Interviewees

Sean Ferguson:  This is Sean Ferguson with Dr. Nicholas Molnar.

Shanti Tangri:  A little louder.

SF:  This is Sean Ferguson with Dr. Nicholas Molnar interviewing Professor Emeritus Shanti Tangri of Rutgers.  The date is August 1, 2013.  We are in his home in Somerset, New Jersey.  Professor Tangri, if you would like, can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up? 

ST:  Obviously, I don't remember where I grew up in the first year or two.  I was born in Rawalpindi, which is in the northwest of Pakistan, and it's near the capital of Pakistan now, which is the new town called Islamabad.  I understand my parents moved from there when I was one year old. 

[They] moved to Lahore, which is about fifteen miles west of the India-Pakistan border.  When I left Lahore, it was in 1947, so [I was] nineteen years of age.  That's when Pakistan was created out of the country that used to be called India.  My first--not the first but second--to year nineteen, I grew up in Lahore. 

Then, I moved to New Delhi after a hiatus of several months, which is during the partition, or what Indians and Pakistanis refer to as the partition.  That refers to the partitioning of India into India and Pakistan, and I'll use the same terminology when I use the word partition.  Its exact date is August 15, 1947.  The two countries were created around midnight.  They had the same governor, a general, the British governor, a general, [Lord Louis Mountbatten], so he went from one to the other overnight and inaugurated both countries at the same time. 

I was in Delhi up to November 1953, so that's six years.  I had gotten to Delhi in November 1947, so from that, I was there for six years.  Then, I left and came to this country via Europe.  I took a train from Delhi to Bombay, which is an overnight trip, almost twenty-six hours.  I took a boat, a ship, which took me to Italy, and I was in Italy for a few weeks.  Then, I took a train along the coast to the South of France, then ended up in Paris for a week or so.  Then, I took a train again to the western coast of France, Calais, took a boat to Dover, England.  You're too young to remember a movie called [The White] Cliffs of Dover, or you would have seen the pictures of those cliffs that I saw.  [laughter] From there, I went to London, stayed there for a couple of weeks and went down to Brighton, south of England, and took the famous Queen Mary to New York.  It was not a luxury trip for me.  That's what my agents booked, so I didn't know any better that it was a luxury ship.  It turned out to be the last trip of the Queen.  [laughter] I think now it's parked somewhere off New York Harbor.  It took five days crossing the Atlantic. 

I stayed in New York, the YMCA [Young Men's Christian Association], for a short while.  Then, [I] took a bus trip up to Buffalo, Niagara Falls doing sightseeing, in the middle of the winter.  [laughter] It was all white.  [I] winded my way still [to] Columbia, Missouri.  I went to school there for one semester.  Then, I moved to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas for one academic year.  Two summers, I worked at a YMCA camp in Michigan, off Flint, Michigan, as a camp counselor.  The second one, they actually promoted me to be associate director, which was surprising considering I had so little experience.  Maybe I was older than most of the counselors at the time.  They were high school students or college students, and I was already in my mid-twenties.  From there, I went to the University of California in Berkeley, where I got my Ph.D. 

In between, I forgot to mention, I got a bachelor's [degree] in science, in physics and chemistry, from Punjab University.  Punjab is the name of the state, which was divided into half, West Punjab and East Punjab, West Punjab in Pakistan and East Punjab in India.  I also got a master's [degree] in economics from what was then called East Punjab University.  It was scattered all over the state, but part of it was in New Delhi.  When I graduated from there, for a year, I did odd jobs, mostly teaching part time here and there.  In about a year, I got a university job as a junior lecturer in economics, so for three years, 1950 to '53, I taught there as lecturer in economics.  Then, I left for this country. 

When I got to Berkeley in 1957, I was there for a year.  Then, I, I'm trying to remember one year or two years, I got a fellowship.  I went to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for a year as a guest of the faculty on a Ford Foundation Fellowship.  Then, I went back to Berkeley and finished my Ph.D., and I also started teaching there.  I had a lecturer's job for a year, and I was helpful in developing a new program for engineers, which was called Integrated Social Science.  It was a one-year-long program.  I was one of maybe twelve people who were involved in the designing of the program and then teaching it.  We had over three hundred students in the first semester.  I was in that program for a few years.  When I left, we had nine hundred students [laughter] in the same course.  Teaching nine hundred students in an auditorium was quite an experience.  It was very different from teaching a small class.  It worked out somehow.  [laughter] I survived it. 

I taught at San Francisco State for a year, and then I took a job at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.  I was there for a semester when I had to go home, because my mother was dying.  I was in India for almost eight or nine months.  A young woman I used to date in Berkeley, she came and joined me there, and we got married in Bombay.  So, I came back to this country and went to Southern Methodist for a semester or a year.  I forget now.  From there, I went to Wayne State University in Detroit and had a[n] honorary appointment at the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  I was there for six years and left that place to go to a joint appointment at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the Population Center, which was a research appointment.  I left there after a year. 

My wife also was working there for a while.  She had been a graduate student at the University of Michigan, which is the main reason I had taken the job at Wayne State University.  She finished her Ph.D.  We had our child there in Michigan, but soon after, about a month later, we left.  We went to Wayne State University, then North Carolina and so on. 

To cut a long story short, since then, most of my years have been spent here at Rutgers.  I came here in [1970], when Livingston [College] had just been created a year before.  I was hired to be chair of this small, almost non-existent [Economics] Department.  It had two other faculty members.  My main job was to try to develop the program, which I did.  Until 1983, I was chair off and on, because we didn't have enough senior members to be chairs.  [laughter] I got out of that when the college was more or less transformed into a residential college rather than a teaching college.  I spent several years in the integrated department here on the College Avenue Campus.  [Editor's Note: In 1969, Livingston College opened as Rutgers-New Brunswick's first coeducational undergraduate college.  The faculties of Livingston College, Rutgers College, Douglass College, University College and Cook College merged into a single entity, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), after 1981.  The autonomous college structure existed until 2006, when the undergraduate liberal arts colleges combined into the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and Cook College became the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.]  That's how I know so many people from Livingston, but I also got to know a lot of people, not only in the Economics Department of College Avenue but also Douglass College and Cook College. 

As a matter of fact, I chaired a group called the Economics Section, which consisted of all the tenured people on all the Rutgers campuses, Newark and Camden included.  It didn't have too much function, but whatever coordination and overall management was concerned, we were involved.  I was the last chairman of that group before the integrated department took over in 1983.  That's my curriculum vitae.  I retired in 1998.  All those years, I was over on College Avenue after 1983. 

My main fields were, I specialized in development economics at Berkeley.  Actually, I helped get that discipline established there; it was not considered a Ph.D. field until then.  I and a Pakistani student and a British student were the three first graduate students to take those examinations.  It was uncommon, in those days, to have that as a field any place.  Indeed, 1954 was the first year in which two major books came out which had the title development in them.  Until then, it was not a very common word.  You had courses in economic growth, which were basically macroeconomics.  Technically, it's supposed to be different, but quite often at that time, people did not distinguish between these two.  I had a specialization in both economic growth and economic development, which became my major teaching areas.  I had a secondary field called comparative systems.  That was partly sheer coincidence.  There was a course in Soviet planning in my master's program in India, which was necessary, so I had some background, where most students in America did not, [in] British history, Soviet history, economic planning and history, and Indian history, three major histories.  American history, I learned only after coming here.  When I got to work there, I looked at my sheet, and they needed somebody to teach that course.  They said, "Oh, you had it at least at the graduate level.  We don't have anybody, and four faculty members are not available."  It was an opportunity for me to teach.  [laughter] I said, "Sure, I'll teach anything."  [laughter] The professor was a specialist in Soviet economy, Gregory Grossman.  [He] happened to be very friendly.  [He] liked me.  I had a few lunches with him, so he figured maybe I was not a nincompoop.  I could handle that course.  He recommended that I be given the course, even though I was a graduate student, and so they did. 

Then, my other professor, who I had talked to and I went to Berkeley to study with, was Howard Ellis, who was a well-established name in monetary theory, even though I didn't choose it as my field.  He recommended me, so I managed to get my first full-time job in the summer of that year, 1958 or '59.  Once you get in and unless student evaluations are terrible, you have a good chance of going on.  So, I was fortunate by subsequent appointment, and then I got selected to be one of these twelve people to develop the program for social science.  In between, I spent a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT at the Center for International Studies.  It allowed me also to interact with the Harvard faculty.  I was considered a guest there also.  People were very generous and nice.  When your budget is small, even going to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club is something [laughter] you can't afford unless somebody takes you there. 

Things were much tighter back then.  My salary, for example, as TA [teaching assistant], my first full-time teaching assistantship was 1,850 dollars during the year.  When they hired me, they only offered 1,600, which I was happy to accept, [laughter] but by the time I got there, the university gave raises to everybody.  It was a substantial raise for me.  Costs were lower, and everything else was lower.  People were used to a different style of life.  I lived with two guys in a bunk bed, one upstairs-downstairs bunker, like campers do, in a tiny, tiny little room, which was about one-fourth the size of this kitchen.  I don't think any graduate student would put up with that.  [laughter] Even undergraduates don't.  I could live there for forty-two dollars a month, including rent, and this co-op in Lawrence, Kansas became substantially higher when I had to pay something like twenty-six dollars just for my room at Berkeley and then I had to pay my food bill.  It was still cheap as compared to today.  Today, the costs are much higher, and people's needs are different.  Most of us didn't have cars, and now it's rare to find a person who doesn't have a car.  I figured I owed the State of California a lot, because there was a year they only charged me ten dollars as tuition.  [laughter] That allowed me also to use the hospital for twenty-six days free of charge [when I got sick].  It was covered in health insurance.  The premium must have been a lot more than ten dollars, but they said, "Well, you're not taking any courses.  You just have to be registered as a student to finish your Ph.D., so ten dollars is all you need to do."  I figured I'm indebted to the State of California, [laughter] among others, Missouri, Kansas.  The other thing is, well, maybe I should stop and let you ask any questions you have.

SF:  Well, we did cover a large period of time, and I would actually like to go back to Lahore and ask about what types of activities you did as a kid growing up.

ST:  In Lahore, well, beginning at the beginning, my primary school was called Dev, D-E-V, Dev, it's the Sanskrit word, Dev, meaning god, small g, Samaj is association or assembly.  Ironically, I later learned that they were agnostics.  [Editor's Note: Sanskrit is the language of Hinduism and the classic literary language of India.]  They were a bunch of Hindus, and Hinduism, contrary to what most Hindus believe, Hinduism allows agnostics or atheism, both as you're being a Hindu, unlike most other religions.  Buddhism, of course, you may know, doesn't really speak about God.  Buddha didn't, and most Buddhists may or may not know what people know and what their scripture says is a different matter, generally.  Nobody tried to brainwash me or preach religion to me.  It was the absence of talking about religion which made it stand out later on, because most other schools were affiliated with some religious organization. 

In four years, my distinct, and it was walking distance from home, we didn't have buses and stuff, it may have been less than a mile's walk, the conditions of the school were by any modern standard primitive.  We had about like a foot-and-a-half wide mat made from jute or hessian and maybe twenty-feet long, and they would have rolls of it and put them out on the ground.  They didn't have enough money to make then into lawns, so they were dirt.  Some people who worked for the school, like janitors and stuff, they would put them out in the morning, roll them up on days when it was not raining, store them.  The teacher would come out.  The teacher would have a small desk and a chair, usually put under a tree, and they were not generally trained teachers.  They had not been to college, so you were lucky if some teacher was good.  In this place, they had been good teachers to me, at least what little I could judge. 

My other experience was that it was a very homogeneous group.  I didn't understand that at the time, but there was only one Muslim student out of my class of, I forget, what twenty-five or thirty.  [The school had], one, poorly-trained teachers, one, (para-modern?).  I didn't know of any Christians or Jews or Jains, or Jains maybe, but Jains and Hindus generally don't distinguish themselves from each other.  Some of my relatives were Sikhs, and it's just like you were to believe, "Oh, you're a Methodist or Episcopalian."  It may not make a great deal of difference.  [Editor's Note: Jains are followers of Jainism, a religion that broke away from Hinduism in the sixth century.  Methodist and Episcopalian are denominations of Protestant Christianity.] 

I transferred from that school to a school which was more distant.  It required walking almost two miles, and in the Indian weather, especially in the summer, that's not fun, because you can get temperatures in my hometown of 110 [degrees Fahrenheit] in the shade.  We didn't have water bottles and stuff, and there were no places on the way you can stop and drink water.  You had to learn to survive in ways all kids did, which is different.  One of my teachers was unhappy in losing me, because they also were very oriented towards grading people.  For all four years of my being in that school, in my class, in each grade, I always ranked number one.  I don't know if it went to my head, but it's good to know.  It allowed me also to save a little bit of money, because they gave me a tuition exemption, which my parents could use.  They weren't rich.  It was a small amount, five rupees maybe a month, which was a few cents, but it was worth it and the fact that I was called a scholarship holder.  The second student was this Muslim student, but he lived in a little village beyond my house, about a mile or so away.  I never went to that village.  Nobody from his family ever came.  We would walk home together, because my house was on the way, and he would sometimes come in and have a snack or a drink or something. 

That's the only Muslim I knew, except my father would bring home a friend sometimes who was a Muslim, but I never got to know his name and didn't know what he did.  This was the segregation of the communities.  All of my neighborhood was either Hindu, Sikh, Jain or something, maybe Christian, no Muslims.  [Editor's Note: Sikhs are adherents to Sikhism, a religion of India.] 

When I went to that other school, which was called Arya Samaj, that is a reform organization amongst the Hindus.  It goes back to the nineteenth century and was founded by a man called Swami Dayananda Saraswati from the same state as [Mohandas] Gandhi came from, Gujarat.  It was a very good organization in many ways.  It wanted to abolish a lot of very bad things which had crept over into different sects amongst Hindus, one of which was they did not allow widows to remarry and the worst of those features was the custom of sati, where a widow was supposed to burn herself and they claimed that she often did.  I'm convinced that was false.  That was just propaganda.  They were generally burned by others.  Many of these the British had tried to abolish, but they needed the help of Indians who were reform-minded.  One of those groups was this Hindu sect, which wanted to say that the ancient times religion based on the four sacred books called the Vedas, which means books of knowledge, that these do not have all this corrupt stuff, that you don't permit widows to remarry, you burn them, or strict observance of caste.  They believe caste was mainly a function of your occupation, so you took over the caste roll of whichever occupation you joined.  It was not something you were born into, but over the centuries, somehow it became something that you were born into.  So, then you had no way out of whatever your caste status was, and the caste system was pretty oppressive.  So, the Arya Samaj was doing good things in the sense they wanted to abolish these things, and they were against the caste system.  The other big thing they did [was] they were very active in my home state, not in every state in India.  So, beyond their own state of Gujarat, they had set up a lot of schools in my state [Punjab] and even some colleges.  This was independent of the government, totally private, and they were affiliated naturally with what they considered a pure form of Hinduism. 

