Dharma Kumar : A Great Scholar And An Eminent Economist

 Dharma Kumar : A Great Scholar  And An Eminent Economist 

‘She was outgoing, garrulous and reveled in admiration. She was not the kind of woman I usually fell for.  Her features were passable; she used no make-up or perfume. It was her animation which I found irresistible. Her legs and hands were never still. Her eyes sparkled as she spoke. Come to think of it, the only reason she responded to my overtures was that she was overwhelmed by my adoration. It was an entirely one-sided affair. I dedicated my second novel Nightingale to her, but I don’t think she bothered to read it. Women like Dharma did not die; they faded out of memory like a lost dream”. These words have been written by famous English writer and journalist Khushwant Sing. He had written this at the time of praying the tribute to such a scholar who was an eminent economist and Liberal, Dharma Kumar who was India’s leading Economic and Editor of Indian Economic and Social History review. She had written three books like Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras, Land, Politics and Trade in south Asia and Colonialism, Property and the State. She had also written many essays on Politics, Liberal and Secularism.

From Yogesh Gogwekar

Dharma Kumar was born in March 1928 in progressive Tamil Brahmin family in Lahore, Punjab (Now in Pakistan).  Her father K Venkataraman was a famous Chemist. Her uncle K S Sanjivi was a doctor of great vision. He was also the Professor of Madras Medical College and founder of Voluntary Health services. Her uncle was K Swaminathan, a Professor of English language at Presidency college who later on became an editor of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. All three brothers have been honored by awarding India’s third highest Civilian award Padma Bhushan. Even though she spent her part of childhood in Lahore, she grew up in Mumbai and did her schooling in J B Petit High School. Her performance in the matriculation exam was excellent. She received a new sari from her mother for her best performance in the matriculation exam. After her matriculation, she joined Elphinstone College, Mumbai. At the time of feeling the form for college admission, she had written the word atheist in the religion column. This was the good quality of her precocious free-thinker and rebel. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Economics and went to Cambridge to get her Master’s degree in Economics. She joined Newnham College.

Dharma Kumar returned to India in 1948 and joined the Reserve Bank of India where she worked for nearly ten years. She was not satisfied with her work in RBI; therefore, she started taking much more interest in the social and intellectual life of Mumbai. She started running an art circle and wrote about the Dance performances especially about Shanta Rao who was a notable dancer and exponent of Bharatanatyam and also knew about Kathakali and Kuchipudi. She was also writing about economics in the Economic Weekly and formed the forum for young scholars to speak about their work. While doing this, she met India’s first Rhodes Scholar and Chemical technologist Lovraj Kumar and married him. Lovraj was from UP and working with Burmah-Shell in Mumbai. She did not like Lovraj’ s working in Burmah-Shell as she considered such jobs are nothing but taking orders from White bosses . She always felt that people doing such jobs were becoming boxwallah.  Therefore, Lovraj decided to leave the job and joined the government and subsequently became a senior bureaucrat and started serving as secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum.  They were blessed with one daughter named as Radha Kumar who was one of the three interlocutors who travelled in Kashmir to bring peace and wrote a book on Kashmir issue.

In 1960, Dharma Kumar decided to leave the job in RBI and went to Cambridge to do the PhD in Economic history. She published her thesis under the title Land and Cast in South India under the Cambridge University Press and her thesis was awarded the Ellen MacArthur Prize for the best dissertation of the year. In this book, she mentioned institutional changes under British Rule in the beginning of the nineteen century which includes population shifts, distribution and use of land, social and economic status of labour. While writing this, she had given some statistical evidence to prove the factors which led to landlessness. She blamed British Rule as well as the Cast system for such happenings. According to historian Ramchandra Guha, “Land and Cast in South India were ground-making in its methods and in its conclusions. In particular, it demolished the myth, then prevalent among the nationalist and Marxists alike, the British Rule had destroyed the organic village community of precolonial India and created a polarized society of landowners and labourers”. This is rightly said as Dharma Kumar said in her book that, “It is highly unlikely therefore that agricultural labour was a quantitatively insignificant group at the time when British rule began”.

After completing her PhD in Economic history, she came back to India and joined the Delhi School of Economics and became the founding member of an academic journal titled as Indian Economic and Social History review. During her Delhi life, she started taking an active part in the arts and literary life of Delhi. It is being said that she had been portrayed as the character of Professor ILA Chattopadhyay in Vikram Seth’s book Suitable boy. She was also writing in the Civil Lines Magazine. She has written many essays on social and economic history in the 70s and 80s and the same have been incorporated in the book Colonialism, property and the state. In these books, she had considered her essays regarding landownership and inequality, essays on forgotten service sectors, exploration of the idea of private property in pre-colonial South India, brief information about taxation policies of Colonial rules in India, best analysis of Indian states and governments in modern times. This is the great book to read. 

Dharma Kumar along with Meghnad Desai edited the second volume of the Cambridge Economic History of India which covers the period from 1757 to 1970 in which thirty historians and scholars had written the essays. At the time of appreciating her work, intellectual Fritz L Lehmann has said that ”fascinating though the contemporary struggle for economic development may be, the real strength of this book is in its analysis of the colonial economy”. He further stated that,” the work as a whole is surprisingly readable, which must be taken not only as a credit to the individual authors but to the hard work of the editors. They have not imposed any artificial unity of approach or treatment on the authors but have let each one make his or her judgments, one of the strengths of this excellent book”.

Dharma Kumar’s writing on agrarian structure and the regional economy were very interesting for readers to read and to know the variation in land revenue regimes, in the status of agricultural labourers in the cultivation and its social arrangements.  Apart from her writings, she had taken deep interest in the teaching of the students. According to historian Ramchandra Guha, “she never liked to teach to the large classes in Delhi schools and also to exam oriented students. She was more effective with a smaller group. She took great care over her doctorate students by giving them access to her extensive personal library, rewriting drafts sometimes, and raising funds for their research and consoling them in times of personal crisis”.

Dharma Kumar was a true liberal and always opposed the fundamentalist and extremists of all kinds. She was the first person who publicly protested against the decision of the Government of India to ban Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Even she criticized the act of demolition of Babari Masjid and also the riots of Sikh Community in 1984. Such a great lady died on 19^th October 2001 due to Brain Tumour. As Khushwant Singh rightly said that, “It is hard for me to accept the fact that Dharma was mortal. I will not see Dharma any more. She may not have cared for me but I will cherish her memory for the years left to me”.

Students of economics should read all her writing under social and economic history.

Mumbai

31/01/2021