Ajit Singh of Cambridge and Chandigarh: An intellectual biography of the radical sikh economist Authors: Ashwani Saith (Book Review by Sunanda Sen)

Book Review by Sunanda Sen

On a  legendary scholar from India and Abroad

As indicated by its title, the book relates to the life and  work of the rather unconventional scholar Ajit Singh (1940- 2015) who led the battle for heterodox economics and left politics  in the West  while  continuing to proudly  uphold his other identity as a Sikh from Punjab, India . The reader of this very special book will get a comprehensive account, not only of the life’s journey  of Ajit Singh which started in an upper  middle class family in Punjab, but also his remarkable  contributions in several areas of meaningful research concerning  both advanced and the developing areas. As can be  noticed, Ajit, from the beginning of his career as an economist, chose  areas of  research which were never of an arm-chair variety. Instead the policy prescriptions that followed from his work raised issues on socially acceptable  policies, at the level of private firms, corporate houses, the financial markets and state-run agencies.

The areas of research covered by Ajit Singh, detailed in a comprehensive curriculum vitae completed in 2014, just a year before he died, mentions that his  “publications relate to three distinct but related research areas”. The  reader can get an idea of those areas and papers from the CV which is attached to the book.

Leaving out the details, the first category in the list include 92 papers, on  “Modern Business Enterprise, Finance and Governance, Theory of Firm, Takeovers and Stock markets”, relating to both advanced and emerging markets. The second group includes a set of 89 papers on “De-industrialisation, North-South Competition, Employment, Liberalisation and Globalisation of Financial, Labour and Product Markets”. As in the first set, the papers relate to countries in both the North and the South. Interestingly, three of those papers , co-authored  with A. Sheng, are on Islamic Finance, a completely new area of research which caught his attention when he visited Malaysia as an invited professor around 2011. Ajit includes77 papers in a third category of his  research under “Industrialisation, Economic Development and Policy in Emerging Markets”.

The book offers a set of well-crafted ten chapters, starting from his early years of grooming in Chandigarh  as a combative young man ready to face the world. Ajit’s capacity to withstand adversities had its first test  as he arrived in the US  without any financial support. Talent as well as capacity for hard work helped Ajit to get suitable openings, moving from  Berkley to Cambridge where a lifetime of work was waiting  for him.

The chapter “Cambridge: Home from Home” touches on Ajit’s associations with streams of bright young people from India who, in those days, were regularly visiting  Cambridge as students or in other  positions. Cambridge was also the ground for Ajit turning radical while supporting student rights in Cambridge, or the anti-Vietnam War rallies in London with Tariq Ali. The author recalls the morning after the fall of Saigon, with Ajit  “..coming up the few steps (at Sidgewick site) grinning, with Suzy (Paine, a faculty comrade) holding up a national daily with the front page splattered with huge banner headlines  announcing the fall of Saigon …”!( p70) What else could be  more appropriate to capture the involvement of Ajit with the Vietnam War in the small  university town of Cambridge !! I recall our reactions at JNU sharing the moment!

Ajit, after joining Cambridge faculty in 1975 assumed a big role in upholding  the heterodox school of thought  against neoclassical methods. This was a battle against faculty members, as pointed out by Amiya Bagchi, “   who wanted to  mathematize economics into pure theory without content …   a battle over the soul of the Faculty of Economics and Politics which was not about the use of mathematics in economics but whether economics would be based on empirical evidence or not”.[i]  Involved in what was not just a battle of ideas, Ajit , described by the author as “ Commissar of the Left collective”, was ready to  openly dissent and confront.

Several members of the faculty were opposed to members of Ajit’s camp in the Department which shared Keynesian, post-Keynesian, Marxist and other heterodox ideas in their  research and teaching. As described in the book, “..Cambridge economics was rendered acephalous: …idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, personalities, egos and individual intellectual passions of wilful prima donnas resurfaced and took over” (p87). Institutional attacks, supported from outside by the Tory government, played a role in crushing the Department of Applied Economics (DAE), the last bastion of heterodoxy  controlled by the Left.[ii]   The detailed  account of the inter-personal rivalry, as described  in the chapter appropriately titled  as “Faculty Wars”, provides a picture of how reputed centres of scholarship (like the Cambridge economics faculty) could degenerate to triviality. Many a place in India and abroad have or are going through this process; with neo-classical victory robbing their earlier stance  and capacity to generate useful research for theory and policy. Often  the courses   following  neo-classical guidelines  tally  with those offered in the majority of US Universities—a fact which works to lure the students to the package as a passport to admissions in the latter. In my judgement the procedure, by all means,  stands opposed to what could be rated as of social relevance in different parts of the world.

