Daniel Thorner Memorial Lectures

Daniel Thorner Memorial Lectures

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Author: Alice Thorner
Publisher: Tulika
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 279
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185229465

Description

The ten lectures in memory of Daniel Thorner comprising this volume were delivered in various cities in India over a period of sixteen years from 1985 to 2001. Besides an introductory essay by Utsa Patnaik, the volume also includes a hitherto unpublished paper by Daniel Thorner.

Instituted after his death in 1974, and sponsored by the Indian Statistical Institute, this continuing lecture series reflects the breadth of Thorner’s own range of interests: from themes in the social sciences to issues in the fields of public policy and human rights. Besides an introductory essays by Utsa Patnaik, the volume also includes a hitherto unpublished paper by Danied Thorner, written in his student days.

As a student, Danied Thorner did not set out to become a specialist on India; nor did he consider himself an economist. Yet, paradoxically, this is how he is remembered in India. His intellectual career, which began as that of a historian, followed a logical and ever widening path that led him from studying British economic and social relations with India, to researching the agrarian structure and economic development of India. Indeed, most of his publications in the 1950s and 60s could be so interpreted as to place him in the category of ‘Indian economists’.

Daniel Thorner began his research on India in 1939-40, when he went to England from the US on a fellowship. In London, he came to know several Indian students—P N Haksar and K T Chandy, among others—who were dedicated to the cause of freeing their country from imperialist rule. Soon Thorner too developed a deep commitment to the cause of Indian nationalism, and his interest in India ceased to be purely academic.

Extensive tours and field visit to remote villages marked the course of Daniel Thorner’s sustained engagement with India. He widened his understanding of this country’s social, economic and political complexity through exchanges with leading scholars and public figures, through acquaintance with administrators and journalists, and through involvement in everyday urban and rural existence. Thorner’s longest stint in India was between 1953 and 1960, when he lost his US passport because he refused to provide names of fellow academics who could be charged with ‘un-American’ beliefs or activities, to a US Senate Committee. Thorner stayed back, waiting for the storm of intolerance to blow over—a wait that extended to seven years.

In 1960 Daniel and Alice Thorner flew to Paris, where he was invited as visiting Professor to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. He was soon elected to a chair in the Ecole where he remained until 1974

Contents

Preface
Introduction

The Royal Titles Bill of 1876

The Agrarian Question and Development of Capitalism in India

Paper Laws

Land and Labor in India: The Demographic Factor

Famine Mortality

Colonialism and Environment in India: A Comparative Perspective

Human Rights and International Solidarity

Disinherited Peasant, Disadvantaged Workers: A Gender Perspective on Land and
Livelihood

Land Reforms and the Question of Food in Kerala

De-industrialization

Lost Visions? Imagining a National Culture in the 1950s

Thorner Memorial Lectures
Index