Abstract
In 1957, John Burdon Sanderson (JBS) Haldane (1892–1964), the world’s leading population geneticist, committed political radical and one of the three ‘founders’ of neo-Darwinian ‘Modern Synthesis’ of twentieth century biology (Sarkar 1995; Haldane 1932; Cain 2009; Smocovitis 1996), ostentatiously renounced both his British citizenship and his prestigious chair at University College London. In a decisively and very public anti-imperial gesture, ostensibly played out as a reaction to the Suez crisis (although his discontent was simmering for quite some time), Haldane, and his partner, geneticist Helen Spurway (1917–1977), turned their backs on Britain and set off to India to offer their considerable scientific prestige, their inexhaustible organisational abilities, along with their leading Journal of Genetics, behind the efforts to build a ‘modern’, democratic India emerging out of the ashes of colonial rule. Haldane’s support of independent India was a major triumph for the new state, itself in the midst of negotiating a fine balance between rapid modernization through science and technology and an postcolonial respect for traditional ‘non-Western’ values. Although his time in India was short, Haldane’s few years in India were marked by a frenzied engagement with the new India, its science, its government and its culture (Rao 2013).
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Notes
Haldane had taken the chair in 1933.
In this paper, I concentrate mostly on J. B. S. Haldane and less so on Helen Spurway. Spurway’s contributions to the shift in modern population biology, and especially her long role in independent India, has yet to be studied in any depth.
Haldane’s sister, the renowned poet and scholar Naomi Mitchison, identified the key problem with this work. ‘He [Clark] doesn’t really find himself interested in anything except making a dramatic book which, indeed, he has done. I think he has taken a lot of trouble about the science part (but had three pages from John Godfrey – syaing [sic] he got it wrong) but he is essentially a writer of, he hopes, best selling books.’ (N. Mitchison to Helen Spurway, 25 October 1967; Helen Spurway Correspondence, Scottish National Library, MS20643.146a).
Again, the remarkable exceptions are the work of Dronamraju and Veena Rao.
His official reason for quitting turned on a long history of ‘broken promises’ by the University administration (see letter to University of London Senate, 23 July 1957 (Haldane Collection, Wellcome Library) regarding the Senate conferring the status of Professor Emeritus. As a parting shot, he pointed out to the University Senate: ‘The ISI ... has a higher standard of research and teaching than ... Oxford, Cambridge or McGill.’). His biographers point to Helen Spurway’s recent incarceration for disorderly conduct.
Haldane’s various visits to India, including his visit as part of a Royal Society / British Council delegation, are documented in the ‘Visits to India’ file of the Haldane papers (UCL: Haldane/5/7/5). Haldane was invited again in 1953. See the June 1953 correspondence with Mahalanobis including Mahalanobis’s invitation to the ISI (JBS Haldane Papers, UCL). For the statistical pilgrims, see Mahalanobis (1964) and Rau (2009). These scientific pilgrimages from Europe to India have yet to be fully explored.
The ISI was taken as a model when the first institute of statistics was set up in the United States by Gertrude Cox (see Ghosh 1994).
Here we might want to resist such monochromatic stories of hegemony, as propagated by certain resonances left over from the Foucaultian school of ‘biopolitics’.
Haldane took up the editorship from Punnett in 1946. The negotiations over moving the Journal to India are discussed in several letters to P. C. Mahalanobis, e.g. 16 January 1957 (Indian Statistical Institute Papers, 0_30_543FHaldaneD55P1).
As early as his second year at ISI, Haldane and Spurway were already in deep conflict with their colleagues and the Director. An argument over curtains for their apartment would blow up into a suggestion that they move off-site (P. C. Mahalanobis to Helen Spurway, 9 October 1958; ISI Archives 0-20_542FHaldaneD64P1). By October of 1958, Mahalanobis’s patience was already worn out, and he was complaining that Haldane had a ‘certain lack of balance of mind which is alarming in a scientist of his eminence’ (letter from PCM, 10 October 1958; ISI Archives 0_33_543BHlandaneD35P-15). Mahalanobis would later accuse Haldane of colonialism and ‘white man’s burden’ (23 October 1960; ISI Archives 0_35-543HaldaneD97p1-4).