The word Arya, the Nazis took it over.  They made it Aryan.  The Nazis used as an argument that it used to be a great culture until they started intermarrying with the local blacks or brown races and therefore India became poor and deteriorated.  My school had a banner right across, "Make the whole world Aryan."  It's interesting.  A friend of mine who's a distinguished physicist went to the same kind of school in the state somewhere else, and he thought it was a Nazi kind of propaganda.  So, he thought these Arya Samajes were Nazis.  I understood something totally different.  It meant make the whole world Aryan, and Aryan meant noble in Sanskrit.  Make the whole noble. 

That's consistent with my reading of Indian history, that people who came in as conquerors mostly from Caucasia or Caucasus area.  They were lighter complexioned, so when they conquered India, they pushed the dark races further and further south, called themselves noble and the other, the lower class people.  Like any other group, they tried to exploit the other.  It also meant that they were willing to have people move up, so as to make the whole world Aryan, but not to exterminate everybody else but change them into nobleman. 

They were doing good deeds.  Here were the ten principles of noblemen.  The first one was learning is your prime responsibility.  Our very, very strong emphasis in every class was you must study.  Learning is important in life.  Cleanliness is next to godliness, which is something like Christianity also had at some point.  There were things like the Ten Commandants.  I don't remember all of them.  [laughter] It had an influence.  Every day, every way, I'm getting better and better.  The whole emphasis is self-improvement and not as much emphasis on, "Hey, others should do something for me," but you've got to do something for yourself. 

That, of course, influenced me, but there were also negative elements in that.  Unlike my primary school and my secondary school, which was also run by the Arya Samaj, this one, well, I'll come to that in a minute.  I had a bad experience with a teacher, both in secondary school and in this.  In the primary school, my teacher was very unhappy that I was leaving.  I was his best student.  He started telling me some stories about the secondary school I was going to, something called the middle school.  One teacher in particular, he says, "Well, you'll be," my only education was in Urdu, which is the language of Pakistan, my mother tongue is Punjabi.  They're similar but not the same.  The middle school I was going to, there the medium of instruction was largely Hindi, so I had to make a quick switch and learn the other language fast.  What they had done was to facilitate things for people like me.  They had several sections of each grade, so the grade I was going into, the fifth grade, had one section in which people who needed to learn more Hindi could come and the others were on the fast track.  They said the guy there was an older teacher, and he said, "Oh, he's a drunkard.  He's quite often found in the gutters.  Some students and some of the fellow teachers or his family had to pull him out.  You're doing a terrible thing.  You have to walk two miles each day or learn the bicycle" and stuff.  The bicycle is not something everybody could afford at the time.  I had no choice at the moment, because my parents had decided I was going to go to the other one.  The other school had a reputation for being a very good scholarly place and more competitive than my neighborhood school.  So, I went. 

My first serious mistake in life was I talked to somebody I became friends with, and I said, "This is the guy about whom such-and-such rumors are going around."  I don't know what his answer was.  He knew or didn't know.  Well, that got to the teacher.  What I thought was a friend, a newfound friend, sort of betrayed me.  The teacher asked me in class if I said that, and I said, "Yes, I didn't say that was the truth."  I said, "That's [what] my former teacher said in that school, and I didn't quite believe it so I was checking."  He got very angry, asked me to step out, took out a ruler, hit me on my hand several times.  I went home, trying to hide my hand, which had gotten swollen.  My mother kept watching, "Why are you eating like this?  Why are you taking the food out?"  In an hour or so, it became apparent that something had happened.  When my father came home, he found out, so he got angry.  He took me to the headmaster's house, who used to be only about ten minute's walk from us.  The headmaster apologized, and he says, "It's hard to fire people in India, no matter what they do, because jobs are so difficult to get."  It used to be more difficult.  If somebody got a job, and you terminate him, it's like a death sentence.  People do everything, and friends, relatives, politicians, whoever they can get to speak with.  I don't think they fired the teacher, but he never bothered me again.  I finished that. 

In the same school, I had my most wonderful opportunity, also due to a teacher.  The teacher was in charge of the class where people who were deficient in Hindi.  He turned out to be a very Orthodox Hindu but very strongly believing in this notion of learning is your first responsibility.  He said, "Now, you are capable of doing anything anybody here [can do], so I want you to be number one again."  [laughter] I said, "I don't know if I can be number one.  I'll do my best, but I'm not concerned about whether I'm number one or number two."  He came to my home several times a week to give me private lessons.  [He came] on a bicycle a couple of miles each way, and he wouldn't accept food or stuff, maybe a cold drink or hot tea or something.  I'm trying to remember his name.  It's too bad I'm forgetting.  His last name was Dutt, D-U-T-T.  Once he gave me a pen.  He said, "Here are two pens.  One is for your final examination.  The other one is your number one competitor.  There's this young man called Mukherjee, Shankar Prasad Mukherjee.  He would be in such-and-such class if you go seek him.  He's always been number one in this school for several years.  That's your competition.  Nobody else here you have to worry about."  He insisted that I go deliver this pen.  [laughter] I said, "I feel bad about this.  [It is like I am] going to challenge somebody to a duel."  He said, "No, you've got to do it.  Maybe you lack enough drive.  You need that."  [He said], "Also, things were becoming too easy for you.  Your second in the previous school was way below what your grades were.  This guy is going to be very competitive and you'll have a hard time beating him, but I want you to try."  Now, I went and met this young man, who became a good friend incidentally.  He became a high official in the government of India.  When I left India, I went to see him.  He was in charge of the district where the Taj Mahal is.  He later joined the Foreign Service and became a high official someplace.  He was a brilliant guy, and he had much more direction than I.  He wrote [beautifully].  My handwriting was always lousy.  I should have been a doctor.  [laughter] He was flunked out for a physical exam, even though he was selected for the Indian Administrative Service, which was by examination.  So, he turned his attention to building up his physique.  In six months, he did it, went back for an exam, bastard got into the Indian Administrative Service, maybe later Foreign Service.  So, Shankar Mukherjee was a good inspiration. 

We also got to share a bench.  We had school benches in high school where two students for each bench.  The teacher would always give number-one student the first choice and number two student, so we always ended up sharing a bench for three years.  We became good friends.  His language was different than mine.  He was [from] a Bengali family.  They had migrated to the Punjab.  Mine was Punjabi, spoke Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu.  Even though our families didn't get to know each other, we lived maybe two or three miles apart, he was a good influence on me. 

The one interesting little thing that happened to me, only once in my life I outscored him in those three years.  I remember it was an essay exam in my tenth grade I think, which was the highest grade in the school.  Mukherjee got very shaken up.  He was so competitive.  [laughter] To me, this was nice, but now only it's one exam out of five different what we call papers or essays in five subjects.  I said, "If I got a few more points, what's the big deal?"  Well, he really broke down, and I'd never seen [anything like it.]  It sort of embarrassed me.  I went to the teacher, and I said, "There's a mistake in your grading."  [laughter] He said, "What mistake?"  He says, "I don't make mistakes."  I said, "Well, I think you gave me too many points here and maybe I didn't do this right."  I just wanted two or three points knocked off, and then we would either be even or I would be a little lower.  He sort of eyed me, and he says, "Why are you doing this?"  I said, "Well, because I think it's not right, and I need to get the grade I deserve."  He says, "Well, who is the judge of whether you deserve it, me or you?"  I said, "Well, obviously you, but don't I have an opinion that I can express?"  He said, "Yes, your opinion is dismissed."  Then, as we were leaving, he says, "Come out here.  Tell me the story.  What's going on?'  He said, "I've been teaching for so many years.  This has never happened.  I've never had a student come in to say, 'Lower my grade.'  So, something is wrong.  Either you're crazy or something else.  I need to know.  I don't think you're crazy.  Tell me the truth."  He says, "Well, that's one of the pleasures in the ten principals, always tell the truth."  I told him the truth.  He said, "Listen, if he broke down, that's not bad for him.  He has to grow up.  He's bright, but he also has to grow up.  He has to learn that in life sometimes he will come out second, third.  Maybe he'll go to college.  There'll be some other brighter kids.  He can't do that, and I don't think you should do what you did."  I said, "Okay, I was well intentioned, but (words?)."  He says, "Why do you think so?"  He says, "I'm not convinced that you really believe that you should be graded lower.  Therefore, it's not quite honest, even though it's well meaning, and nowhere in my book does it say that you should sacrifice honesty for the sake of something else, and [you are] doing that to please your friend.  I don't think it's a good idea."  I said, "Okay." 

My other experience, which had a life-long influence on me, the same school was called DAV High School, Lahore.  It was considered probably the best school in town.  There were maybe a lot of high schools, some run by the Muslims, some by the Christians, some by the Hindus, Hindus or Orthodox Hindus or Reform Hindus, and a government school, which was considered very high.  This teacher would have us read fiction of a popular book that had come out that year called Usha Kal, which meant dawn.  It was a historical novel about a nineteenth century, no, maybe earlier, about the rebellion by the local Hindus called Marathas in South India or Central India against the Mughal emperor.  The Marathas or sometimes called Marathis or Maharashtrians, they were led by a guerrilla leader called Shivaji, who's become an idol of Hindu right-wing people.  There's a statue of him in New Delhi, very prominent, of Shivaji on horseback.  It was like many other peasant rebellions.  They were rebelling against a distant Mughal emperor in New Delhi, exploiting local people for local landlords and stuff, but it took overtones of religion.  The rulers were mostly Muslims; the rebels were mostly Hindus.  This guy adopted that book, which turned out to be very anti-Muslim.  It was interesting, so we were all glued to it.  We looked forward to that class, and he would have a student read parts of the book and sometimes discuss it. 

One day, I went up to him, or maybe it was in the class, I asked, "Why are they saying this and this about Muslims?  Do you know any Muslims?"  I did.  I said I only knew one in my primary school.  "I don't know any Muslims."  Repeatedly, the book talks about like Hinduism is superior to all of the religions.  I said, "I don't know any other religions.  How can I believe this?  Is there anything you want me to read?  Do you have a book?  Can I get something from somewhere that I can read?"  He says, "Aren't you a Hindu."  I say, "Yes," but to me, that was a nonsequitor.  He says, "Then, why aren't you satisfied with that, that you belong to a superior religion?"  I said, "I just want to know why."  He said, "Well, go ask you parents.  Maybe your father and mother can tell you."  I asked my dad, and he said, "No, I never said it was superior."  My mother couldn't care less.  [laughter] She was born in a Sikh family and married a Hindu, and nobody forced us to go to a temple or a church or anything.  My father said he'd been to churches, he'd been to mosques, he'd been to temples, Sikh temples, Hindu temples, Jain temples.  You want to go, you go.  You don't feel like going, you don't have to. 

So, I told the teacher.  He didn't approve of my father's attitude, but he said, "Well, think about it more, and ask me more questions."  I was feeling humiliated in class, like I'm an oddball, and he makes me stand up and answer these questions.  Finally, he said, "You don't seem to learn, so I have to take you to the headmaster."  I think before that he also put me through a little bit of physical humiliation.  There used to be an old stupid custom where you ask a kid to sit down and you put your hands through your legs here and catch your ears, so in other words, you go catch your ears on the corner of the room.  Or stand up on the bench.  Everybody is sitting, and you're standing up until you are permitted to sit.  You know, you're looking over the landscape and feeling odd.  [laughter] He took me to the headmaster, thinking those punishments had not been enough to teach me what I needed to learn.  I went to the headmaster's office, and he's sitting behind a mahogany desk.  [He was] a big man, who we consider superior because we all had colored complexion and he was very light complexioned.  He had spent a year in England, gotten a master's degree in one year or two years, in English.  He was considered very high, and he [wore] a turban.  He looked very impressive.  The teacher took [me] in and was very deferential to the headmaster.  The teacher was more old-fashioned.  This guy was sort of semi-modern.  [laughter] He told the story.  He excused the teacher.  Then, he asked me, "Is that your story, or do you have a different story?"  I said, "No, that's the same story."  He says, "Do you have anything more to add than what you told the teacher?"  I said, "No, I just don't understand why I'm being punished."  I said, "Sir, do you know the answers to these things, because you've been abroad.  You must have known a lot of Christians, because I understand that's what the English are mostly."  He says, "Yes, but I don't know if we are superior in any way, our religion."  [I said], "What is it I'm doing wrong?"  He was quiet for awhile and he said, "You're not doing anything wrong, and don't stop asking questions, because that's what learning is all about and that's what you're committed to when you joined this school and that's your religion, the pursuit of truth, asking questions, questioning what you know, questioning what others know.  That's the way things should be, and that's the way things have improved."  I said, "I still don't understand why I'm being punished."  He says, "I'll speak to the teacher.  You don't need to.  I don't think you will be bothered again, but one advice.  While you should never stop asking questions, you have to know whom to ask and when to ask.  These can be very critical, so you have to use some judgment.  I'm not telling you to keep quiet.  I'm just telling you, bide your time, find the right circumstances, and how you ask the question also matters.  Your question should never imply disrespect.  It should be a straight question."  He introduced me to the notion of, you know, leading question, people want a certain answer. 

Well, that man went on to become the chancellor of the university, from a high school principal.  He was my English teacher, so I was grateful for that.  He taught me very good English.  Years later, I saw him in Ann Arbor, Michigan at a conference.  He had been elected member of the Parliament, representing the educational community.  In India, they have [these] special elections for people who are in different professional groups, architects, renowned artists, educators.  I saw him [and] went over.  He remembered me.  I was married.  I was living off campus with my wife.  [I] invited him to dinner.  He came.  We went over that incident.  He remembered that. 

