Forgotten seer

J.C. Kumarappa and Gandhi’s Struggle for Economic Justice, Venu Madhav Govindu & Deepak Malghan ; oxford university press, Rs.895; Pages 388 India’s national movement was special because it possessed social, economic and environmental dimensions in addition to the political goal of independence. And special among its participants was Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa, born in 1892 into a talented family of Tamil Christians close to India’s southernmost tip, in Palayamkottai.  In Public Finance and India’s Poverty, his Master’s thesis at New York’s Columbia University, Kumarappa wrote in 1928, that the State not only had to curb the profligacy of individuals, it had to limit the danger that wasteful use of resources “may entail on the coming generations”. In that same year, a man Kumarappa was yet to know, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, wrote in his journal Young India (December 20, 1928): “God forbid that India should take to industrialisation after the manner of the West. The economic impact of one single tiny island kingdom today is keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of three hundred million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” Obviously fated to meet, the two did so on May 30, 1929 in Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. Some days after this meeting, Joseph, wearing a three-piece suit, arrived at a khadi bhandar in Mumbai’s Kalbadevi district and asked to be measured for a dhoti. Told by a salesman that dhotis came in fixed lengths, Kumarappa ordered six dhotis of recommended size as also six kurtas and Gandhi caps. Thus equipped, he returned to Ahmedabad to teach at Gujarat Vidyapith, the national university started by Gandhi in 1920.  Govindu and Malghan tell us the riveting story of the life of Kumarappa, who died in 1960. Joseph’s father Solomon was the eldest son of the Rev. John Cornelius who preached in an Anglican church in Madurai; in earlier times the family had been Roman Catholic. By the year of Joseph’s birth, the family was part of a flourishing class of Anglicized Tamil Christians enjoying “firm roots in the colonial administration”.  Joseph’s first career was in accountancy. From 1913 to 1919 he was in England, where he became a partner in a firm of chartered accountants and called himself J.C. Cornelius, Esq. In 1927, after a successful career in Mumbai as partner in the firm of Cornelius and Davar, he sailed for the US. Graduating from Syracuse University (in business administration) at age 35, he moved to Columbia University, where he read and shared Thorstein Veblen’s critique of middle-class consumerism, The Theory of the Leisure Class, and worked with E.R.A. Seligman, one of America’s front-rank economists of the period.  Seligman considered Joseph’s Master’s thesis Public Finance and India’s Poverty ‘an unusually able essay’. Kumarappa pointed out that while servicing of debts, the military and the administration took 49 percent of US revenue in 1925-6, in colonial India these expenditures used up 94 percent of the revenue, leaving nothing for public works. Returning to…