It, however, remains to be seen whether the rather ugly and unfair “Faculty War” led to a total loss if judged in terms of continuing the heterodox tradition. The author points to the lasting power of the heterodox group in it capacity to re-assemble by continuing with the heterodox ideas its members believed in. The notable developments included the formation of the Cambridge Political Economy Society and the launch of the Cambridge Economic Journal, very soon a major heterodox journal; the coming together of a small and effective circle of the heterodox researchers in the Judge Institute of Business; and also the continued research in and teaching of development economics by a few within the faculty who chose to struggle. In all, the neoclassical triumph within the faculty did not succeed in decimating the heterodox tradition, in Cambridge or outside.

The idea that  “..For Ajit there was no separation between economics and politics; inverting Lenin’s aphorism, his economics was concentrated politics “ (p176),  brings us to the longest chapter of the book, spanning almost 100 pages in which the author aptly recollects Ajit Singh’s  main contributions in economics. Attention is drawn to  the evolution of his ideas from his firm-level studies relating to advanced economies in the 1970s to an entry into the broader theme of Kaldorian ‘reverse de-industrialisation’.  Initially relating to Britain  and other advanced economies at end of the ‘golden age of capitalism’, Ajit’s ideas touch similar situations in  the developing countries typically faced by an absence of the “growth-accumulation-industrialisation” axis. It is in the latter context that Ajit took an active interest in advising Mexico and Tanzania during the 1980s and also in writing on other developing countries. The latter included an account of China’s success story under the Deng regime of transiting  from ‘a command economy to a socialist commodity economy’ (p224). Ajit clubbed India with China for implementing reforms at a  pace which was ‘gradual’ rather than one following the ‘big bang’ path advocated by the Bretton Woods Institutions. The point made, however, does not tally with the launch of the sweeping reforms in  India in the year 1991 and the steady dismantling of controls thereafter. Ajit’s papers also relied on the Rosa Luxembourg thesis relating to the need for export markets to explain China’s  strategy of  industrialisation  and export. The author, however, points to the infeasibility of export-led growth under globalisation when the strategy is followed by too many countries—a question Ajit did not want to grapple with.

Ajit’s papers on development issues also include two papers on the structural changes in India, co-authored with a former student working at ILO.  With the share of services in GDP far exceeding those of industry or agriculture in India,  an argument was put forth that growth can be service-led. Neither Ajit nor the author enter the debates on the merit of the suggestion that services, led by Finance, Real Estate  and Business Processing (FINREBs), failed to offer opportunities for employment  and increase in demand which could generate overall growth in India.

Looking back, Ajit’s writings, questioning the neo-classical paradigm of market efficiency in financial sectors loaded with stock markets and critiques of the so-called virtue in takeovers and corporate mergers, constitute, in my opinion,  his major contribution to economic policy. That for industry, credit from banks could be rated superior to equity-driven finance, both for the advanced  as well as the developing regions, was probably the most powerful message left by Ajit. While his writings do not touch on the post-Keynesian themes of financialisation  and the Minskian uncertainty related crises, his research brings to the surface the discord between dominant finance in the face of stagnating  industry, with the steady opening of financial markets . The argument, as Ajit possibly would have held, is similar to what Kaldor, ‘the apostle of rapid industrialisation’ ( p 193) recommended for the newly industrialising countries.

The contributions of Ajit Singh in economics left a legacy for further research as well policy making. That he chose not to participate in the trans-Atlantic capital theory debates possibly had its trade-off in terms of the alternate path he tracked very fruitfully. Continuing with hard work and putting up with the debilitating illness borne over 35 long  years, Ajit remained a pleasant, sociable and most generous character, for friends who knew him.

The intellectual biography of Ajit, documented in the book, will go a long way as a record of the challenge to mainstream neo-classical doctrines and policies which was led by an economist from Chandigarh and Cambridge.

(Sunanda Sen is former Professor of Economics, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University)

[i] Amiya Bagchi,”The Practical Economist” Frontline,  December 20, 2019.

[ii] Ibid.

About the Author

Ashwani Saith is Emeritus Professor at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Netherlands. He has held positions at the Delhi School of Economics; Faculty of Economics, Cambridge University, where he took his PhD; Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University; and at the London School of Economics where he was the first Chair of Development Studies and Director of its Development Studies Institute. He has served on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals, and published extensively on the political economy of development and on economic history.

Table of contents (10 chapters)

• The Early Years: Forging the Imaginary
• Washington, First Stop: Sikhism, Racism and Steel
• Berkeley, The Launch Pad
• Cambridge: Home from Home
• Faculty Wars