There was one other incident.  He was very gracious in both.  In the other one, I violated some school rule, [laughter] and he forgave me.  He said, "Well, just don't do it again" and let me go.  I didn't like to go to prayers, and there was a way of dodging that, as there used to be a school prayer.  I and a couple of friends, we stayed behind in a room, and we skipped room to room as somebody would come to check.  He caught me.  [laughter] I told him them also, "I don't like this business, and I don't believe in much of the stuff that is said there.  Why do you guys force us to do it?"  He said, "Ah, that's beyond me.  It's the policy of the school system.  I have to implement it."  When I was in Ann Arbor, he said, "Next time you have a sabbatical, you have to come to my university.  This is also your home university, and I will arrange for everything.  Just send me a letter or a telegram or a call, and I'll take care of all the beauracratic hassles and you'll be our guest," which is what happened.  I spent almost a year at the Punjab University.  I didn't have to pay a penny for residence, meals, everything, except the telephone system, which never worked.  It was the government of the Punjab State which has my money still.  They never gave me back my deposit.  [laughter] The telephone didn't work for even a single day.  [laughter] Well, that's my academic career in this country.  Well, back in India, there were other things that happened, which were part of my education, informal education.  Where do you want me to go?  [laughter]

SF:  You mentioned a few interim months between.

ST:  My what?

SF:  There were some interim months between your time in Lahore and Delhi.  What happened in that time in 1947?

ST:  Between Lahore and?

SF:  New Delhi.

ST:  And New Delhi, oh, yes.  Well, that's probably the most painful period in my life.  [laughter] In the summer of 1947, or even before, I forget the dates now, the whole subcontinent was in turmoil, much more so in the north than in the south, the tensions between the Muslims and non-Muslims, which is the two main divisions, which continue to this day.  It's not Muslims against Hindus.  It's Muslims against everybody else, which is probably the way it's happening as I see the world today.  I see Islam against the Jews, Islam against the Hindus, Islam against the Jains, Islam against the Christians.  You choose your country, and you find that Islam, if there is Islam there, it's in conflict with the other groups. 

(Harme Blum?) may say that is a jaundiced view.  There is another way of looking at it, which Markowitz can tell you my position.  He has it on his blog, unlike that Princeton professor [insert name], what's his name, who talks about the conflict of cultures, Christianity against Islam, and I don't agree with him.  It's not Christianity against Islam; it's Islam against everybody.  The problem is that all other religions have undergone some reformation in the last thousand years or so.  You have Christianity being in the lead.  [It] went from Catholicism to various different groups challenging the official doctrine, so it has accommodated modernism, including science.  Buddhism has done the same.  Amongst the Jews, Orthodox Jews are a small minority now.  Most Jews are conservative or progressive or liberal or reformed, and they are at peace with science.  Even Catholicism is coming to terms with science, not completely.  Some of them are still fighting some aspects of science.  There are some fundamentalist Protestant Christians who are fighting science, including [Charles] Darwin [and his theory of evolution].  Hinduism has no such conflict, and Buddhism has no such conflict. 

The problem is that you have this one group of people who in my judgment are basically against everything modern, and that in my explanation may not be right because that culture was born in a nomadic kind of period.  Those desert areas seem to produce different kinds of cultural norms than other kinds of agrarian systems or industrial systems, and they reflect the backwardness of the times.  They haven't changed much, because they haven't modernized much. 

This was happening in India, and if you're ever interested in checking it out, look under my name in the Internet and there's an article by me in a history journal called History and Society.  It's from the University of Chicago, and the issue is 1961.  It's the special issue on intellectual and society in Asia, and I'm one of the three contributors.  It was the year I got my Ph.D., so this was an excursion outside of my economics.  I'll show you; I may have a copy.  [It is] so easily accessible.  Edward Shil's a well-known intellectual historian.  He was the editor of that issue.  He was a University of Chicago professor.  I've never met him, except my paper was included.  Marion Levy, [a sociologist] at Princeton, was another contributor, and I forget who the third one was.  There was something on China, I think the one by Levy, and something on Japan by another person.  My thesis was that the roots of the modern Hindu-Muslim conflict, as it's usually called, go back to the adoption of western education by the Hindus much more readily than by the Muslims, one reason for which was the Muslims had conquered the Hindus and the British conquered the Muslims.  Each one naturally considered himself to be superior to the ones they defeated, and the Hindus therefore were more or less reacting, like my enemy's enemy is my friend.  When the British introduced western education, a lot more Hindus collaborated with them.  So did the Jews.  So did the Christians.  The group that felt humiliated by the British were the Muslims, so they hung on to their traditional education, which consisted largely of teaching the Qur'an and other stuff.  I found references to how much time schools spent on teaching traditional subjects as against modern subjects, so I devised an index, a very crude index.  I said this is going to go on for a century or so, because the Muslims are going to be lagging behind.  By the time the first graduates of these Hindu colleges and universities come out, the Muslim will just be starting college, and when they come out, the few positions that are available in commerce, industry, government, they're going to be filled by these Hindu kids.  It's going to create a rift.  Everybody's going to say, "We're being discriminated against."  Essentially, in my way of thinking, that hasn't disappeared even today.  It's a long-lasting thing.  There are other reasons, more complex reasons, but to me, that's the basic stuff.  Modernization influences of all kinds are eroding traditional attitudes, both amongst Hindus and Muslims but not fast enough. 

In the summer of 1947, we were heading towards a lot of rioting all across the country.  The highlights of that, depending on whose history you listen to or read, there was a big massacre in Eastern Bengal, what is now Bangladesh.  It was associated with the word Noakhali, N-O-A-K-H-A-L-I.  Lots of Hindus got murdered there.  They were a minority.  [Editor's Note: The Noakhali riots took place in October-November 1946.]  Depending on who's telling the story, and I'm not a historian to tell you who's right or wrong, some people start the story in the northwest.  Some start the story in the east, but whatever within a few months, these riots spread from one place to another.  A lot of people were murdered there. 

Gandhi swore to stop this, so he walked in those villages, unprotected by police and security.  Like America, Muslims, who were not very pro-Gandhi but had enough reverence for him, they were to stop the killing.  He went from village to village.  Word would come that Gandhi's coming; he was marching on foot.  Those riots stopped over there, but meanwhile, they spread elsewhere.  They generally, as far as I can recall, they went from there to the next state of Bihar and U.P. [United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh after 1950)], where again, depending on who was in the majority somewhere who murdered whom.  It went on in some states until they got to the northwest [to the Punjab region], which was heavily Muslim, where the Hindus got slaughtered. 

The way it touched my family was two ways.  I saw that one night there was a big fire somewhere in the inner city of Lahore.  We were in the suburb.  We all climbed to our [roof].  We had like roofs where you could walk around, and they had little barriers around so you could sleep there.  Most of the night, I and the rest of the family would watch these fires burning, and the radio wasn't giving much information.  We didn't have TV.  Word would go from house to house in the neighborhood, and somebody said, "That's the Hindu part of Lahore burning.  The Muslims are burning that.  They're saying it's the revenge against some killings that have taken place in East Punjab where Muslims have been killed."  We knew that trouble is coming to our neighborhood.  It was the next day or day after, when I was sitting in one of the rooms in my house where I used to study, and I looked outside on a field.  I heard a noise, and the noise kept building up.  I was preparing for my physics final in college.  I think it was April.  I forget.  Some of the dates may be mixed up. 

Anyway, whether this happened before the fire or after the fire, I'm not absolutely positive.  I opened the windows.  My windows had screens also.  I don't know if they had metal bars.  I saw, beyond our house, about thirty or forty feet of undeveloped land.  Then, there was a field, a corn field, or something.  Beyond the corn field, there was what we called playing grounds or a college, Harley College of Commerce, which was one of the western names of a college.  In that field, the Harley College of Commerce, beyond the the corn field, I saw a mob swirling around, chasing something.  Then, it turned out they were chasing three different [people].  The mob broke up into three.  Some of them had swords and other instruments of violence.  I saw some of them hacking somebody.  Then, I saw these people fall, somebody pulling even a sheet over his face before he got killed.  It shook me up.  Then, I saw these injured bodies, some of them.  It was a very hard day.  [I] saw the (word?) (rising?) in the sun.  I went to get some water from the kitchen and take it out, and my mother stopped me.  She said, "Don't go out, or you may be killed.  You just stay in there.  You can't do anything.  You won't be able to save anybody.  If anybody is going to come and save them, it's going to be the ambulance, depending on the service."  We didn't have telephones and stuff.  She closed the window.  She said, "You can't keep looking at it.  Try to focus on your studies."  It was hard to do so. 

That made me rather angry at my fellow--I mean, these guys were Hindus or Sikhs or Christians.  I inferred because the neighborhood was that.  I don't know.  I never talked to any one of them.  I never saw any one of them.  The three people who were going through, I inferred, must have been Muslims who were going to that village about a mile down the road, because this was a shortcut through these Hindu neighborhoods to get to the village.  I saw that brutality for the first time in my life. 

Soon after, my father, who was in Karachi, he used to work for the federal government railways.  He was a reasonably high official.  He started his career as a lowly-paid clerk at fifteen rupees a month back around World War I, which at that time meant about three dollars a month, five rupees to the dollar.  Part of his job was three years in one town, he was an auditor, three years at home base.  We grew up with him intermittently.  We would see him during the summer vacation or Christmas vacation.  He came, and he talked my younger brother to leave town.  My younger brother was three years younger.  He now lives in San Francisco.  Unlike me, he was big and sturdy, so what the police would do is come and round up all the young men they thought would be a threat to the other community or somebody who had participated in this murderous act.  We were afraid.  That's exactly what they did.  My brother was forced to go to East Punjab to a relative.  My older brother was married and lived in West Punjab about a hundred miles or so in the town of Lyallpur, so there was nothing we could do for him, hoping that he'll get out if these riots spread.  He did luckily but later, many months later.  Here was my mother, myself, younger brother and an older brother, an older brother who now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.  He's also a university professor, retired.  He was a student at Banaras Hindu University about a thousand miles east.  He was home for his summer vacation or some vacation, so he was going to be leaving shortly anyway, or he had some time. 

It so happened that a cousin of mine whose first name was also Krishan, as my older brother's, but Krishan Palta, P-A-L-T-A, he was newly married.  He was a Hindu.  He married a Sikh woman.  He was a Hindu and a Communist.  [laughter] He married this Sikh, very religious woman.  They were visiting us, so we were quite a few in the family.  Krishan Palta was heading to Kashmir with his wife for a honeymoon, and then he was going to be a partner with another cousin of a place which it was a chain of those places.  They're like hotels or inns.  The government builds them and leases them, so it doesn't sell them.  These were called dak (postal) bungalows.  In the old days, they were largely for the British, but nowadays, they will take tourists of any kind.  Part of the solution they figured out was my father was going to go back to Karachi.  My mother was going to stay back, or if things got rough, she was going to leave for a town where she was born, which was maybe fifty miles east.  There was a man who had lived since his childhood with us, our servant, Mahant.  He was probably in his thirties or so.  He was a single guy, uneducated.  My father insisted that I and my brother Kris leave town, so we were given the choice of going east, staying somewhere else where my younger brother was going to, or with different relatives, or go to Srinagar, Kashmir, which seemed like a very attractive proposition.  We used to go there during the summers.  It's beautiful, cool.  We were going to be paying guests, so these people wouldn't have us as a burden. 

That's what we did, and we packed in a hurry.  I had two pieces of baggage, the one which is called a hold-all.  It's a place in which you can wrap up a quilt or a blanket and some sheets and stuff and a pillow and roll it up.  [I also brought] a steel trunk, because I was going to be there for at least three months or so.  That was a mistake, but, anyway, I took what I thought was essential clothes for those months.  We were also very naïve.  I mean, we didn't have bottles of water, any ways to deal with emergencies like kids today would have.  We got onto a bus and bid goodbye to my mother and everybody. 

To the best of my recollection, it was sometime in late July or early August [in 1947], a few days before the separation of the countries [India and Pakistan].  We would hear on the bus sometimes that a town we had just passed through a riot broke out, and some people were hauled down from a train or a bus and murdered.  We were going through an area which was basically half and half Muslim and Hindu.  Some communities were more Hindu.  The road went through those.  It was somewhat dangerous, but that was the only road available.  We headed for a town called Jammu.  From Jammu, you can take buses to go to the heart of Kashmir, Srinagar, the capital.  We made it.  I don't remember now how much time, but several times we heard on the radio that just ten miles or fifteen miles behind us some bus had lost all its passengers.  We were lucky in that respect. 

We got to Jammu, maybe slept overnight.  I don't recall now.  Jammu is at the foothills of the Himalayas.  It is flat country, bush country.  It used to be bush country.  I don't know what it looks like now.  The buses didn't travel at night.  Next morning, we got into a bus going to Kashmir.  It was, I think, a twenty-four hour journey, if I recall, because we stopped again.  Even though the distance isn't great, the buses go slow [on] snakelike roads, fifteen-twenty miles an hour.  A lot of people throw up.  They can't stand the motion of that.  Every time I travel on that, there were people throwing up all over the place.  We got there fortunately.  We had some money, and we could get there.  That journey ended later.  Two days later, we were at our destination. 

It's called, a small place, which is now a big tourist resort.  I say now, I don't mean now.  I meant back then.  Whatever is it now, I don't know.  It was called Kokernag.  I probably remembered the name correctly.  There were not many of these towns that end with the word nag.  Nag simply means [in] Sanskrit, it's snake, but it sometimes referred to the head of a river, because there's the legend of Shiva, who the Ganges [River] comes out of his head.  [laughter] You see pictures in Orthodox Hindu temples and stuff.  That place was the beginning of the River Jhelum, a little stream, a spring, and a cold stream, a trout stream, a very narrow valley.  From Srinagar to that, you go part of the way by a bus, and we may have had to change the buses in Srinagar.  From Srinagar, we went to a place called Anantnag, and there was a paved road.  [It was] not a very good road, but at least it was paved.  That may have been twenty or thirty miles.  Then, the road parts.  One goes east; one goes west.  The one west goes west another thirty or fifty miles to the capital.  The one that goes east went to where we were going.  The last fifteen or twenty miles of that was on one of the horse-driven carriages, because it was a gravel road. 

