Sd/-Project Director, Aajeevika

EPW

exchange and exchange rate policies, Plan priorities and the assumptions underlying them. When Sachin conveyed that comment to me I remember to have retorted “I agree that it is nonsense we wrote but at times it is necessary because two nonsenses make one good sense!”. Sachin always enjoyed such combative encounters amongst his contributors, anonymously or otherwise as he believed that they contributed to debunking of the h umbug, to clarity of thought and eventually to the emergence of new ideas.

Embarrassment

At times, Sachin was embarrassed by unidentified authorship of articles. Iqbal G ulati, a fine public finance specialist, asked me to review a book on central banking when he was editing EW in the absence of Sachin. I did it with a title “All a Matter of Pebble Gathering”. Sachin was upset when he read the review on his return, the author of the book being his close friend. When he met me, he said half- jokingly that I had lost him a friend by my unfriendly review. Not so similar but equally interesting was the publication in EW of a brilliant review of Sraffa’s book, Production of Commodities by Commodities by Krishna Bharadwaj. The review a ttracted Sraffa’s attention and he wrote to Sachin requesting him to let him have the address and the institu tional affiliation of Krishna Bharadwaj, thinking that she was a male. Sachin too thought likewise and asked me to find his (sic) whereabouts. Both were surprised when Krishna was an up-and-coming woman scholar with great promise. This review is now considered to be a classic and Sraffa himself ranked it as one of the two best reviews of his book. Krishna was offered a fellowship at Cambridge on the basis of the review, which marked the beginning of her remarkable career as an economic theorist of international fame.

Addas at Churchill Chambers

Sachin’s reputation as a distinguished e ditor of an unique journal was spreading like a rapid fire. For a large number of well-known economists like Arthur Lewis, Joan Robinson, N Kaldor, J R Hicks, M Kalecki, T N Swan, Donald M’Cdougall, R ichard Goodwin, Alvin Hansen, Rosenstein-Rodan, and a host of others who visited India, he was a magnet and Churchill Chambers was an inevitable stopover on their way to Delhi and Calcutta. Sachin was very hospitable in his modest way and these great social scientists did not mind legging up the creaky, dingy and unlit staircase because the conver sational feast was salivating and sui generis. Often times, some of us closely known to Sachin were the lucky ones to be his guests at these gatherings with the eminent scholars.

Friedman’s Visit

Milton Friedman visited India twice – first in 1955 under the auspices of the International Cooperation Administration, the US government’s foreign aid agency to a dvise the Indian government. During that visit, he wrote one of the most scintillating, perceptive and prophetic notes on the draft Second Five-Year Plan. Somehow he escaped Sachin’s notice or Sachin was not aware of his importance as an economist, being mesmerised by Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Goodwin – all pro-planning and of leftist persuasion. On his second visit in 1962-63 sponsored by the Council for Economic Education, a pro-business body, Friedman and his wife Rose were invited by Sachin for dinner. For whatever reasons, Sachin never mentioned this d inner to any of my friends or me. I, however, did ask Sachin if he met Friedman, but my question was drowned in his characteristic loud laughter, saying that “You know he is an American edition of our Professor B R Shenoy. Can he tell us anything different from what we know from Shenoy?”. Much later in 1998, when Milton and Rose’s memoirs, Two Lucky People was published, one paragraph on page 306 where Rose described her meeting with Sachin hit my eye.

Last night we were guests at dinner given by the editor and owner of a weekly newspaper.

We were told in advance he was a character but we weren’t told how much of one. He is unmarried – I was one woman, with seven men. When we sat down to dinner and half of the company (these are all university graduates and have been abroad) ate with their right hands… this was a little too much for me, I hope before we leave India, we feel close enough to some Indians to get an explanation of this…at the conclusion of the party, we were conducted downstairs by our host with a flashlight and almost stumbled over the sleeping bodies in the hallway.

The context is loud enough to speak that it was Sachin as a host. It still remains a puzzle why no reference was made to what transpired between Friedman and Sachin at the dinner. Perhaps they avoided discussing economics as Sachin might have heard reports about Friedman’s experience with V K R V Rao at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi around the same time. Friedman was invited there to deliver a lecture on monetary theory and policy over which Rao presided. After Friedman finished his lecture, Rao, instead of extending the normal courtesy of thanking the speaker remarked that “Professor Friedman is seductive but I want to warn the students in the audience that if you answer questions in the money exam along Friedman’s lines, you will flunk”. Arthur Lewis was right when he said at Sachin’s party that he found Indians to be smug, complacent and at times boorish.

Foreign visitors who came to see Sachin were not all economists. There was Edward Shills, an eminent sociologist from the University of Chicago who wrote a book on the Indian intellectuals. Even more significantly, there was the one and only V S Naipaul who, if my memory serves me right, wrote somewhere on his meeting with Sachin and EW. In his book, In a Free State he has immortalised Paresh, Sachin’s domestic help, who used to cook food for our bodies while we had a feast of thoughts at his famous addas.

Despite his busy schedule, Sachin had a large circle of friends – young and old, f amous and not-so-famous, wellconnected aristocracy and commoners but they all were interesting specimens, in their own ways, of the educated class. I met Sharada Mukherji, a scion of the famous Ranjit Pandit family and later a governor of Gujarat, brothers and n ephews of a great socialist leader late Achut P atwardhan,

Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

and a highly sophisticated industrialist, Sudhir Mulji, whose Oxford credentials were flaunted more than his wealth, apart from a large number of bright, young fresh graduates from the foreign universities. Sachin was a man for all seasons.

