Abstract
Shortly after Ajit Singh was born in Lahore in pre-Independence “British” India, his family moved to Indian Punjab where he studied economics, and encountered Manmohan Singh, to be his lifelong friend and mentor, at Panjab University, Chandigarh. Five major influences shaped his radical youthful imaginary: the uprightness and respect for justice and law imbibed from his father, a High Court judge; a deep affinity and loyalty towards the egalitarian values of the Sikh faith from his mother, a descendent of the third Sikh Guru; rigorous economics from his Cambridge-oriented teachers at university; an immersive emotional belonging to Punjab; an engagement with leftist thinking in the tumultuous political turmoil of the times; and a radical political commitment to the nationalist aspirations and development ambitions of a newly independent and resurgent India. The chapter covers the period from Ajit’s birth in 1940 till 1959, when he left for further studies in USA.
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- 1.
Pushpa had to drop out when she was married three months short of the final B.A. examinations; then two months later, her father, Dr. Harnam Singh Bawa, died; Gurbachan had planned for her to take the examinations the following year, but by then she was pregnant with Ajit and had moved from Lahore to join her husband; and subsequently she was too deep into the duties of wife and motherhood, looking after Ajit to follow through with the completion of the B.A. degree; regrettably, a familiar story for many an aspiring young girl and mother in India, even today.
- 2.
By coincidence, he would have been taught there by my maternal grand-uncle Professor C. L. (Chuni Lal) Anand who was the longest-serving Principal of Law College of Punjab University Lahore , with his remarkable tenure running from 1924 till 1947. See “PU Law College turns 144 years old”, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/PU+Law+College+turns+144+years+old.-a0317432530.
This source incorrectly gives his name as “K.C. Anand”. C. L. Anand’s granddaughter , Anjali Kumar , was later to do her Ph.D. under the supervision of Brian Reddaway , Ajit’s respected colleague and mentor in Cambridge.
- 3.
Manohar Singh Gill , personal communication, email dated 27 November 2017.
- 4.
Ajit was the eldest of four siblings: sister Parveen “Biba” (Tuli ) born 1942; brother Madan Gopal “Lali” Singh (1946–2002); and sister Ramnique “Rani” (Lall ) born 1949.
- 5.
The volume is a compilation of texts of speeches and pamphlets over the previous period. Some extracts serve to illustrate: “The Hindu nation has two languages which it should teach to every member of the race. One is an imperial language: the other is the provincial tongue. When a Hindu addresses the whole nation he uses Sanskrit : when he confines himself to his own particular Province, he employs his vernacular. … Sanskrit is the only national tongue for all India, the language of our noble religion and the tongue associated with India’s highest hopes and happiness. It is the medium of inter-communication among the various States, and it is the language of science and scholarship. It speaks to us of our common past and can furnish the only solid foundation for a genuine national movement. … I must learn Sanskrit well in order to join the ranks of the educated classes in India. No Hindu who is ignorant of Sanskrit can have any pretensions to culture” (extracts from Har Dayal 1922).
- 6.
“Other preoccupations made it impossible to learn the classical idiom like any other beginner. So, the same method was adopted as for study of statistics: to take up a specific work … [He wrote] an essay which caused every god-fearing Sanskritist to shudder, I fell into Indology, as it were, through the roof. … My judgement of the class character of Sanskrit literature has not become less harsh, but I can at least claim to have rescued over fifty poets from the total oblivion to which lovers of Sanskrit had consigned them” (Kosambi 1985). His daughter, Meera Kosambi , notes that “Kosambi’s insistence on treating Sanskrit texts and later also ancient myths as sources of data for analysing social and cultural life of their period of origin rather than as sacred words beyond analysis also led the more conservative Sanskritists in India to perceive him as an iconoclast” (Kosambi 2011, p. 510).
- 7.
Incidentally, for the record, the PGC Chandigarh to this day offers the same three-subject combination, Economics-Mathematics-Sanskrit , for the B.A. degree.
- 8.