When we got there, it was a beautiful place right on the side of this stream, and it had a very good cook.  Ninety-five percent of the population in that area was Muslim, maybe more than ninety-five.  Certainly all the people living in that place [were] Muslims, the cook, the people who worked there, except my distant cousin and his wife and the cousin who was going to be their partner and his wife.  The four of them, myself and my brother Kris, we were the only Sikhs-Hindus who were from outside.  There was one Hindu family in the neighborhood.  They were usually called Kashmiri Pandits.  Kashmir has this strange situation.  You have Hindus who are Pandits, which are Brahmins, and nobody else from any other caste.  All the others must have converted to Islam.  Pandits considered themselves superior, so they weren't going to convert.  Now, those people were wonderful to us.  There were all kinds of noises of people coming, maybe in the neighborhood, and they were from the Punjab and riots may spread to Kashmir anytime, but they never did. 

A couple of times, our cook, Abdullah, who was a Muslim young man, he would come in in the middle of the night.  He says, "Pack quickly.  I'm going to show you the trail, if any mob or crowd comes here, to show you how to get away."  So, he did, and I also packed some food for me, which would not rot, some durable type.  He took me across the stream and showed me a trail.  He says, "Most people are not local.  They won't know these trails and you have to walk so many miles, climb the mountain.  On the other side of the mountain, you'll be in a Hindu area.  You'll be safe."  Here are these Kashmiri Muslims helping me. 

One family, which was there from Lahore, my hometown, they were Muslims, and we became friends.  They offered to help me get back to Lahore.  Then, we gave up the project.  I learned some Qur'an.  They gave me a Muslim name and stuff.  But I said I couldn't take a chance, and they couldn't take a chance, because all they do is a mob would surround a person.  They wanted to know if you were a Muslim or non-Muslim.  With women, I don't know what they did.  Men, they would strip them, and if the man was circumcised, that meant he was a Muslim.  If he was not circumcised, he got killed.  I said, "There's no way you can help me there.  I am what I am."  I didn't go with them.  It's also interesting that they were from my hometown, even though they were from a very different part, and the family was headed by an old man.  Why he became friendly, why they were so, I don't know, but one of the things I used to do I read every book that was there while I was in Kashmir all the time doing nothing.  I gave up on trying to prepare for my physics book.  It got lost anyway.  One day, I was somewhere on our trail.  I fell asleep.  My book was next to me.  There were shepherds in the area.  Somebody came and picked it up.  I don't know what they would do with a book on physics.  Anyway, they can probably sell it in a second market. 

I spent some very pleasant months, some very dramatic months in that period while I was stuck there.  I learned palmistry, which I didn't believe in, but it was fun.  I used to read hands just for fun.  The few people who were coming as tourists, I would do that, and that Muslim family was the same.  They became very fond of me.  They'd come back again and again, "Oh, you didn't tell me this.  What about this?  What about?"  I said, "It's all nonsense anyway.  I don't believe in it.  Why should you believe in it?"  The one thing they used to [say was], "Oh, you were so accurate," because when I asked this old man, I saw his hand, and the first question I asked him, I say, "Have you been sick recently, seriously?"  He said, "Yes."  I said, "Did you have a heart attack or a stroke or something like that."  He says, "Yes, of course."  [He] said, "How did you know?"  I said, "I made some guesses," but he wouldn't believe me.  He says, "You must have seen it in my hand."  Well, the plain fact of the matter is his hand looked very reddish, like there was a lot of blood.  I said, "I was not medically trained or something."  I figured maybe he has blood pressure [issues].  It looks a little unusual, and he's an old man.  Because if an old man has blood pressure and he's here recuperating, away from the heat of the Punjab or Lahore, it's not unreasonable for him to be in a safe [place] where nobody's about rioting and all that.  He brought his family.  [I thought], "What the heck?  Let me guess."  I looked as you would look at nails, and if you're very old, your nails come back with the pinkness depending on straight-up health more slowly than if you are young and healthy.  Something in his nails told me there was some problem here too.  He became a devotee.  He would not take anything from me and no to anything.  Maybe that was the reason his whole family was willing to help me.  He had good reason perhaps not to, because he had a rather attractive young daughter and [she] was our age.  Conservative Indians don't like dating or socializing anyway and particularly Muslims.  Then, for a Muslim to be seeing a young man who was of a different faith would have been really an anathema.  We didn't have any place to go other than this small area to wander around or take walks. 

There was another man who came from the eastern state of UP [Uttar Pradesh] who was a Muslim. These were the first Muslims meaningfully that I met in my life.  He was a lawyer, and he also turned out to be in the same boat.  He was recuperating also from a sickness, and there was a blood pressure problem.  He was on his way to Karachi, so he was coming from the east, going to Kashmir in the north, then going west-southwest to Punjab.  He was leaving behind his family, or they went to Karachi directly.  They sent him up here.  He was maybe in his thirties.  I learned a little bit about Islam from him and some of their history, culture and stuff.  Nice guy.  When I came to this country, I had learned what his Karachi address was.  We had corresponded.  [This] was six years later.  My boat stopped in Karachi.  We left Bombay, next stop was Karachi, for an hour or so.  I took the time out to go find him.  I went and they said, "Oh, didn't you know?  He died."  "No."  Of course, it had been some years, six years, or I don't know how long it was when I stopped communicating with him.  Well, he died of tuberculosis, it seemed. 

Until I came to this country, I didn't meet any Muslims again, either in England or on the boats.  Then, I got to know some, or even one, when one of them was living with me in the co-op in Kansas, two, and one of them was my classmate who became finance minister in Pakistan.  I still don't know a whole lot here.  My primary care physician is an Indian-Muslim.  His wife, who's my ophthalmologist, she's an Indian-Muslim.  I know some others but don't have intimate friends.  Probably without intending to more of them are Jews than anybody else.  I have some Christian doctors and so on. 

The exit from Kashmir and stay in Kashmir were the painful periods.  Going up was very tension-filled.  [Editor's Note: Dr. Tangri resided in Kashmir during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, a war between India and Pakistan over control of Kashmir and Jammu.  Kashmir remains a disputed territory.]  It was touch and go.  When we were there, there was no communication between my family and us for months.  Up there, Kris, my older brother, he left after about a month or so, because he had to go back to school.  When we started, the vacation was only about a month or so.  I didn't know if he ever got there for quite awhile, because he had to go through some dangerous territory. 

One day, while we are whittling away time and reading palmistry and learning how to play bridge and other ways of whittling away time, learning to cook, word comes that Gandhi is coming to Srinagar, Mahatma Gandhi, the reason of which was the [accession of Jammu and Kashmir to either India or Pakistan].  I don't know how much history of India you know, it was another reason the east state, there were two kinds of states in India at the time.  [Editor's Note: Mohandas Gandhi, known as Mahatma or the "great-souled one," led the movement for Indian independence from Great Britain through the use nonviolent disobedience.]  One were called the British states.  The other [ones] were called the Indian states ["Princely States"].  The Indian states were ruled by Indian rulers.  The British government had treaties with each one of them, a separate treaty, about what was their prerogative and what was the British prerogative.  The relationship was called suzerainty.  The states were not sovereign, but the British also didn't claim complete sovereignty.  They said, "The Queen and Britain are over you.  Foreign relations, currency and arms or defense, the British will control those.  Other things, you can do that."  The Indian states had more of that, because areas that the British ruled directly, they ruled everything. 

There were three problems at the time of the partition, among many, which were the thorniest.  The British had decided to walk out of India a little prior to their planned departure.  Because of the riots, they didn't want any British boys killed.  They figured, "The sooner we leave, the better."  It was probably something everybody figured, "This country is hopeless."  Some people were happy doing that, because they figured they're saving British lives.  Some were doing that, like [Winston] Churchill, who was still in power in Britain.  They were saying, "Indians will never be able to live together, so it's just proving they're killing each other."  He didn't want to leave even so, because he said, "I did not become her Majesty's prime minister to liquidate the British Empire."  If he had still been in power at the time of the partition, probably things might have been different.  Better or worse, I don't know. 

A Labour [Party] government [led by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee] had taken power, and they were willing to move out.  There was a Stafford [Cripps] Mission, Stafford [Cripps] was the Labour leader, and they negotiated some kind of a deal by which the British will quit.  Gandhi had opposed the partition of the country, but the leader of the National Muslim League, the Muslim party, they insisted that they want a separate country.  Later on, it turns out, according to one of the BBC documentaries that I saw, it's a six-part documentary, excellent, it's called The Story of India [1997], and also two, two documentaries, that, and the other one is called End of Empire [1985].  This probably what I'm saying now is in the End of Empire.  According to him, [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah used that demand for a separate country called Pakistan only as a negotiating chip.  [Editor's Note: Muhammad Ali Jinnah headed the Muslim League in India and served as the first Governor-General of newly-created Pakistan from 1947 until his death in 1948.]  He didn't think the British would give it to him, until he got a call from one of the British leaders saying, "How would you like to have a separate state of your own?"  He took it back to his executive council.  They said great.  They made it a condition that, "We will agree to the partition agreement if you create a separate state for us." 

After all kinds of complications and details, Gandhi, who was opposed to it, yielded, because the Indian National Congress, the major opposing party, agreed to it.  Gandhi's excuse was, or reasoning, that, "I'm not even a[n] ordinary member of the Indian National Congress."  He was just considered the leader, but he was not ever elected to any position, nor did he ever seek an election.  It's like somebody who was super-religious here, a leader.  [Jawaharlal] Nehru quite often deferred to him.  [Editor's Note: Jawaharlal Nehru played a central role in the Indian independence movement from Great Britain and served as India's first prime minister from 1947 until 1964.]  On this issue, he did, too.  This was the reason for Gandhi's murder basically, because the Hindus thought that Gandhi had betrayed them.  He was one of them.  He had promised that only on his dead body would there be a Pakistan, so they were going to give it to him, the dead body.  [Editor's Note: On January 30, 1948, a Hindu nationalist assassinated Mohandas Gandhi in New Delhi.]  That's why soon after independence, and I was already in Delhi, so I'll come to that, so he got killed. 

When the news came that Gandhi was here, what was he doing was probably trying to influence the ruler of Kashmir [Hari Singh], [who] was a Maharaja from the old times, who was a Hindu, to opt for India.  They had to make a choice, opt for India or opt for Pakistan.  Theoretically, they could become independent.  The British said, "We are washing our hands of this.  Our treaty is dead.  Now, you're free to do whatever you want, but we recommend that you join either India or Pakistan, because most of you are not big enough to be independent states."  Most of the states did exactly the same.  They picked one area or another, some under duress, some under pressure.  Some of it was difficult; some of it was easy. 

There was a man called Patel, Vallabhbhai Patel, who was our home secretary, and he was a powerful figure.  He managed most of that transition and sometimes with rough tactics.  The problem areas were on the coast there was a western enclave consisting of Portuguese territories called Goa, Daman and Diu.  There were three areas.  Well, there was a little difficulty.  The Portuguese were threatening to fight, but when the shove came to push, the Indian army just walked in.  There was no fighting, so the Portuguese left.  The French volunteered and left.  They were on the [southeast] coast, Pondichery, southeast.  The Dutch colonies had been liquidated in the previous century.  There were no Dutch settlements in India. 

The major settlements now, the British did not have settlements of their own.  There was a state of Hyderabad in the south, which had most of its population belonging to the Hindus or Christians or others but mostly Hindus.  The ruler was Muslim but maybe five percent were Muslims and the ruler, just the reverse of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, where the ruler was Hindu and the population was mostly Muslim.  The population was a little complex in Kashmir, because it's different in Kashmir Valley, which was the real bone of contention.  In the south, Jammu, which was mostly Hindu, some Muslim, and the northeast which was Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim, mixed, called Ladakh.  There was no such complexity in the south in Hyderabad.  The Hyderabad people negotiated a treaty with New Delhi to join India and then they backed off.  Patel gave them a twenty-four hour ultimatum to sign the treaty or, "We are sending our troops in."  They didn't sign the treaty.  There was a very fascinating story and a silly kind of propaganda, what it can do.  They really believed that they could fight off a million-man Indian Army, when they had a thirty thousand sort of para-military force, and they kept propagating that over the radio, that every Muslim soldier is good enough for ten to a hundred Indian soldiers.  They believed some of that propaganda.  When the time came, the Indian Army just moved in.  There was hardly any fighting and, as far as I remember, no casualties.  That problem got resolved, not to the satisfaction of Pakistan, because they expected that would be one state which would remain Muslim and pro-Pakistan within India. 

The other area was Bengal, which got divided into East Bengal and West Bengal, so that was according to the treaty.  It was not yet called Bangladesh.  There, the Muslims wanted a corridor linking West Bengal and Punjab, but it would have been a one-thousand mile long corridor.  Nobody thought it was a sensible idea how to implement it, so that was finally given up. 

The major problem that remained was Kashmir.  When Gandhi went there, that was the background.  People felt Gandhi should not be meddling in politics, because he's already betrayed the Hindus and so on.  Muslims didn't like him.  They thought, "He's a Hindu after all.  He might influence the Hindu Maharaja to join India."  I don't know what he had in mind or what he didn't.  The moment I heard that Gandhi was coming to town, I had good reason to go to Srinagar, because my brother Kris, who had gone back to supposedly Banaras Hindu University, had met Gandhi's granddaughter in that university.  Her father was Gandhi's eldest [second] son, and he was still living in South Africa where Gandhi started his political life, Manilal Gandhi.  He started the non-violent campaign there against apartheid way back.  He was renowned.  Manilal sent his daughter to Banaras Hindu University for her studies.  She and my brother met, and they decided to get engaged. 

I had a connection.  I went to Srinagar to find out if he knows anything about my brother, where he is, and my family or anything else.  The old man had a calendar.  He was going to be only three days, morning until evening, and he was very punctual.  He wore a little watch around his neck, and if your three minutes were over, you were out.  It didn't matter how important you were.  [laughter] I got three minutes, and so I got the information that Kris is back in Banaras safe.  He didn't say anything about their engagement, which I learned later he was opposed to and managed to crush.  [laughter] As far as he knew, my family had left Lahore and made it to India, but he didn't know where they were, probably in East Punjab somewhere.  That's all the information he had and nothing more. 