Open Mind

Like all those who live by their wits, Sachin too had his hobby horses. But he was cognizant of the limits up to which he should cling to them. Once he was convinced that some of his concepts had outlived their times, he did not hesitate to reassess and jettison them with detachment. He started with a firm belief that planning of a comprehensive nature was necessary and he made no apologies for it. But his beliefs did not become dogma. He retained due respect for other views. He did not set equation between persons and their theories but between the needs of the prevailing conditions and the theories to tackle them. Towards the end of his life when I was almost in daily contact with him, often driving him at night to Hiten’s house at Pali Hills, Bandra, he was reappraising his views on the type of planning we had between 1952 and 1965. Without offering any excuses for his earlier beliefs he thought aloud whether planning was not inadequate in an emerging situation in India.

The same could be said about his a pproach to the Nehruvian vision of India which had enamoured him in his youth. When Nehru passed away in 1964, he brought out a special number of EW on N ehru’s times. I was asked to write a piece on “Nehru and the Administration”. I had done a volte face about Nehru after India’s ignominy in war with China in 1962 and I told him that being in the RBI, I would not be able to express myself candidly. In his usual imploring voice and with a cigarette hanging from his drooping lips, he said “Make it contributed”. I wrote in that a rticle,

The Paradox of Nehru was to be sought partly in the fact that the instruments which Nehru could use for the achievement of his goals were much at variance with the requirements of his ideology. This often led to ridiculous situations in our foreign relations as well as in the implementation of economic policies.

Soon after this article was published, he visited Delhi where he was pestered by many senior officials about the authorship of the article. He of course played hooky with the questioners. He himself was in the “change mode” in regard to Nehru and his outmoded way of thinking about the Indian polity. This was reflected in his e ditorial “Miles to Go” in the first issue of EPW. “The nation can no longer” his e ditorial read “be activised by an incantation of Nehru’s ideas and Nehru’s policies. But the forces released during that era have by no means worked themselves out. The task before the country today is to free forces from the dead weight which is holding them back.” All this amply bears out Sachin’s ideological neutrality and his preference for ratiocination rather than dogma unlike several of the friends associated with him in his endeavours, thereby making his weekly, a “Republic of Letters”

– to invoke that beautiful and eloquent phrase of Naipaul, where all thoughts and feelings have equal voice.

Sachin, though moulded by Bengali Bhadralok culture and ethos remained quintessentially cosmopolitan in outlook and behaviour. After the EW folded up, many of Sachin’s Bengali friends urged him to shift the new weekly office to C alcutta but he did not succumb to their pleadings. He told many and I was one of them, that his weekly could thrive only in compassionate, cosmopolitan and collegial Bombay with its ingrained generosity than uni-cultural Calcutta.

End of Economic Weekly

In the twilight of his life with ill-health pursuing him relentlessly, he saw the Taj of his life’s achievements crumbling b efore his eyes. But his spirit was undaunted. The Sakserias were the main backers of his weekly, thanks to Hiten’s efforts and goodwill. But somehow around the mid-1965, something went amiss in his relationship with the S akserias who until then scrupulously stayed away from interfering with running the weekly. Sachin reacted in a huff to the shock and dismay of a l egion of his friends and the admirers of EW, by shutting shop. It was in the midst of the India-Pakistan war with a blackout all around that I met him at his residence when he announced the dreadful news. With that I thought like the blackout outside, the light had gone out from the country’s i ntellectual life as well.

Launch of EPW

Sachin later disclosed that he with Hiten and a few others were trying to revive EW with another name as the old name was copyrighted. It was a Herculean task, with no financial resources in sight. He mooted an idea of a charitable trust and was looking around for the ways to raise funds from well-wishers of the EW, who unfortunately were not millionaires. He told me that some of his friends, among whom Ashok Mitra was prominent, had raised around Rs 20,000 which was measly for a new venture. I was just a middle-level RBI economist but hope had no limit. I used some of my wealthy contacts like Pallonji Shapurji, Dharamsi and Ranvir Khatau and procured Rs 5,000 from each of them only on the condition that I would sign on the receipt. I knew that it was asking for trouble but devil-take-the hindmost kind of my outlook on life propelled me to sign it. I told Sachin that I stuck my neck out.

He was in low spirit then but when he heard about my dare-devilry, he suddenly stirred up from his somnolence. Months later while returning from Sachin’s Pali Hill residence with the then governor of the RBI, P C Bhattacharya, I learnt from him that Sachin appraised him about my adventures in raising funds by flouting the RBI rules. He asked me not to worry as what I did was for a good cause.

In addition, I also mobilised donations from my friends M Narasimham, V V Bhatt, Russi Karanjia of Blitz who worked with Sachin in the Free Press Journal. Fortunately, I suddenly struck a gold mine when I received a cheque of Rs 2,500 from the Life Insurance Corporation as my paid-up life insurance policy had matured, which I handed over to Sachin. Knowing my strained financial position, Sachin returned the cheque but finally took it back on my insistence. Somehow I could raise around Rs 27,000 for the Sameeksha Trust.

It is a little known fact that John P Lewis, a noted economist at the Princeton University, who wrote a famous book