Abstract
The conclusion of Keynes’s evidence to the Hilton Young Commission on Indian Currency (1926) marked a temporary suspension of his formal links with India which had been forged over the preceding decades of his work on Indian monetary issues. The subsequent period until the outbreak of the Second World War was comparatively quiescent and uneventful in terms of Keynes’s association with India which was limited to sporadic contacts with a select few personalities like Sir Basil Blackett and Sir George Schuster, both Finance Members of the Government of India, and Malcolm Darling of the Indian Civil Service or occasional correspondence with former pupils like B. P. Adarkar and L. K. Jha. Superficially, India would seem to have virtually faded from Keynes’s economic consciousness during the thirties, judging from the absence of any public pronouncements on Indian economic affairs and as confirmed by the recollections of some of his closest pupils and associates at Cambridge during the thirties. Thus Polly Hill recalls: ‘from 1933, when I got to know him well, I do not remember JMK ever referring to India. And am I not right in thinking that he had few Indian friends in Cambridge in the 1930s?’ (letter to the author 1 May 1987). These recollections find an uncanny echo in other communications.
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‘In the matter of … India’s rights … Keynes rendered valuable assistance and guidance.’ Sir Chintaman Deshmukh
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Notes
Lorie Tarshis in Symposium on ‘Keynes as Seen by his Students in the Thirties’ in Keynes, Cambridge and the General Theory, (ed.) Don Patinkin and J. Clark Leith, (Macmillan, London, 1977), pp. 48–9.
Sir George Schuster, Private Work and Public Causes, A Personal Record, 1881–1978 (Cowbridge, D. Brown and Sons, Glamorgan, Wales, 1979), p. 100.
Sir James Grigg, in his autobiography Prejudice and Judgement (Jonathan Cape, London, 1956), p. 297.
As remarked by Grigg during the discussion in the Indian Central Legislative Assembly on the appointment of Gregory. Cited by D. H. Butani, ‘The Quality and Perspective of Indian Economic Thought’, Indian Journal of Economics, January 1942, Conference Number 86, Vol. XXII, Part III, p. 280.
Roger Middleton, Towards the Managed Economy: Keynes, the Treasury, and the Fiscal Policy Debate of the 1930’s (Methuen, London, 1985).
H. C. Coombs (ex-Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia), Trial Balance (Macmillan Co. of Australia, Melbourne, 1981), p. 11.
R. S. Sayers, Financial Policy 1939–1945 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1956), p. 260, footnote 2.
C. D. Deshmukh, The Course of My Life, (Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1974), p. 120.
Joseph Gold, ‘The Multilateral System of Payments: Keynes, Convertibility and the International Monetary Fund, Articles of Agreement’. (International Monetary Fund, Washington DC., August 1981), p. 15.
C. D. Deshmukh, The Course of My Life (Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1974), p. 128.
Dr B. K. Madan, ‘Echoes of Bretton Woods’, Finance and Development, June 1969, Vol. 2, 1969, p. 33.
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© 1989 Anand Chandavarkar
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Chandavarkar, A. (1989). To Bretton Woods and Savannah: The Longest Journey. In: Keynes and India. Keynesian Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374775_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374775_6
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