Years later, if I remember, I'll come back to it, I met Sita.  I didn't meet her until I came to this country, and only about maybe fifteen years ago or so, I got a call from her.  I said, "Well, you sound like you're here.  You're not in South Africa or in India."  She said, "Yeah, I'm in New York City.  I'm visiting and I would like to see you."  We set up a date, and I spent the afternoon with her and one of her attendants who traveled with her.  That's the only time I met her in my life, but I've seen many of her letters (word?) and she wrote to me after that.  She also invited me to South Africa, but I didn't go.  She said that she was upset and so was Kris, that Gandhi got a lot of letters from both of them and he didn't forward them to each other, because he wasn't going to approve of that.  Well, it was conditional approval.  He said he had to become a vegetarian, he wasn't, and they had to wait for three years before they [could] get married.  That's how they prove that they really love each other and it's not just a momentary passion.  My brother was like many young Americans, not to be dictated to, so he didn't want any of those conditions.  He says, "I'll marry if your granddaughter wants to marry me.  I will become a vegetarian if I feel like it."  That marriage never came off.  She went and she got married in South Africa.  When she was here, she was already a grandmother.  She wanted me to carry a message back to my brother, which I refused to.  [laughter] He's married and he has kids of his own.  That's one part of the story, and that's also in a book my brother wrote some years ago which is on the Internet.  It's called The Mahatma and [Three Unlucky Lovers].  His first name is Kris, K-R-I-S.  The last name is the same as mine, Tangri, T-A-N-G-R-I.  That's his version of the events.  I don't know what Gandhi would have said if he had seen that manuscript.  [laughter]

The time came for me to leave a month or so after, I think, Gandhi visited Srinagar.  Lots of things happened.  Soon after Gandhi's departure, Kashmir got invaded by North-West Frontier Province tribesmen.  That's the area on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is still the source of trouble to Afghans and to Americans.  India (accused?) the Pakistani Army.  They denied it.  Later on, they had measured that they were equipping the Afghan tribesmen and others, and many of the regular units were appearing in different kinds of civilian clothes and stuff.  I was still there when these tribesmen invaded, and their advance was fairly rapid.  The advance moved very fast at that time. 

This is where [I would know], if I had my notebook, which I was keeping a daily diary.  I don't know where it is.  I rented the house one year, and those people put away my stuff somewhere.  I never found it.  They maybe threw it out.  I had a daily diary for years, and so I don't remember the events and dates because that long ago, it's difficult. 

I know that several things happened.  They were very intense days for me.  I had to decide to leave as soon as possible.  I had a distant cousin who was a professor in a college in Srinagar in the heart of the city, on the edge of a big maidan, what they call a maidan, which is an open space across Srinagar.  Events happened with a great deal of rapidity.  Number one, the invasion of the tribesmen.  Now, I may be wrong on some of these details which occurred first or second.  As far as I can recall, that was the first.  Two, the Maharaja asks the government of India that he wants to accede to India, which he was legally entitled to do.  Nehru was prime minister and was sometimes called the "Son of Kashmir," because he grew up in Kashmir.  He was from a prominent Kashmiri Pandit family.  They lived much of the time in India.  He was the son of a prominent lawyer.  Nehru said he was committed to democracy, and he would like to have that accession ratified at least or endorsed by the political leadership of Kashmir and later on would become final only if there was some kind of a popular vote, a plebiscite, they used to call it, to endorse that, which was idealistic on his part.  A lot of Indians, they don't like it.  Indians wanted to not give up Kashmir.  Nobody wanted it.  This went back and forth for maybe a day or two.  The Indian government finally decided to agree to accession and imposed these conditions on the Maharaja, who had no choice.  He actually fled Srinagar, went south to Jammu, which was a Hindu area, and took the small contingent of his personal palace guard with him.  There was no police force, no military force in that whole state of Jammu and Kashmir until the Indian military came maybe a week later or some days later.  Meanwhile, one of the conditions that Nehru had imposed was the release of political leaders who had been in jail under the Maharaja.  The main person in that group was Sheik Abdullah, Sheik Mohammed Abdullah.  [Editor's Note: Sheik Mohammed Abdullah was a Kashmiri statesman who served as the head of government intermittently after Kashmir acceded to India in October 1947.] 

That evening that I remember, there was announced all over that the Kashmir leadership led by Sheik Mohammed Abdullah and his co-workers, who were called the Kashmir National Conference, that they would have a public rally in that maidan, which was right next to where I was staying.  All I had to do was walk out of my door and I was there.  I had been selling some belongings, whatever I could sell, because I didn't have much money left, and I had some film.  I sold all the film I had.  I sold my camera in the most momentous time of my life I should have been taking pictures.  [laughter] I had a small inexpensive camera, (word?) camera.  I'll show you one picture I took with it from Kashmir.  It did a good job.  It was a German Agfa.  I paid two dollars for it.  [laughter] I sold everything I could.  The price, what you may pay two dollars for in the morning, by the evening, it was one dollar.  The next day it was fifty cents.  Things were going down, because there was fear all over town there may be riots, and if Srinagar had fires, most of the housing is wood.  It would have gone up in flames.  There was fear something is going to happen.  It only takes a few people.  I was selling everything I could, and I could have a lighter load to carry with me if I move. 

Meanwhile, one bus was coming from Jammu every day bringing mail, and the next day it would go back.  Every twenty-four hours, there was one bus, which will take twenty passengers in addition to the driver and a conductor.  I managed to get on it the third day, but that first day, [I could not].  Each day, I would come to the bus station with my two belongings, the steel trunk and this.  [I would] wait until the evening, be turned down, and go back, come back the next morning again.  Third day, I was lucky.  I was able to talk somebody into letting me.  There were three other people, a young man, who looked somewhat like you but was younger.  He came from somebody in India, a distant relative.  They were obviously well off.  They sent two of their employees, who were villagers from Jammu, to bring their kid back out safely.  They were up there, three of them and me.  It was a miracle.  We got four seats in a bus of twenty and no bribes, no nothing.  I even tried to fake looking older by wearing a hat and sticking a cigarette in my mouth, which I hated because [laughter] I tried to take a puff and I was coughing for ten minutes.  [laughter] I never did that again.  That big rally was a big event in my life.  First thing, I see a big banner on the podium, which was built up in that open space.  That banner, a cloth banner, said, "Long live the Son of Kashmir, Jawaharlal Nehru."  That couldn't have gone up there if their executive council really was going to choose between India and Pakistan.  That to me meant they'd chosen.  They've chosen their leader; they've chosen their country.  It was a hard decision for a Muslim leadership.  Nehru had stood by them all these years even knowing they were Muslim leadership, but they were also pro-people and against landlords.  The landlords, who were also Muslim and some were Hindu, they belonged to the Maharaja's camp or the Muslim League [Conference], which was the more traditional party, Islamic party, and that was a minority party in Kashmir.  I stopped selling whatever I had, number one.  Two, for the first time at night, I slept peacefully, thinking, "There may not be a fire or no riot."  The other thing that persuaded me of that was the speeches that followed, so there were all kinds of secondary leaders who came and gave talks. 

Then came Sheik Abdullah.  I have never heard a more eloquent speaker in my life, and I've listened to all kinds of people, some of the most prominent leaders in India, Pakistan, the U.S.  His essence was, as I saw it, not saying we have joined India, but we are going to make a decision which is good for the people of Kashmir and not because of religion and not because of whom I know or I'm a personal friend to Nehru.  People seemed to believe in that, that he was a man of integrity.  He was not going to betray them for some secondary reasons.  Two, he said, "A lot of people are telling me that we should go with Pakistan, because look what the Hindus are doing to Muslims in parts of India."  He used the argument, he says, "Is there a Muslim here who can swear on the name of God and say that we did not start it?"  It was in the such-and-such area, I think he mentioned the North-West Frontier Province, that's where the Hindus were slaughtered.  Then, this happened, then this.  "How can we now point a finger to only Hindus?  We are all guilty."  Then, he would use his charismatic leadership and his knowledge of the Qur'an to use that religion against that religious fanaticism.  For example, he said, "If there is a Muslim here who thinks I'm lying or not telling the truth, let him stand up now."  [laughter] He went up there, well, who is going to stand up in that kind of environment?  The place was full of people.  It seemed like the whole city had come in there.  Then, he said, "Repeat with me," and he recited a verse from the Qur'an.  The verse included the word, "Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim."  Bismillah, I think, is God's name, Rahman, God is merciful, and something else.  [Editor's Note: This phrase means, "In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."]  "You say that in every prayer.  Is what we did to the Hindus what the Qur'an admonishes us to do or to the Christians or the others?"  The people who invaded, they got delayed in moving onto Srinagar.  They could have taken the country easily.  They got interested in looting on the way and raping.  There was a, just a few miles outside of Srinagar, at the entry of the valley, there was a Christian nunnery.  They couldn't care, the tribesmen raped every single nun in there, and they couldn't have cared if they were Christian, Hindus, Muslims, all of them. 

Part of the response to that had been, incidentally, the Muslim National Conference volunteers raised a ragtag police force of their own.  Hardly any of them had pistols or guns, but if somebody had, they brought them.  They weren't wearing uniforms, but they were wearing badges.  They became, in the absence of the Maharaja's police, in the absence of the state military, in the absence of anybody, they became the effective law and order people, and in a city as big as that, crime stopped.  Others stopped.  Everybody was afraid of the raiders advancing on them.  To finish off the story about the maidan, Abdullah made this group stand up, sit down, stand up, reciting the Qur'an and taking a pledge that they will not kill anybody, "If you are a true Muslim, you'll do as I say."  I could see this was a spellbound phenomenon.  I was surrounded by Muslims all around.  Any number of them could have just put their hands on my neck and broken it.  I didn't feel at all at risk.  I walked out of that place at peace that thing is going to resolve in favor of India, although troubled times are ahead. 

Sure enough, I heard on the radio, the tribesmen were within five miles of the airport.  Had they taken the airport, there would have been no way to fly in any troops, and there was no other easy way of getting Indian troops in there.  Just in the nick of time, the Indian cabinet approved Kashmir's accession to India, thereby authorizing the Indian military to intervene.  The only way to intervene was by air, so plane after plane [landed] almost continuously.  We could see those wherever I was, planes coming, landing, taking off, landing, taking off.  They weren't like the American Air Force, emptying out a hundred soldiers.  [Each plane carried] maybe twenty, thirty.  The Taliban types, they were on the outskirts of the airport.  Some of them had actually reached the airport and went back to get reinforcements.  Some of them went back to loot, because they heard about some nice, rich places.  As a result, from the accounts that I read at the time and remember, the first twenty-five soldiers landed and were afraid that they were going to have a gunfight, but they didn't.  Once one group was down there to secure the perimeter, then within several hours, several hundred Indian military were out there, and they stabilized the front. 

Over the next few days, the Indian military kept building up.  Then, later on, they tried to go across Jammu and then Banihal Pass, which is twenty thousand feet high, and there was a long, arduous journey.  It was difficult to supply, but they had supplementary reinforcements coming through on the land basis.  The thing got stabilized, and the Pakistani Army came out more openly from the fight, but they had to withdraw.  That area now has what is called LOC, line of control, so they had a truce there after many months of fighting.  There has been eruptions of fighting every now and then in that, but it's never been undone.  That's part of the story there.  My story, I left there, got a bus, as I said, on the third day, came down to Jammu.  In Jammu, I had a friend [Balraj Puri] who had been my classmate in Lahore, who was also an economist.  He became a prominent leader.  Many years later, I went back and visited him, and he introduced me to Sheik Abdullah.  That's where my memory is getting mixed up.  I went and visited Sheik Abdullah.  Maybe it was just before the Indian Army's intervention, because Abdullah had not been released yet.  I saw him in Srinagar to speak.  I also visited him, but when I visited him, that was much later, with my wife, who was American, and we visited him in jail.  He was jailed a second time, unfortunately [1962].  That was a bad Indian mistake. 

My story, at this part of it, it's probably the worst period in my life, because in Jammu, we disembarked from the bus, and there was no bus available going from Jammu to (Heltik?).  The closest Indian town was in the east, straight east, I forget, thirty-five miles or fifty miles.  It was through sort of desert area, which had a few bush but not much else.  These two people, or three people, who were with me, the two of them who had come back to get the young man, they had a village halfway to where we were going, so it was logical for us to go that way.  The bus wasn't going, and any vehicles were not moving in that direction, because rain had washed out the very flimsy road that was there.  It was now basically sandy soil.  The Indian military had put sort of mesh on it to enable some very essential supplies in light vehicles to go, and you had to make room for those vehicles all the time.  Plus, there were refugees moving in each direction, some from Pakistan to India, and then another group further south.  It ran very close to the border with Punjab, Pakistan. 

The four of us embarked on this journey.  The two of us hired donkeys to take our baggage.  We had to pay them from whatever little money we had.  It was two days, two days or one day, I can't remember, but we made it to their village.  We stayed with their families.  They were very poor people, and we did whatever we could.  My palmistry came [in] handy, because I ceased to be a burden on them.  Everybody in the village wanted to see me, so I finally had to say after one day, we stayed there several days, that I'm only supposed to see five hands in the morning, five hands maybe in the afternoon sometime, and five hands in the evening.  Somebody believed me, so I got invitations to lunch, breakfast and dinner, and they had to invite the other three also.  It wouldn't have seemed nice.  So, four of us had wonderful meals.  [laughter] My fake business, my career as a palmist. 

After the few days we stayed there, we decided, "We can't go on staying here endlessly.  We don't know how long the military's going to take or somebody to build this road, so we better continue the journey."  We did.  I think it was the second night, maybe third night, we came to the river, River Ravi, which actually flows down to my hometown, Lahore, it divided India and Pakistan at that place.  There was supposed to be boats to take us across.  There wasn't any.  What happened?  They said in the foothills up north, there were rains overnight, and there was sudden flooding which happened in the mountains and they washed away everything.  There were boats here.  There were a few animals, cattle, some camels, all kinds of things, and people sleeping on the bank of the river, waiting to cross.  [They were] refugees, I guess.  Several hundred people probably got washed down.  I said, "Well, I'm not going to sleep here.  We've got to find a place to sleep."  They said, "This is the best place.  It's in the open.  If there is rain up there, we'll hear about it.  We'll get up and go."  The nearest building, it looked like an old, abandoned religious place, temple or mosque.  I said, "I don't want to sleep in there, because there may be snakes and stuff.  Who knows."  I wasn't that strong.  I was a young man, but not that strong and I have all this stuff to [carry].  How am I going to carry this?  Nobody has, even though the other two could have given us a hand, it was still not fair.  There's no donkeys around at this time, so, "We better stay someplace where it's some distance from the river.  I rather sleep in the open."  After some discussion back and forth, some disagreement, [laughter] who knows better, I was not the youngest, but I had at least a title of having been a lecturer for awhile at the university, they called me professor, [laughter] so they got to listen to better, they agreed to find an open space.  I said, "Well, let's find it near I see crops."  The corn seemed to be reasonably high.  [One] said, "Why do you want to go near the crops?"  I said, "Just in case we have to run, there's someplace to hide."  So, that's what we did.  We slept near the edge of the corn.  [We] put the luggage somewhere else, risking that somebody may steal it.  There were all kinds of other people going that way. 

