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
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Notes
Alan Ross, Ranji (Prince of Cricketers) (Collins, London, 1983), p. 41.
Salman Khurshid, At Home in India, A Restatement of Indian Muslims, (Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1986), p. 27. The author is a grandson of Dr Zakir Hussain.
J. M. Keynes, ‘Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924’, in Memorials of Alfred Marshall, (ed.) A. C. Pigou (Macmillan, London, 1925) p. 53.
Sir Atul Chatterjee, ‘Obituary: Jahangir Cooverjee Coyajee’, Economic Journal, Vol. 53, No. 212, December 1943, p. 454.
Joan Robinson, ‘Teaching Economics: A Passage to India’, Collected Economic Papers, Vol. III (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1965), p. 1.
L. P. Wilkinson, Kingsmen of a Century, 1873–1972 (King’s College, Cambridge, 1981), p. 222.
It [King’s] had a special aura about it and King’s always gave the impression of having been, like the twelve chosen’, Raymond Leppard, in My Oxford and My Cambridge, edited by Ann Thwaite and Ronald Mayman (Taplinger Publishing Company, New York, 1979), p. 309.
Frank Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru (A Biography) (Macmillan, New York, 1956), p. 42.
Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography (London, Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 48.
See Richard Deacon, The Cambridge Apostles (Farrar, Straus, and Geraux, New York, 1986), p. 38.
See Noel Annan’s review of The Red and the Blue: Intelligence, Treason, and the Universities by Andrew Sinclair (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), in Observer, 15 June 1986, p. 24.
G. C. Harcourt, ‘A Man for All Systems: Talking with Kenneth Boulding’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Vol. VI, No. 1, Fall, 1983, p. 147.
Walter Salant, ‘Keynes as Seen by his Students in the 1930s’ in Don Patinkin and J. Clark Leith, Keynes, Cambridge, and the General Theory (Macmillan, London, 1977), p. 44.
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© 1989 Anand Chandavarkar
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Chandavarkar, A. (1989). Keynes: The Guru. In: Keynes and India. Keynesian Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374775_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374775_8
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