C.T. Kurien, or ‘CTK’ to all those who knew him, is no more. He had a unique career as an economist. He was a public intellectual well before this term became fashionable. But, above all, he was, for the greater part of his life, a teacher of economics, and highly influential in that role. He earned his doctorate at Stanford University in the early 1960s, at a time when very few Indians could go to the world’s best departments of economics. There, Kurien was in contact with a pre-eminent economic theorist of the time, Kenneth Arrow. A rare exposure to top-flight academic economics gave him a visible confidence, though Kurien was conspicuously devoid of intellectual arrogance. Detaching himself from the seductions of a life lived in California, a move difficult to imagine for Indians of the present generation, Kurien returned to teach at his alma mater, the Madras Christian College. He was to remain there for nearly two decades, growing a noted department of economics in India.
An academic trajectory
Kurien was fearlessly critical of the economic orthodoxy of the time but did not wear this stance on his sleeve. Instead, by example, he nudged his students towards a holistic understanding of the economy as a site where economics and politics interacted to produce the societal outcomes we observe. Though he may have appeared somewhat aloof and forbidding of manner to young people, he never refused to engage with students. As may be imagined, a serious academic interest was far from present in the colleges of India when he taught, with students more interested in the spectacle of public debate. Interestingly, Kurien was as good at this as he was in the classroom, easily holding his own against the leading economists of the world in his time.
Apart from his early work, which was a critique of what in the economics literature is referred to as neo-classical general equilibrium analysis, he engaged with empirical work in diverse fields. There was macroeconomic analysis in his work, ‘Indian Economic Crisis’, published in the late 1960s and microeconomic analysis in his book ‘The dynamics of rural transformation in Tamilnadu’, which appeared in the 1980s. The latter was adopted by the Indian Council of Social Science Research as a prototype for studies of the rural economy across India. These significant academic projects apart, Kurien provided commentary on the Indian economy continuously. The last stop in his career was as the director of the Madras Institute of Development Studies when, in the late 1970s, he launched one of the first regional social science research institutes of the country. Arguably, he was a little less successful here than as a professor of economics, possibly because the position required maintaining an interface with the government not to mention constant self-promotion, a role that he evidently rejected.
C.T. Kurien was a model social scientist — astute, engaged and grounded — pursuing the truth unmindful of praise or blame and unmoved by success or failure. Above all, he served his country as a practising economist. Those who may see him as their role model would find that it is a difficult act to follow.
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Published - July 25, 2024 12:04 am IST