At one point, I saw something you may see in the movie Gandhi if you see it, refugees walking in different directions, and some of them even starting fighting each other on the road, those going from Pakistan to India and India to Pakistan.  I saw one such scene.  That night, in the middle of the night, it was a dark night, fortunately for us, and none of us had flashlights or anything, I hear noises, and we all woke up.  I hurried into the fields, and we heard shouting, yelling, couldn't tell who it was.  All we knew that we were very close to the border.  It was very easy for the Jammu Hindus to cross over into Pakistan or Pakistanis to cross over to Indian and get back.  There were hardly any police, any border patrols, no nothing.  From some other yelling, and we heard a few shots, we didn't know if somebody'd been shot or if somebody's just wild and shooting in the air.  Then, I heard a few screams.  They told me these were Muslims.  Again, whether they were local Jammu Muslims, because Jammu had a large Muslim population, or they were Punjabi Muslims, and they're very similar in that area, similar culture, similar language, but it was not good news for us if somebody's shooting around.  We just hid there for several hours, until the noises died out and we felt that we'd be safe.  Then, we sort of probed around to see if everything was safe.  When it was at the daybreak, then there was no safety anyway.  We got up and managed to get some donkeys again to get to the side of the river.  I rode on a camel for the first time in my life.  The other alternative was to swim across.  I was a very poor swimmer, so I didn't want to do it. The river was not very wide.  It came up to here, but I was also not very tall.  The other two people were willing to [swim].  I said, "I'll pay for the other two whatever the fare is.  I don't want you to risk your lives for me."  We got across and then found another land transit to the nearest place where we could find a place to stay, and there was the town of Pathankot.  We found a place to stay, which was filthy, absolutely filthy.  I don't even want to describe it.  I got there at night, and there was no electricity.  There was no toilets.  It was messy.  We were alive. 

The next day, we were lucky.  I found distant relatives in town, so I was able to visit them, take a bath, have a nice meal.  Then, my trip continued on a train, which is another part, but I was safe in India.  I was near the border, but this was a regular town.  It was unlikely that we would face any internal danger, because probably most of the Muslims had fled or were kicked out by that time.  From there, we had to go south about sixty-five miles on a train and then east to Ludhiana, another town.  That's where I traveled overnight on top of train, and that was in November.  Then, between two trains, another fifteen miles to another small town, then a horse driven carriage, another twenty or thirty-five miles, and I met some members of my family.  By that time, it was in November.  Then, I finally made my way to Delhi by train, which was probably the first reasonably comfortable trip, and found my father, knowing that he worked for the railway. 

In the morning, when I got up, I went to the railway headquarters, and fortunately for me, he was working there.  He had been allotted by the government, being a refugee, had been allotted a flat not too far from the center of town.  I was able to go home, shower, eat.  My mother was still not there.  A day or two later, I and my brother went to find my mother and bring her back.  So, we all finally got together. 

My oldest brother, who was in West Punjab, he had come before me, he and his wife had a kid or two children, so they had arrived before I did, and they were living somewhere else.  Finally, it was, I think, in late November or early December, having left Lahore in July or August, the whole family got together.  We were lucky; we all survived. 

In between, there are details, like I got sick for a month, because there were no doctors.  I had been traveling on top of a train.  I got pneumonia, so I stayed in a village.  There were no doctors within twenty-five, thirty miles, and if there had been, they probably would have been very ill-trained and poor doctor.  Nature just brought me back to life.  My older brother Kris, who was there from Banaras [Hindu University], I stayed with him for a few days in a village.  I stayed with another aunt for a few days and so on until I had seen everybody.  Then, I put all of them together, and we went to get our mother.  A lot of families had it much worse. 

Later on, I went for my master's degree in that town, Delhi, and switched to economics.  That's another part of the story.  It was difficult, because in India, it's not so easy to switch from one subject to another.  I got my master's there.  I also became politically active in organizing, not politically active in the sense of joining a political party, but organizing students to get help for the students from the Refugee Rehabilitation Ministry.  A lot of students didn't have a place to stay at all.  I managed to get 150 small pup tents and persuaded the university after a lot of effort to let us use the playground in the back, which meant the hockey team couldn't play there.  The soccer people couldn't play, no athletes.  It really belonged to the high school system, which was different, because the university was using the thing only in the evening.  It was an evening college.  During the day, the high school students were there.  We managed to kick all of them off and put 150 tents, which out of a student body of three thousand, that's nothing, but we figured 150 is better than nothing.  I was lucky; I was living with my family.  A lot of people had no family left.  A lot of people had family but no income.  A lot of them were living with relatives, where [they were] crowded eight or ten to a little place.  Some of them could afford to buy their own tents, and we arranged to have them put a tent on the playgrounds. 

We had no library.  We got lots of books; that was easy.  I went to the American Embassy, and the United States Educational Foundation.  I said, "We've got no books.  Can you give us some?"  "Okay."  They had several cartons filled with all kinds of books [and] delivered them to us, and we had to find a place to put them.  [laughter] We had no librarian and not even a room, so I had to negotiate with the university, which has headquarters in another city, to get us a room, rent it someplace.  We did that.  Then, we went to the Russian Embassy.  They did the same.  Then, the Chinese.  The Chinese, I guess, didn't do it.  So, Russian, British, American.  The Russian [books], I went back.  I said, "You gave us all books on politics.  Can you give us some books on literature?"  "Sure."  [laughter] They sent the same box.  [laughter] Three times, I requested, "Do you have books on economics or sociology or anthropology?"  [laughter] They sent the same box.  It took us a year before the university agreed to hire somebody to even start cataloging those, and we were long gone before those books became available to anybody.  [laughter] One of the good results of that was that it forced us to learn by mouth kind of thing.

I formed a lot of groups in which we would invite people to talk to us, and surprisingly, people were cooperative, including foreigners.  The U.S. Consul came to talk to us.  There were only fifteen people.  We had no other room but in my parent's living room, which could seat about ten to fifteen people in a crowded way.  He came, and we sat around on the floor.  Similarly, we had some authors, well-known authors, journalists.  Then, we finally found a place, public place, where twenty to thirty, forty people could gather, and rented it to us [for] free.  I called it the Rationalists.  Then, another group we formed was called the Humanists.  Then, the two meshed after awhile.  Then, I formed a group called Hindi Literary Society.  Then, I founded a theater group called Student Art Theater, and we got the cooperation of some professional groups to help.  In exchange, I went around school to school, college to college, organizing little theater groups.  Most people had no other way of entertainment.  They couldn't afford to go to places, and there was potential trouble.  The college [East Punjab University College] was educational, three thousand students, half women, half men.  For the first time, a large coeducational experience.  Lots of parents were not happy about it, but they had no choice.  Keep your girls at home, or let them study.  It created some problems.  The university had no resources to help us, so we had to do most things for the students and self-help.  We organized even, I don't know, we wouldn't call ourselves a police force, but we would just distribute badges to volunteers, and if there was trouble, we will try to negotiate.  Sometimes it was between political parties.  One reason I ran for my first election and I got elected because I was a negotiator between these groups.  One of my roommates, who stayed in my house in New Delhi, was a Communist, and some other groups were right-wing Hindus and so on.  Sometimes, it was difficult to get them on the same page. 

We went through some interesting experiences.  The only time I got arrested briefly for leading a march, but they didn't keep me for more than a few hours.  They let me go.  We were marching against the Dutch Embassy, because their so-called police action in Indonesia.  The police took us in, because the Dutch Embassy was worried that we may turn violent.  None of us did, so they let us go at the end of the day.  It became on the police record, which made it difficult for me to get a visa to America.  It took me several months to say, "Hey, that was nothing.  It wasn't serious."  [laughter] It exposed me to a lot of activism of various sorts.  The theater experience came in very handy, even in this country when I first came.  Mostly what it does is build your self-esteem, that you're capable of doing something, especially when you're forced to do it and there's nobody to hold your hand.  From survival onto doing something to help your fellow students or fellow workers, and in that sense, I had a very at times dangerous life but it was a rewarding life also.  Well, what else can I tell you that may be of interest to you?

SF:  I want to step back a little bit.  How did you decide to move from physics and chemistry to economics?

ST:  From where?

SF:  From physics and chemistry to economics.

ST:  Yes, that's the simplest part.  Physics and chemistry, my degree may be not a fully legitimate degree.  What happened was that, as I told you, the riots were taking place.  Murders were taking place.  Our exams were canceled.  Now, maybe they were scheduled much later, but two or three times, they were rescheduled, and two or three times, they were cancelled.  When I left Lahore, I had not completed my exams.  By the time I came back, I was in New Delhi, that university no longer had jurisdiction, so it wouldn't have helped unless they scheduled exams for me.  What happened was that that university set up this college in the rented building of that high school and called it East Punjab University College ["Camp College"], where I became a student.  In that place, among other things, what they did was they said all those people who had taken some exams but either never got back the results or were not able to take substitute exams, they can get their degree, which will not be considered fully legitimate if you want to go on for graduate study in that field, but if you don't intend to go on in that field, you can do ten weeks of social service and by social service, they designated a lot of activities where we helped out refugee students or refugees or other people in need.  You had to go through submitting the proposal and stuff and what you're going to do and what you did and you submitted it.  Then, at the end of that, if some committee approved it, then they gave you the diploma, which enabled me to start graduate study but not in physics and chemistry.  That's the route I took. 

I had already, without that incentive, been gathering students and some non-students in my parents' living room, where we started inviting these people, as I told you, to speak.  I or somebody else said, "Why don't we do something else in helping some refugees also, like us?"  There were refugee camps around.  I know one of my very close friends, who's a physicist, he was living in one of them.  He said, "We can all help out at my camp.  You tell us what's to be done."  I became the organizer.  My parent's home became the office.  We kept the records, and we would talk and interview people who wanted to volunteer with us.  There was no membership fee, only the willingness to do it.  We set up a supervisory system, who's going to report to whom.  I did that, instead of ten weeks, I did that for, I don't know, a year or two years.  They thought I was more than qualified to get the degree. 

In the meanwhile, I had started my work as a master's student in economics.  Why economics?  Well, while I was an undergraduate, Indian education seemed to be very focused.  [It was] not very diversified.  For example, I was going to be a med student.  I got off that track, because I had become a vegetarian.  I couldn't cut up an animal, which was necessary in the biology lab.  I took what was called, there was a biological track and the non-biological track, so I took the non-biological track for physics and chemistry.  Part of it was it was easier to get jobs with a science degree than with anything else.  Then, after two years of that and math and one language, you go onto two more years of college and they drop the languages, the English and Hindi both, and just focus on math, physics and chemistry.  There's no economics, no sociology, no distribution requirements.  When you come out, you probably have more than a comparable American student would have with a college degree in your area of specialty but much less or none in other areas.  That's why you can't switch from physics and chemistry to economics.  They said, "Well, you have to take an exam.  If you qualify in the exam, then there'll be a committee of three people, who will examine you orally and they will examine you in writing."  They said, "If you know enough economics to go into the master's program, we'll let you in."  They were nice, and they set up a committee just for me because there were no other candidates. 

What I did was, even before this, when I got to that point, I'd been reading some books on economics, politics, literature, probably more in literature than anything else, but economics was because I had inclinations to do something useful for society.  I thought economics would help me understand the problems of poverty better.  I had fairly reasonable knowledge of very elementary economics.  Indian students don't work that hard until they're near their exams.  Then, they hit the books, and in one week, they try to [study], unlike in America, where you have every second week, there may be quiz or there may be a midterm.  [There was] none of that [in India].  It happens once a year, and you're working like crazy to read whatever you should have been reading ten months ago.  I didn't do that.  I was reading.  They asked me, "What kind of books have you read?" in my application, so I mentioned the books I had read.  They thought if I really meant it and I understood those books, I have a good chance, so they gave me a written exam, which I passed.  Then, the committee of three gave me an exam for an hour or two hours.  [I] passed, and actually they were quite complimentary.  They said, "You are better than most of the students who have taken the courses."  I said, "Well, because I have been reading all through the past few years."  One of them, many years later, asked me, "Did you solve the problems of India's poverty?"  I said, "No, but I solved my own poverty problem."  [laughter] It did give me a broader outlook, some of this thanks to the Russian Embassy, which sent me a lot of literature on Marxism and Soviet economy and stuff, which I read out of interest, some of it due to an accident.

 In the college, I had organized, as I said, several societies.  I don't know if I was instrumental in starting also a debating society.  I may have been one of them.  I'm not sure I was the only one.  There was a professor, whom we all loved.  He was a Christian and a Communist from Kerala, Frank Thakurdas.  I remember him to this day.  He announced one of these debating things, it was a competition, and encouraged me to participate in it, which I did.  I won the first prize, so he gave me some books on Marxism, [laughter] which he was interested in.  They were good books, classic, philosophical.  I read them and went back to discuss with him several times.  While Frank knew that I was not a Communist, I was not a Marxist even, and I disagreed with a lot of what the books had to say, but he respected me just as I respected him.  Years later, I saw him in Chicago one night.  Certainly, it was very interesting.  That gave me a broader kind of approach.  For example, if I had never taken the root of either joining a political party or taking courses which included the teaching of Marxism or history of Marxism or something, I would not have known those [subjects], especially on philosophy. 

