Keynes: The Guru

Abstract

Keynes’s Indian connections were much more than purely intellectual and academic. In fact, the human facets of Keynes’s personality as a teacher and mentor are perhaps nowhere better exemplified than by his sustained interest in and constructive empathy for Indian students, who at least in his lifetime were the largest single foreign national group in statu pupillari at Cambridge. Keynes had varied contacts with Indian students, academic and social, at Cambridge as an undergraduate and Fellow of King’s, as President of the Cambridge Union, as Secretary of the Cambridge University Free Trade Association, as a frequent guest speaker at the Cambridge Majlis (the Indian students’ society), as founder of the Political Economy Club, and as University lecturer in economics. His service at India Office had served as an invaluable introduction not only to Indian economic affairs but also to the strength and sensitivities of Indian nationalism during the eventful period following the High Noon of Empire (1905–10) which witnessed the upsurge of Indian nationalism following Curzon’s partition of Bengal (1905) and the rise of the Swadeshi (Buy Indian) movement.

‘He was not merely a very great man, he was a very good man also.’ James Meade

‘he was magnificently generous … to his country … to servants and dependents, particularly to his less fortunate friends … his supreme virtue was his deeply affectionate nature.’ Clive Bell