Har Dayal’s ideas on Sanskrit as an imperial language of a new India raise difficult issues—with the conflation of Sanskrit with a Hindu nation—and need to be placed in the context of the complex specifics of his life and his vision of a future India, and not in the current sub-continental context, where conservative and cultural zealots, whether in India or in Pakistan , have striven to construct their respective “national” languages by purging any impurities which resonate with the presence of the “other”; so street Urdu and street Hindustani are reinvented in Arabicised Urdu and Sanskritised Hindi respectively on either side of the border. Sanskrit thus becomes a flag and an instrument for the new Hindutva nationalism, prompting the insightful Indian public intellectual Bhanu Pratap Mehta (2014) to stand up and speak up on behalf of the Sanskrit that was: “I am Sanskrit: My tragedy is I have to fear my supporters more than my attackers”. The language signifying “a nation” has seldom been free of political tentacles, and Sheldon Pollock (2006) has written about the interface between Sanskrit —“the language of the gods in the world of men”—culture and power in India in pre-modern times.
- 9.
One can wonder if the choice of date was intended to be a special birthday present for the modernist Prime Minister who turned 66 that day.
- 10.
The quotation is from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speech for the Inauguration of Bhakra Nangal Dam ; see the website of the Bhakra Beas Management Board, Government of India; http://bbmb.gov.in/speech.htm.
- 11.
Chandigarh: The City Beautiful—the Official Website of the Chandigarh Administration; http://chandigarh.gov.in/knowchd_gen_historical.htm.
- 12.
- 13.
The brutalist modern architecture of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh has a diametrically opposite reflection in Nek Chand Saini’s naturalist, humanist creation of his magical Rock Garden in Chandigarh . Nek Chand arrived in Chandigarh in 1951 as a road inspector and would have daily experienced the brick-by-brick rise of Le Corbusier’s city in the following years. In 1958, the year Ajit left, Nek Chand launched his own visionary project, constructed solo and in secret, using primitive tools and his own toil after office hours. He personally collected his construction materials: the rubble and malba of Corbusier’s construction would surely have provided a rich source of materials in all kind of bits and pieces, shapes and sizes, forms and colours; the waste of the one was transformed into the wonder of the other. “He had carefully observed the techniques of using concrete in building the new city, particularly the Government Centre, then under construction; his creative impulse was stimulated by the building going on around him. … Quietly, out of official gaze, on 40 acres of land reserved as a green space separating Le Corbusier’s government buildings from the city centre, Nek Chand , ‘the untutored builder’, constructed a miniature world depicting Indian village life, as well as a fantasy kingdom of palaces, pavilions … meandering paths, courtyards, waterfalls, theaters, plazas and thousands of sculptures” (Rajer, n.d.). Upon its discovery , the Chandigarh bureaucrats wanted to pull it all down; lawyers of the Bar Association of Chandigarh fought court battles to stop its expansion so as to protect their plan for a larger parking lot (Rajer ); but popular sentiment and good political sense prevailed; Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, which hosts 5000 wonderstruck visitors each day, was given official recognition and soon became iconic; he was given a staff of fifty helpers, a budget, and a national honour. And so, the two worlds coexisted, each a negation of the other, together a symbiosis of Indian tradition and modernity. Nek Chand’s is the other to the story of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh; of the other people, of the mysteries and secrets lodged in broken crockery, rejected rubble, chunks of mortar, metal shards, broken glass, leftover wood, bits of anything and everything revived and melded with nature; an essential antidote to the monolithic power of the modern city and its rich dwellers, the ecological human to industrial man. I wonder what Ajit, the socialist modernist, would have made of this parallel world next door to him.
- 14.
Shamsher Singh tells us playing bridge was one of Ajit’s hobbies in Washington ; Biba tells us Ajit played no card games in Chandigarh; but then younger sisters don’t always know what their older brothers might be up to! Most likely, Ajit picked it up when he had more time than things to do on the boat to America. The hobby certainly did not survive the next voyage to England; by then Ajit had more things to do than time.
- 15.