I'm probably one of the few persons you will meet, unless you go around looking in the philosophy department or maybe in political science, though I doubt it, ask them, "Who is the author of the book called Anti-Duhring?"  It's Anti-Duhring, D-U-H-R-I-N-G.  Well, Frank Thakurdas gave that book to me.  It turned out it was written by [Friedrich] Engels, the co-author of [Karl] Marx, and it's basically a philosophical treatise from a Marxist point-of-view.  There was interesting things for me to chew on.  For example, Anti-Duhring was written against somebody called [Eugen] Duhring.  It was a Marxist response by Engels.  It may not even be fair to call it Marxist.  It was Engels' response, but Engels and Marx are generally bracketed together, because they were partners.  Well, its basic argument was that, which is consistent with modern science, that most things come out of human effort interacting with nature, and human effort is due to intelligence and physical labor, but intelligence comes out of consciousness.  From there, they would go onto biology and stuff, and it came out with a sentence, "At some point, in natural evolution, matter became conscious," that material world precedes the conscious world.  Now, many religious people may or may not agree with that, but it was a different point of view and it was sort of a mystery of how it happened.  I still don't understand that mystery, how can inanimate matter produce life, and as [Charles] Darwin [theory of evolution] is not enough of an explanation.  Why is it that, well, I can understand why in a lawn or dirt.  Sometimes after the rain, all kinds of worms and insects come alive, and then next year, they disappear because of bad weather or something.  Well, that's because maybe there are bacteria which are still alive or there are viruses which are still alive, but we didn't know those things two hundred years ago. 

Another book I read many years later by a British chemist [insert name], a short book [insert title], wonderful book, explains how life began in the oceans, a wonderful little book, and how those chemicals interact.  [It is] still a mystery.  Where do those inanimate chemicals become animate?  What is the process?  The religious person would say, "God did that, so there's nothing more to ask," and it's intelligent design, or whatever, or non-intelligent design and he's satisfied.  Darwin has an explanation, but that part is still missing, at least to my knowledge, as to why inanimate matter becomes animate.  Well, this book was the first one to raise the issue, raise about causality, issues of free will against pre-determination, which I knew something from my religious background and I never had satisfactory answers through that also.  I still don't know if we are caused by something else, then what we do, isn't that caused by something else that was caused before, so to what extent am I responsible for my own actions or at what point does it become really independent.  Again, different people have different answers.  The religious people have no problem, "That's God's will."  That was one reason I had a larger interest in the world around me than simply becoming career-oriented and either pursue physics and chemistry would have given me some insurance that I won't starve.  I could find a job.  When that didn't happen, what will my next bet be?  Something I really wanted to do, and that was economics.  Fortunately, I got opportunities. 

When I came to this country, I took some anthropology at the University of Kansas, because I was interested in learning the problems of poverty.  I said, "Most people in the world are poor, and there are very different societies and cultures.  If I'm going to learn something about how to help those people change, I need to have some anthropology."  I took several courses.  One of the funny things was I got "A-plus" in both courses, graduate courses at the University of Kansas, with a professor whose name I remember, (Merrill?).  He was a Canadian, a very interesting guy.  I did not have the prerequisite for it, so I couldn't get credit from the graduate school [laughter] for two courses I had taken.  As well, the professor said, "My scale is one hundred down to whatever, but the top grade actually is 118, using my formula, and that's Shanti Tangri and he's not even an anthropology major."  I was very pleased, so I said I'll study it further.  I took another course, and I wrote a paper, which he thought was publishable, but I never submitted it.  It was called "Religion's Role in Man's Adjustment to his Habitat."  Well, I started coming to the point of view that religion has a role.  That's why it's so universal, though I don't personally believe in any religion and didn't want to.  I could see that people found it useful in making adjustments in life.  I also got to know a lot of anthropologists as a result.  I went to some conferences there.  I wrote a paper for a conference in Santa Barbara where I used my experience in theater as communication as an instrument of social change in that conference.  I got paid for attending it and back, so it was nice.  As a matter [of fact], somebody in Berkeley remembered that a few years ago.  He said, "You once wrote a paper I heard."  He said, "Why didn't you ever publish it?  It was an interesting paper."  I said, "If I can find it.  God knows where it's buried now." 

It, again, broadened my horizon [and] taught me to be a little more tolerant, instead of become an intolerant Marxist or an intolerant something else, which a lot of my friends do become.  They have very strong opinions, [Norman] Markowitz [Professor of History at Rutgers University] included.  [laughter] You know Markowitz.  I don't argue with him.  I kid him.  One day, I said, "Around this table, you're all very bright people, very senior people, scholars.  Tell me one thing that you have changed your opinion on in the last fifty years."  [laughter] Somebody like Rudy Bell [Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University] said, "Hey, that's not a fair question.  You're putting us on the spot."  I said, "No, honestly, think of something significant in which you said, 'Well, as a young man, I thought this, or in my mid-career, I thought this, and now I've come to realize that that's not the way it is.'"  Norman said, "Unlike some of my friends, I have never changed.  For fifty years."  I said, "Well, you're not even fifty yet."  He said, "No, no, I'm sixty-five."  [He] said, "I haven't changed in fifty years.  I have no different opinions."  I said, "Yeah, I have known people who are slow learners."  [laughter] He said, "Was that an insult?"  I said, "That's a description, Norman, if a person tells me that he or she has not changed."  They may not remember, and there's reconstructive memory.  We tend to think, you know, I was never wrong.  We may have been wrong, but we remake our past.  To say and be proud of it that I have not changed in fifty years is to say that all the reading you have done, all the learning, all the seminars, all the classes, all the public lectures, it had no influence on your basic thinking.  That's incredible and not something to be proud of.  [He said], "Well, I know, you have bourgeois thinking as usual."  Unfortunately, and he admits it, but a lot of people who don't admit it but they're in the same boat. 

Some of them made their careers on the basis of one notion and made a career out of writing several books saying the same thing again and again and on and on.  Unfortunately, historians do often.  The British historian Niall Ferguson, he's saying the same damn thing over the last thirty years, something about the [British] Empire, and it sounded interesting.  Maybe he's right.  My God, you know, he should have something new to say.  [laughter] I hear him on the radio, TV.  He's a professor at Harvard.  He comes from Cambridge.  There're lots of them.  That guy who's famous again, a name I'm skipping, who talks about this clash, Samuel Huntington.  Samuel Huntington hasn't changed his tune in, God, forty years or thirty years, fifty years.  He may be right, but I don't know.  It's a matter of opinion.  It's a matter of how you read history. 

One of the interesting historians I met in my life, I met several people, but Walt Rostow, he's an economic historian, he was.  He was a professor at MIT.  I spent a year at MIT, and my encounter was very interesting.  I was a student, I'm trying to remember, at Berkeley, I think.  I went east, and I had developed this, thanks to my background, which I mentioned to you, of taking the initiative and contacting people.  I had read something by Walt Rostow and something by other economists at MIT.  I called him up.  It was Christmastime.  I told him who I was, a graduate student at Berkeley, and some background from India.  He invited me to lunch.  [laughter] I said, "Great," so I went.  He said, "Do you mind if we go to the Harvard Club rather than eat here?  The place is closed here."  I said, "Whatever you want."  He took me there.  He had told me if I had written anything I should bring it along, so I took some of the stuff I had published.  It was not very academic stuff.  It was from my days in India, but I had published several articles.  He listens to me.  He treats me to a nice lunch.  He glanced over those things, one quickly. 

He said, "One of those may be brazen," because I generalized about historical trends on the basis of my limited knowledge of world history.  I read a few books on world history.  I had an interesting experience in writing an extempore essay for my final exam at Berkeley.  They said, "Write about a problem in economic history which interests you and your views on it."  You could write on it for three hours.  I took the chancy kind of thing.  That's what happened.  There were two readers.  One gave me a grade, they had a grade of one, two and three in the Ph.D. exam, two was an "A," one was "super A," three was a "B."  If you got three "Bs," you didn't make it.  A "C," even one "C," and you were flunked right away.  One person gives me a one, an "A-plus."  The other gives me a three.  They're both very distinguished historians.  One's saying, "This guy is running wild with ideas, and I don't know how much he can back them up with real history."  The other says, "A very imaginative article.  He has the potential of writing a very creative book with a fresh outlook."  [laughter] I took the second one.  Rostow joined the other guy and said, "Young man."  I said, "Oh, my.  Now it comes."  I put down, I said, "Yes, sir."  He says, "How much history have you had?"  I said, "You mean to say I don't know much history, and you are right, but you dislike what I wrote or you disapprove of it or you think it's wrong based on the fact that I don't know enough history.  Is that your premise?"  He says, "You're right."  I said, "Pardon me, this is maybe an insulting question.  Do you think you have read more history than Toynbee?"  [Arnold] Toynbee was a much older man, much more well established.  He says, "Touché."  I said, "What's that?"  [laughter] He said, "Touché means this and this.  You got a point from sword fighting.  I touched you."  He said, "Okay, so you want me to tell you why I don't like it rather than just comment."  I said, "Yes."  [I said], "I'm not willing to throw away this, because this is something I did for a final and wrote my Ph.D. exam that way.  There were two people, and one would agree with you.  The other thought just the opposite.  I'm not counting heads, but isn't that the way knowledge in many fields comes about?  If more people thought that I was saying something interesting and fewer people were critical, then people would start going my way."  I said, "It's the same way.  I liked your book and though I'm critical of some of the things." 

I was still somewhat radical, and one of things that the book said was Communism is a disease of the transition.  We don't need to worry too much about it; it's going to pass in time.  As traditional societies become modern, they quite often go through a transitional phase which is autocratic, and this is one form of autocratic life.  I was of the view that no, it's not transitional.  It can be very long-lasting.  Autocracies are places run by religious fanaticism, or places run by the military may be more transitional, which was a thesis later on, which Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became [John F.] Kennedy's advisor [in the presidential campaign in 1960], took.  I said [that] I don't know if he's right or wrong, but that's a much more likely scenario, as far as I'm concerned.  I think Communism is a much bigger danger, because it's a religion and it's going to have the force and staying power of religion.  Plus, it's a religion which acts in the name of the poor and the oppressed.  Therefore, it's going to have a much larger appeal in the world than any particular religion which appeals to a segment of the population.  Well, that's my way of thinking.  I may be wrong.  For that reason, I certainly would not want to support a Communist regime in the hope that it would be replaced by a better regime more quickly.  So, we had an argument.  He said, "I'll tell you what.  You come to MIT.  I will transfer your credits and stuff.  It's going to be fun to argue with you."  [laughter] He said, "Come and I'll introduce you to people in the department."  He introduced me to Paul Samuelson, the Nobel winner, and all the other members including the chair.  They were willing to let me start graduate studies there next year, but they couldn't come up with enough finance.  They were willing to give me something like thirteen thousand dollars, seven thousand I had to pay back, or the other way.  I said, "I might as well stay at Berkeley and finish and then maybe I can visit MIT another year," which is what I did. 

When I spent the year at MIT later on, I got to know all these people, which was very interesting, and one of them was Zbigniew Brzezinski.  I was at a dinner at his place, and he was very strong and pushing the notion that military dictatorships are more transitional than the Communists.  In that, we were not on the same page, but we had something to talk about.  I was saying to him it depends, and I started qualifying my thinking, that it may also be where Communism takes hold and different cultures may influence it differently and some may become more dictatorial than others.  One of the influences on me may have been Paul Baran at Stanford, who was probably the only Marxist economist [laughter] on any major campus in those days.  I said [that] there's an interesting point of view in a book called Theory of Economic Growth [The Political Economy of Growth] that Communism or socialism in Great Britain is going to be very different than Communism or socialism in America than Communism and socialism in Soviet Russia, an argument that Soviet Russia would be really the worst because it hasn't had democratic traditions.  It won't be a superimposition or a change.  If you do that in Britain, [with] its slow growth of democratic traditions and institutions, it's going to modify Communism no matter what their ideology.  In America, Paul Baran thought even more so because Americans are much less likely to tolerate those kind of dictatorial powers centered in one city or one party.  Therefore, it's not a reason for going Communist, but there's less reason to fear them also.  I said, "Well, that seems like a reasonable approach."  Zbigniew Brzezinski and I didn't quite agree on that, but he was still pushing his own.  I included one of his articles in a book I edited called (The Poverty of Nations?).  It's not a hardcover book.  It was published by the Associated Students of the University of California.  It was used in one of my courses as an optional book to read, and one of the articles I included was I wrote to him to give me the permission to reproduce.  It was called "(Please Buy My Ideology?)."  [laughter]

Anyway, it gave me an opportunity to see some of these great minds and talk with them and even, when they would put you down, they would not put you down really, but only to make a point and then move on to becoming more like colleagues.  One of them was Robert Solow, who went on to become a Nobel Prize winner.  I attended his seminar.  He's a wonderful teacher.  He said, "There's only one condition, Shanti, of attending my seminar.  If you are sitting in my room, then you are like a student and I'm entitled to ask any student any question."  [laughter] I said, "Okay."  One day I walk in.  He had just started, and he was talking about a famous model called the Harrod-Domar model.  [Evsey] Domar was his colleague.  He was the author of a new model in economic growth, which was also developed by a British man called [Roy F.] Harrod, but they had done it independently and they both published almost simultaneously, so economists hyphenated them, Harrod-Domar model.  It's a very simple model.  I walked in.  I was maybe a minute late.  Solow is up there teaching.  He said, "Well, there comes Shanti now.  He's a Berkeley guy, so let's see."  I said, "Oh, don't put me down."  He said, "Tell me what happens if capital grows at x percent each year."  The answer is very simple in that model, that output would also grow at x percent, because a capital-output ratio by assumption is fixed.  That model is based on that.  Anybody who remembers that, any undergraduate would remember that, would have a very quick answer.  I did what professors do.  I said, "Well, that depends."  I'm also right, because there are conditions under which that answer is not necessarily correct.  [He] said, "Why does that depend?  Isn't that a fixed ratio?"  I felt embarrassed.  I said, "Well, that's the first sentence I should have used, so maybe I flunked your test.  Am I still allowed to attend your class?"  He laughed.  He said, "Yes, but before you sit down you have to finish your answer.  Tell me some of the conditions under which you think this won't be true."  I proceeded to do that.  I said, "Well, there's some work which we needs to be done, and I think my impression is you are doing it."  He said, "Like what?"  I said, "You're introducing technical change in your models, and as far as I know from some of the papers I've read, which are not published yet, you're talking about what you call embodied capital and technology which is embodied in new capital and technology which is not embodied in capital but is organizational."  He said, "Where did you read my paper?"  [laughter] I said, "I borrowed them from some of your colleagues.  They were circulating."  He was pleased that I read.  I was pleased [I knew] how to handle the question, so I said, "Does Berkeley pass?"  [laughter] He laughed.  He said, "Who am I to judge Berkeley?"  [laughter] He went on to get a Nobel Prize and [was a] very, very friendly person and a wonderful teacher. 

