Border-Crossing: My Imperial Routes

Fig. 1.

Carnival in Bonn, 1933: Sudhir Sen and Frau Professor Spiethoff strike a pose. Photo in author's possession.

Just three generations ago, all of my forebears were imperial subjects. My father's paternal grandparents emigrated to Brooklyn from Bialystok, on the fringes of the Tsar's empire, and the site of notorious pogroms. ('Jasanoff' seems to derive from the name of a nearby shtetl; spelled this way, the surname belongs only to my immediate family.) My father's mother was born in the Transylvanian city of Máramarossziget, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and boasted a large Jewish community. She was five when the Hapsburgs fell, and Romania occupied Transylvania – a transition from empire to nation personified by a Romanian army officer who moved into the front parlour of her family house. My own mother was born a subject of another, altogether larger empire, in Calcutta, during the last years of British rule.

All of my grandparents experienced the effects of border-crossing in some way, but my mother's father, Sudhir Sen, actively sought out foreign contacts, with long-term consequences. Already as a boy he had demonstrated a twin penchant for a life of adventure and the life of the mind, by running away from his village in east Bengal to join an ashram. But his luckiest break came while he was a student at Presidency College in Calcutta, where during his regular walks on the banks of the Hooghly River he befriended a wealthy Sikh called Malik Singh. When Singh got married, he requested, as one of his wedding presents, that his father sponsor Sudhir to study abroad. Equipped with a long-term loan from the Singhs, my grandfather travelled to London in 1928 to pursue a second bachelors' degree at the London School of Economics.

The LSE was a popular destination for Indian students, though because my grandfather spoke relatively little about his London years, I do not know how much his experience resembled that of other middle-class Indian students at the time. (All I can glean from surviving British Museum readers' tickets and papers is that he lived in Hampstead; and during a 1936 sojourn in London belonged to the Indian Students YMCA, on Gower Street.) At the end of his course – about the same time Gandhi walked into Westminster in his dhoti for the 1931 Round Table conference – Sudhir sat the Indian Civil Service exam, to join the selective ranks of the Indian administrative bureaucracy. This would have been a natural career move for a man with his education, but – somewhat surprisingly, given his abilities and training – he did not make the cut. Perhaps illness played a part, as it apparently had when he took his Bachelor of Science exams and failed to earn a first-class degree. Another family explanation holds that he was blackballed for political reasons; his eldest brother had done time in a British jail for anti-imperial terrorist activities. His own British Indian passport, he later discovered, had a hole punched in it to mark him out as a political undesirable.

Whatever its cause, failure sent my grandfather down a more unusual path. In the summer of 1931, he travelled to Bonn, Germany, on a Humboldt fellowship to earn a doctorate in economics. The move marked a major intellectual as well as cultural transition. He left London with the blessing of Harold Laski, who was a well-known 'friend of India' and mentor to Indian students, and a staunch socialist. He arrived in Bonn to study with Joseph Schumpeter, known for his work on entrepreneurship and business cycles, and later one of the leading critics of Keynesianism. Where Laski championed anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism, Schumpeter had written essays (later published as Imperialism and Social Classes) defending capitalism from the leftist accusation that it was (in J. A. Hobson's phrase) the 'tap-root' of imperialism.

On the advice of Laski and others, Sudhir intended to research an Indian economic problem – reflecting his emerging commitment to what would now be called...