To Bretton Woods and Savannah: The Longest Journey

Abstract

The conclusion of Keynes’s evidence to the Hilton Young Commission on Indian Currency (1926) marked a temporary suspension of his formal links with India which had been forged over the preceding decades of his work on Indian monetary issues. The subsequent period until the outbreak of the Second World War was comparatively quiescent and uneventful in terms of Keynes’s association with India which was limited to sporadic contacts with a select few personalities like Sir Basil Blackett and Sir George Schuster, both Finance Members of the Government of India, and Malcolm Darling of the Indian Civil Service or occasional correspondence with former pupils like B. P. Adarkar and L. K. Jha. Superficially, India would seem to have virtually faded from Keynes’s economic consciousness during the thirties, judging from the absence of any public pronouncements on Indian economic affairs and as confirmed by the recollections of some of his closest pupils and associates at Cambridge during the thirties. Thus Polly Hill recalls: ‘from 1933, when I got to know him well, I do not remember JMK ever referring to India. And am I not right in thinking that he had few Indian friends in Cambridge in the 1930s?’ (letter to the author 1 May 1987). These recollections find an uncanny echo in other communications.

‘In the matter of … India’s rights … Keynes rendered valuable assistance and guidance.’ Sir Chintaman Deshmukh