One funny story in that is he and Domar both used to teach a seminar on economic growth at different times, sometimes the same day, so [I would] attend both.  Sometimes they were not on the same page; they would disagree.  One day, he [insert name] asked, and he's Irish, he went through some historical statistics, and he said, "There's one anomaly here in about every country I can think of.  Whenever economic growth took place, population growth also took place."  [Editor's Note to Dr. Tangri: Evsey Domar was born in Lodz, which was then part of Russia.  Robert Solow was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish immigrant parents.]  He said, "That's a statistical fact, except one country."  He said, "Ireland.  In Ireland, economic growth took place, but population growth went down."  He says, "I don't understand that."  [I] said, "That means per capita income went up in Ireland also."  He said, "Yes."  He said, "That's an anomaly."  Generally, again, per capita income goes up, population growth goes up also until you reach very high levels of per capita income.  Then, with higher education and stuff, population growth slows down and may even become zero.  "Anybody have any idea, any hypothesis?"  [laughter] I was sitting in the back of the class.  I said, "If I may dare say that in this town full of the Irish, I guess, maybe you belong to them, too."  I said, "Well, the explanation may be very simple."  He says, "Which is what?"  I said, "I'm using economic terminology and not trying to insult anybody.  Ireland got rid of all the unproductive Irish and sent them to America.  When you do that, your population is going to go down.  The economic growth, which may be taking place for other reasons, including overflow of investment from the rest of Britain, so per capita income went up and population went down."  He said, "With that explanation, you'd better head for the door before somebody kills you."  [laughter] I said, "Well, I can make it more respectable in not saying they got rid of the unproductive Irish.  What I mean is an economic sense.  They had no jobs in Ireland, so what is your marginal product in your language, zero.  They go to America, and there's a job waiting for them within a few weeks and they have a positive marginal product, so the same unproductive Irish are now productive Irish.  The same is true of any other migrant group.  It has nothing to do with their being Irish or not Irish."  He said, "I'm glad you put it this way.  I wouldn't recommend you giving the other explanation."  [laughter] I became a good friend.  He said, "It is funny.  I can tell it amongst my Irish friends."  I said, "If you do, be sure to put my second explanation also, or somebody may be looking to duel me in a footnote."  [laughter] He said, "I don't think you want a footnote on that.  You will really be risking your name.  Everybody who wants to attack you will say, 'Hey, there's an anti-Irish guy there.'" 

Nicholas Molnar:  I think I am going to pause it.

[RECORDING PAUSED]

ST:  A Marxist professor, former professor at Harvard, Paul Sweezy.  I was editor of the magazine called Monthly Review.  I met his co-editor, Leo Huberman once, but didn't know him.  I knew Huberman's assistant quite well.  She used to live in Kansas.  Some Berkeley professors who had a big impact on my life.  I mentioned this Kansas professor, (Meder?), in anthropology.  An economist (Wayne Leman?), who was one of the best teachers I have had, very good, very quiet, said very little, but managed his class to participate actively in discussing things and reaching conclusions without his imposing. 

Amongst the political figures I met in my life, I told you Gandhi, whom I met a few times later.  Actually the day before he died, he was killed, I was at his prayer meeting.  I had been at his prayer meeting twice before.  I had an opportunity to talk with him briefly for two or three minutes each, and some of this was very interesting.  The Indian socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, I spent practically a whole day with him in a town called Dehra Dun, where he had come to see another political figure who retired from active politics, an Indian who was well known to Marxists and Communists, M.N. Roy, he was a member of the Communist Party.  He was a member of the British cabinet in India for awhile after the war.  He was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party.  He was a student at Columbia, a student at Stanford without ever having completed high school anywhere.  [laughter] I knew his wife, who was American.  She came and visited me in Berkeley, Ellen Roy, whose father was in the American Foreign Service with the name Gottschalk.  Her brother Robert Gottschalk had a store in New York City on Fifth Avenue.  I had dinner, the first night I came to this country, I had dinner with him and his wife, because I stayed with M.N. Roy for a few weeks.  Some other political leaders.  One of the people who was most curious about hearing rather than talking was Jayaprakash Narayan, the socialist leader.  He pumped me all day about questions, and I wanted to ask him questions.  [laughter] I didn't get much opportunity.  He said, "Well, I'm here.  I came to see Roy," and since he was sick, his wife asked me to take over and try to explain Roy's ideas to Jayaprakash, which are of decentralization and democracy.  I was really an interpreter of Roy's ideas, not my own, but I did get a promise from him that one day I'll have a chance to talk to him about my ideas, which he did.  He saw me in Delhi many months later for an hour and gave me that hour.  It was interesting.  Our ideas coincided on many fronts.  These were interesting points in my life.  The one time I saw Nehru, I saw him three times, and it was about student needs, and I went with a couple of faculty and a couple of students.  We got a few minutes, and he did help out. 

The other thing I saw him for was I tried to get Jayaprakash Narayan and M.N. Roy and Nehru together at some place.  My reasoning was these three are committed democrats.  Roy was an ex-Communist.  Nehru was socialist, a democratic Fabian socialist. Who did I say the third [was]?  Roy, Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan.  Jayaprakash Narayan was also a socialist but what people call a Gandhian socialist.  My argument was that India is so fractured that something has got to hold them together, and the democratic forces, in spite of their internal divisions, have to stay together for the country to come through this process for at least ten, fifteen, twenty years when the institutions become more established and stable.  How are they going to get them together, because Nehru and Jayaprakash were on friendly terms, though they were in different political parties.  I managed to see Jayaprakash because he came to see M.N. Roy, who was totally different in his political ideology, but he came to see him because Roy was sick and I had gotten to Roy in another way. 

I was asked by his wife to come and help her take care of him, so I was there for three weeks.  During that period, Jayaprakash came up.  I broached the subject with him, and he was amenable to that, but he didn't think I'm going to succeed in getting all three of them in one place.  I broached the subject with Roy.  He turned me down by saying, I remember his sentence, even today, sitting in the lawn, "You might as well expect the sun and the moon to be at the same place."  Well, his wife told me not to bother him too much, because he had also suffered a stroke.  I didn't want to disturb him.  Later on, with her permission, I was able to talk to him and he agreed to come to New Delhi at a conference, which I was going to organize, in which he was going to be the main speaker.  Nehru was going to be inaugurating it, if I could get him, and Jayaprakash was going to attend several sessions.  Jayaprakash agreed.  Roy agrees.  Then, when I went to see Nehru for another reason, I asked him if he would come to such-and-such conference.  He didn't give me a blank no, but he asked me to talk to him again or his secretary in a few months and he'll see.  One of the backgrounds of that was that Nehru had written a letter to Roy saying that he wanted to come up and see him.  He used to be an admirer of Roy, and that's recorded in his book, I think, The Discovery of India.  Later on, he became very critical of Roy and Roy became critical of him, so they went away from each other politically.  He was able to handle my brief plea and why I wanted them to get together.  I said, "You don't ever concede anything, except you three are together on issues of democracy, and your presence would be helping."  Then, he wrote this letter to Roy that he was going to come up, but Roy died [on January 25, 1954] before he could make it.  Anyway, that was the background. 

The person who was instrumental in helping me do this was, why a Kashmiri leader, [laughter] I got to Nehru at that time through one of the Kashmiri leaders [insert name] who was a member of the Parliament and he was a friend of Balraj Puri, that friend of mine in Jammu, who was also [my] fellow student, and he was the one who also took me to see Sheik Abdullah in prison.  So, Balraj Puri managed to get to this Kashmiri leader, and the Kashmiri leader had a sympathetic ear in Nehru's quarters, so he took me to Nehru. 

It was an interesting life, but I was still a young instructor or a graduate student and able to get to see these people and talk to them.  I wish I had a long session with Gandhi sometime, but I was not that fortunate.  Roy, yes, I did, and some other people who were close to Roy, very good people, very bright people, many of them now in the universities, many of them are retired, some of them spread out over the world.  One of them headed up the Indian Studies Program at (Brisbane University?) in Australia, and one of them [was] editor of the magazine The Radical Humanist, a professor of English at Calcutta University, and so on, one of them a philosophy professor at University of Rajasthan.  They're all very smart people, very strong opinions, but very smart people, good people to interact with. 

I never became a "Royist," but I got to know people close to Roy a lot, and his wife.  His wife was a quite an intellectual in her own right, part-German, part-American, and she was a founding member of the Comintern in Germany amongst the Marxists there.  Roy served on Lenin's committee [the Communist International or Comintern].  What was it called?  One was called Cominform [Communist Information Bureau].  The other one was called Comintern.  I forget which is which.  He was one in the Russian one.  [Vladimir Lenin] used to call him [Roy], our Hindu Marxist or Brahmin Marxist.  [laughter] One thing which he became famous for was he challenged Lenin on, I don't know how much of this kind of literature you know, Markowitz can tell you a whole lot about this.  There was a doctrine called the thesis of decolonization, and the argument there was Lenin had deviated somewhat from the Marxist expectation how the revolution would spread from country to country, which is simple enough.  You have an advanced industrial country like America or Britain.  You have class divisions.  Eventually, through class conflict, you get more class consciousness, and eventually the underbelly of society will rebel and take over and become the dominant state, so socialism or Communism will triumph.  This then spreads over to foreign countries and you go through the same process.  Probably the best place to read all that is a short book called [New Humanism-] A Manifesto, which lays out the whole model beautifully in thirty-eight or forty pages.  That process, Lenin said, no, that's not the way it's going to happen.  That way, you had to wait for all these countries to become industrialized.  He had a different interpretation of how some of these countries would decolonize their colonies and get out, and I forget the details now.  I used to know.  Roy came out with a different explanation, which was unheard of in those days, because everybody fell in line when the great Lenin had spoken.  Roy said, "I'm from that country, and I know what's happening and I know better than you guys."  [laughter] The fear was that he was going to be thrown out like the Trotskyites [followers of Communist leader Leon Trotsky] were thrown out later.  Lenin, instead of throwing him out, said at the next party conference that his thesis and Roy's be presented jointly at the same time for discussion.  Whether he was right or wrong, Roy got equal hearing in the highest Communist leadership, based on partly you had to give credit to Lenin for doing that, but it also was that he must have been very bright and persuasive.  [Editor's Note: This occurred at the second conference of the Communist International in 1920.  M.N. Roy was expelled from the Communist International in 1929. ("Manbendra Nath Roy (1887-1954)," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu)]  Again, I don't know who was right. 

I'm not enough of a historian to judge on this issue, but he was therefore well known amongst California Communists, Mexican Communists.  His first wife [Evelyn Trent] lived near Stanford for years.  I never met her.  I knew his second wife.  The first wife was also American.  As a matter of fact, I was in contact with her once, but she didn't want any contact with her ex-husband.  It's understandable.  Anyway, it's been interesting for me to have met these people. 

Ellen Roy reminds me, of all things, the first time I saw any friend of mine having a cat.  [laughter] I went up, she lived in Dehra Dun, which is a town maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty miles north of Delhi.  Here, we were raising money, because Roy was not earning anything anymore.  She was not earning.  They used to edit this magazine and be journalists and make money or from lectures.  He'd been sick for quite awhile, and they had a rather nice house and a library called the [Indian] Renaissance Institute, which they were maintaining.  All that took expense.  Most of Roy's friends, most of us were poor except a few, so we raised money to send them every month.  I was a young lecturer making a starting salary of 185 rupees a month back in 1953, which translated at twenty-one cents to the dollar, [laughter] so less than forty dollars a month.  Even today's money, maybe that's two hundred dollars a month.  In India, that goes farther.  Still, we would take out ten, fifteen, twenty rupees from our paycheck, and one of us would collect it and send it to them.  Then, I go up there the first time.  I'm going there to help and I find one or two cats sitting on her lap, which was a no-no in my culture.  No pets.  If you have poverty, you don't have enough food for the poor. Why do you have food for your dogs and cats?  In Indian movies, they want to show you the contrast.  They will have a rich man with a dog or a military officer with a dog, and the poor are starving.  [laughter] That was the same image, so I had a very tough [time with that].  It turned out I'm also allergic, which was an easier thing to say, "I'm allergic.  I can't get near the cat."  It bothered me that this cat was eating imported cat food, which imports, most of us never bought anything imported.  There was one store in the whole of New Delhi which sold imported stuff in the center of town in the 1947 to '53 [time period] when I lived there.  There may have been others, but I never found out.  I said, "This damn can costs more than my lunch or dinner, and this cat is eating it."  [laughter]

My first reactions to Ellen were not very friendly.  I said, "What are these foreigners doing here in this country?"  Well, she was devoted to her husband, and she had become Indian.  She had given up her American citizenship.  She hadn't given up actually, but she had never renewed her passport.  When she came, she told me they said, "You don't need a visa to go to America.  You were born in America.  You're an American citizen."  She said, "Well, I never renewed my passport."  He said, "It doesn't matter."  The Indian government may insist on your coming back and having a passport, but you don't need one to go to America."  They gave her the passport and said, "You can use this for going to America.  You can use the other one coming back to India."  I was driving her down from the Berkeley campus to take her to San Francisco.  When you come at the end of University Avenue, the road goes left suddenly along the bay.  It was sunset time.  It was a glorious sunset coming over the City of San Francisco.  As we go around the bend, the road merges into a freeway, so you had to be very careful merging into the traffic.  Suddenly, she screams.  I said, "Oh, my God," so I slammed on the brakes.  "What happened?"  She says, "Oh, how gorgeous."  [laughter] I said, "You almost caused a crash."  She says, "How can you not look at it?"  I said, "Because I have to drive.  I can't look at the sunset, Ellen."  [laughter] "You would have been dead if I had listened to you."  [laughter] She laughed.  I said, "Why do Americans always have to scream?"  A friend of mine, the other day, she was driving, going from Berkeley to Oakland, and she slammed her breaks, because she found a very pretty dog walking on the street.  She, again, said, "Oh, my God," and she slammed on her brakes, pulled up, and wanted to pet the dog.  [laughter] I said, "What is it?  We Indians are crazy in our way; you are crazy in your way."  [laughter]

NM:  We are going to conclude the interview for today.  Thank you, Sean, for leading the interview today, and we look forward to scheduling the next one.

ST:  Louder. 

NM:  We look forward to scheduling the second interview.

ST:  Okay.

--------------------------------------------END OF INTERVIEW--------------------------------------------

Transcribed and reviewed by Kathryn Tracy Rizzi 8/15/18

Reviewed by Neil Tangri 8/24/24