academia was largely preoccupied with nationalist or economic history.
One October afternoon in 1955, a 21-year-old matriculate from Kerala’s Ernakulam district got off the Madras Mail at Howrah Railway Station, armed with skills in shorthand and typewriting and 20 rupees in his pocket. He found a job as a stenographer at a private firm in what was then Calcutta. Work was boring. But P Thankappan Nair, who passed away on Tuesday aged 91, was fascinated by Calcutta’s lanes, bylanes, thoroughfares and colonial architecture. He would spend hours, mostly barefoot, soaking in the sights and talking to people. Curiosity led Nairda, as he began to be fondly called in his adopted city, to scan archives, corporation records and libraries. He collected maps and newspaper clippings. Before giving in to the repeated requests of his family members to retire and return to his native place, Nair had written more than 60 critically acclaimed books and 600 articles on Calcutta’s social life, communities, roads, even the police. Most of them were drafted on his 1964-make Remington typewriter.
Much of Nair’s work was done in times when academia was largely preoccupied with nationalist or economic history. The barefoot historian, in contrast, was concerned with every aspect of the city — the origins of its name, the story of its High Court as well as the history of its eating places and watering holes. He collected oral testimonies much before they became part of the methods of the country’s professional historians. Nair’s spartan two-room house had more than 3,000 books — a collection he donated to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation in the 1990s.
Several of Nair’s accounts were contested. He did not credit Job Charnock with creating Calcutta, though he agreed that the modern city owed much to the English settler. Nair’s contention that the city’s famed Kalighat temple once stood at a site different from its current location was also disputed by some historians. However, no one doubted his scholarship. As the historian Sekhar Bandyopadhyay wrote in Calcutta, The Stormy Decades, a volume he co-edited with Tanika Sarkar, “Calcutta owes a great deal to its resident Malayali scholar”.