Pushpa was a trained vocalist, having learnt from the legendary Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan ; she also played the sitar. Biba says “my father had no interest or appreciation for music and fine arts. She generously passed on those talents to me to the annoyance of my father” (personal communication; 20 October 2018).
- 16.
Veer means brave. Ajit’s pet name in the family was Mina.
- 17.
He would probably have recommended the displaced tonga owners get a bank loan to buy and operate a bus collectively. A tonga is a horse-drawn carriage, usually seating four passengers.
- 18.
The Department of Sanskrit , one of Ajit’s three subjects, was initially housed in DAV College Jalandhar; then moved to Chandigarh (http://sanskrit.puchd.ac.in/). Mathematics, Ajit’s second subject, shifted from Lahore to Hoshiarpur in 1947, and later to the new Chandigarh campus (Bhatnagar 2014). After partition, Economics teaching was centred in Government College, Hoshiarpur under Prof. K. K. Dewett ; Prof. S. B. Rangnekar was appointed in 1951. The department was shifted subsequently to the Chandigarh campus (homepage of Department of Economics, Panjab University website: http://economics.puchd.ac.in/).
- 19.
Aziz is a respected senior friend, trusted mentor.
- 20.
Manmohan Singh taught Ajit during the last year of the B.A., and then for a short while in the first year of the M.A. in Economics for which Ajit had registered; that was when Ajit left for studies in the USA (in conversation, 17 November 2017).
- 21.
Gautam Mathur won the Adam Smith Prize at Cambridge, and his major book, Planning for Steady Growth, was published in 1965, the year Ajit joined the Cambridge faculty. Mathur’s Ph.D. was supervised by Joan Robinson who is reported to have once said that he was the “brightest student she ever had ” (Baru 2010). See also the account of P. D. Haleja , Gautam Mathur’s contemporary at Cambridge in the late 1950s, in IIDS (1993).
- 22.
B. S. Minhas (1929–2005) did his B.Sc. in Agriculture in 1949 and his M.A. in Economics in 1953, both from Panjab University (then at Hoshiarpur ), and was a lecturer in economics there, 1954–1955. He went to the USA in 1955, obtained an M.Sc. in Agricultural Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana , then shifted to Stanford where he received his Ph.D. in 1961. His first famous paper, introducing the constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) production function, better known as the “SMAC” paper, was published in 1961, and his book in 1963; both were sourced from his Ph.D. dissertation. The SMAC paper, however, was published with joint authors (Minhas being the M of SMAC); two of these co-authors—Solow (the S) and Arrow (the A) going on to win Nobel awards. The C was Chenery (Arrow et al. 1961). Cambridge (UK) had foundational theoretical objections to this neoclassical exercise, which Joan Robinson famously described as looking in a darkroom for a black cat which isn’t there. It is interesting to note that Minhas, later a member of the Planning Commission, was finishing his dissertation at Stanford , a short hop from Berkeley where Ajit had begun work on his. To my knowledge, there was no contact then or subsequently between the two.
- 23.
Hoshiar: clever, concentrated, attentive, intelligent, bright, aware, vigilant. There was more to it than just the name: Hoshiarpur in 2011 had a female literacy rate of 80, compared to 65% for India, and ranked the 10th most literate city of India.
- 24.
Manmohan Singh , in conversation, 30 November 2017.
- 25.
Shamsher Singh , personal communication, October 2015. Shamsher Singh , a leading figure in the Sikh community in Washington and the USA, is a close associate of Ajit’s family and developed a lifelong relationship with Ajit from the time he arrived in Washington in 1958.
- 26.
16 annas to one rupee.
- 27.
The references to Biba (Parveen Kaur) are from conversations and personal communications with her. I have set these down in a running transcript: “Ajit Singh (1940–2015) — The Early Years: Recollections of His Sister, Parveen ‘Biba’ Kaur, as narrated to Ashwani Saith ”, 2017.
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Saith, A. (2019). The Early Years: Forging the Imaginary. In: Ajit Singh of Cambridge and Chandigarh. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12422-9_1
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