The dispute between Haldane and ISI became a political hot potato, forcing the Congress government to initiate a governmental probe into the matter. The unpublished detailed records of this probe, and the ensuing correspondence, are kept in the National Archives of India, in a special file at the Mahalanobis Papers at the ISI, and the Haldane Papers at National Library of Scotland. Helen Spurway’s own account is to be found in a letter to Professor L. Gallien, University of Paris (15 April 1961): ‘This place is entirely under the whim of its Director. He has since WWII been entirely in politics—very sympathetic politics—he considers, very rightly, that the few scientists of an underdeveloped country have an enormous duty to play a part in planning its development. However he has not faced up to the personal consequence of dropping out of active science. This has led to rather ugly results. He will do anything to preserve his international contacts and reputation, including the offering of, at least financially excellent, possibilities of work here. I think we could have continued here indefinitely if Haldane had been content to accept favours. However he has continually annoyed by asking what his duties and rights were in the Institute, and even more by considering that facilities given to him were to be shared by his Indian colleagues! Haldane is most angered by the way in which the habit of the Director of starting projects which he can talk about abroad rather than carrying them to completion, and his arbitrary changing of plans when he loses interest, not only without informing them of the change, he has made a complete lie of the prospectus with which we have recruited students for our new university courses.’ (Helen Spurway correspondence, National Library of Scotland MS20643.109-10).
Haldane to Mahalanobis, 24 October 1957 (ISI Archives 0_29_543BHaldaneD43).
For a similar view see Keller (2002). For Haldane’s new concentration on ‘variation’, see his letter to Professor Ronald Good, 8 November 1962: ‘I am more interested in the moment in variation, particularly in parts of the same plant’ Haldane Papers, National Library of Scotland, MS20545.45), and to Eliot Spiess, 17 December 1962 (loc. cit. MS20545.97).
The question of the phenomenology of the subject/object relation was later addressed in his ‘Science and Indian culture’: ‘Personally I try not to use apparatus at all, and to get my junior colleagues to work with as little as possible. One reason for this is a moral one. The use of complicated apparatus separates scientists who use it from ordinary men who use such simple machines as ploughs and potters’ wheels ... I am not a consistent Gandhian, but I certainly think that Indian scientific research would be better for adopting a few Gandhian principles, one of which is to regard machines as made to serve men, and never to think of men as made to serve machines.’ (Quoted in Dronamraju 1985, pp. 175–176).
For example, in his response to a review by H. J. Muller of Peter Medawar’s recent book, The future of man (Medawar 1961 critique of eugenics), where Medawar claims that ‘variation was good’, Haldane responds with ‘a plague on both your houses’ and refers to the paper on rice by his Indian colleague S. K. Roy that shows that ‘an approach somewhere between Muller’s and Medawar’s is efficient’ (letter to Elizabeth Meinger, Managing Editor of the Chicago Perpsectives in Biology and Medicine, 15 February 1961; Haldane Papers, National Library of Scotland MS20541.57) (see Mazumdar 1991).
See the pointed critique of Haldane’s view of Indian science and his emphasis on ‘natural history’ rather than large-scale integrated laboratory science, in Brahmachary (2014).
Recollections of Spurway, often negative, can be found in Bhargava (2014). For the later years, see the Helen Spurway papers, National Library of Scotland. As mentioned in the introduction to this paper, Helen Spurway deserves a detailed study of her own.
And, in a more general sense, it resists the unilinear accounts of the development of science. In the words of historian Sharon Kingsland: ‘The modern synthesis followed a somewhat different course in different national contexts. These national differences were largely the result of differences in the institutional context of science, the economic resources available to evolutionary biologists, and the different developmental paths followed by biological disciplines in different countries. The synthesis of course has no conceptual essence, but represents an evolving dialogue played over several decades across several disciplines, with individual views changing over time’ (Kingsland 2003, p. 423).
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Mcouat, G. J. B. S. Haldane’s passage to India: reconfiguring science. J Genet 96, 845–852 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-017-0829-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-017-0829-0