Berkeley, The Launch Pad

There is a considerable body of literature on Har Dayal. For authoritative accounts, see the biographies by Dharmavira (1970), Emily Brown (1975), Gaor (2007), and by his granddaughter Shubh Paul and her husband Jaiwant Paul (2003). Jaiwant Paul tells us: “I had heard of Lala Har Dayal as a little boy. My father, when he was a student in the 1920s, like every other student of his time was a great admirer of Har Dayal. He could repeat long excerpts from his speeches, specially the more stirring ones, without any reference to notes. So I grew up in awe of the very name ‘Har Dayal’” (Paul and Paul 2003, p. 2). This narrative would hold true, almost verbatim, for my mother and me, and I have taken this quotation from her well-read copy of this biography. She grew up and studied in Lahore at Government College (also Har Dayal’s college) in the early 1940s; when my mother was at school, my maternal grand mother had arranged for her to be tutored in mathematics by Lala Har Dayal’s niece, Jio Rani; she and my grandmother Parmeshwari Anand were both lecturers in Queen Mary College. I vividly recall my mother telling me how scared she would be when approaching Jio Rani’s home for her tuition because there would be a detail of policemen stationed outside and both way in and out, they would rummage through her satchel to look for any incriminating political materials being smuggled in or out; the house was at 1, Fane Road; and this was where Lala Har Dayal’s brother lived in Lahore. My mother was indeed active in distributing revolutionary leaflets and got into some trouble over that, but not when going for her maths tuitions. Coincidence has it that the apartment in which my wife and I stay in New Delhi shares a wall with the apartment of Malti Nehru, younger sister of Shubh, and also a granddaughter of Har Dayal.

See the Wikipedia entry for Kartar Singh Sarabha: https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Kartar_​Singh_​Sarabha.

These included Sohan Singh Bhakna who was the Ghadar President, and many other Ghadar members who were students at the University of California, Berkeley, Sikh as well as non-Sikh (Josh 1970). Also significant and illuminating is the amazing life of Baba Bhuja Singh, as researched by the historian Ajmer Sidhu (2013).

See also: Juergensmeyer (1976, 1979), McMahon (2001), and Jane Singh (1982).

Wanderlust and social and political engagement seemed to be in the family blood. Partap and Jaswant Singh’s father was Nihal Singh of village Kairon in Amritsar district. Uneducated and at a young age he went to Malaya and helped out in the eldest brother Tarlok Singh’s flour business; then joined the Royal Artillery in Hong Kong; learnt Gurmukhi and English and became something of a poet; returned to Kairon and then got involved in social activism, setting up schools with residential facilities for girls and pioneering community welfare and reform, with a focus on women’s equality and social emancipation. See ‘Nihal Singh Kairon: A Pioneer of Women’s Education in the Punjab (1983–1928)’, TheSikhEncyclope​dia.​Com; https://​www.​allaboutsikhs.​com/​1900/​nihal-singh-kairon. In their different ways, his sons picked up his trail.

British Intelligence records of the time report him as a member of the Detroit branch in 1930 (“The Ghadar Directory (2)”, Compiled by the Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, 1934. See: https://​www.​sikhpioneers.​org/​ghadar-directory-2/​).

The historian Ajmer Sidhu, in his biography of Baba Bhuja Singh, another Ghadar revolutionary who travelled this route, sheds light on his training at Eastern University, Moscow which included batches of Ghadarites from China, Japan, Argentina, Iran, Turkey, Philippines, Malaya, etc. (Sidhu 2013, p. 33). They “were first taught Marx’s Capital. This is the foundation of Marxism. The students also studied the bourgeois political economy. Both the studies were taught in comparison”. Most of the books were in Russian, so they also learnt Russian. “They also studied famous revolutions … the Russians taught them this history through the lens of Marxism. The second important subject after Capital was historical materialism…” (ibid., pp. 34–35). “Theatre or cinema was twice a month; Bujha Singh wrote an article ‘Art for the People’ … he also learnt how to use art to propagate ideology” (ibid.). Bujha Singh went from the Ghadar Movement into the Kirti Movement, then into the Communist Party of India, then into the Lal Party and the Tenant Movement in PEPSU, and then into the Naxalbari Movement. Such a trajectory would not be untypical of the many cohorts of Punjab and Sikh revolutionary activists in the pre-war period.

See ‘Kairon Family’: http://​www.​liquisearch.​com/​kairon/​notable_​people/​kairon_​family. The fourth generation down from Nihal Singh Kairon is represented by Raghuinder Singh, Jassinder’s only son, who apparently runs “a luxurious marriage place”—a high-life venue for staging the increasingly huge (in expense and numbers) and gaudy weddings of the new monied Punjabis—called “Jass Gardens”, the name, presumably, coming down from his father, Jassinder (R. Singh, n.d.). He combines this with a political foot in the new populist Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) where he is a zonal representative for trade, transport and industry for Patiala (UNI 2016).

Brian Van Arkadie, personal communication, email 30 June 2015

Brian Van Arkadie, personal communication, email 21 October 2015.

Room-mate of Luigi Pasinetti at King’s, son of J. D. Bernal and Margaret Gardiner, Martin was proud to say, “my father was a communist and I was illegitimate … and always expected to be radical because of my father” (Vitello 2013). Ajit was much the opposite, with a judge for a father who raised an eyebrow at his leftist politics. Martin met Ajit at Berkeley, after his return from doing a Diploma in Peking University.

If anything, it is striking that Ajit acknowledges the influence of these three political movements, but there is no mention of radical Sikh politics in his albeit very short comment on life in Berkeley (Singh 2000).

Brian was also the Director of the Centre for Latin American Studies of the University.

Sol Stern (2014), one of the protagonists of the Free Speech Movement at its birth, provides a critical, even embittered, reflection on its subversion and ultimate futility, viewed from his location fifty years on; his account also provides evocative snippets into how it was then. The Free Speech Movement turned “the university into a base for increasingly disruptive demonstrations in the wider community, starting with massive protests against the Vietnam War” … “It was during the FSM that New Left radicals first designated liberalism as the enemy, romanticized Third World revolutions, and broke the long-standing liberal taboo about working with Communists”. Sol Stern and David Horowitz (as well as Brian Van Arkadie and others) were also editors of Root and Branch, “which became one of the foundational New Left publications … proclaimed opposition to the dominant trends in American society and our independence from the certainties of the old Marxist Left”; away from “the spectrum of a left that took shape thirty years ago”. Cuba was a “signature issue”, and “we imagined Castro and Che Guevara as fellow New Leftists”. “New Left stalwart Tom Hayden … settled into the city’s many radical communes and rallied students to support the Black Panthers — America’s ‘internal Vietcong’, according to Hayden — and to create ‘liberated zones’ to serve as Panther sanctuaries. He pushed the Berkeley radicals to learn how to use guns because the revolution was surely coming” (ibid.).

As recounted by Sheila Rowbotham, later partner of Bob Rowthorn (Rowbotham 2001).

See: https://​scholar.​harvard.​edu/​jorgenson/​biocv.

Casting the line into the future, it would be Robert Aaron Gordon’s son, the economist Robert James Gordon, whose hostility as a referee would contribute to the closure of the Cambridge Growth Project in 1987; and apparently he also preferred single-equation methods.

Ron Smith, a close associate, politically and personally, of Ajit until he left Cambridge, not entirely by preference, for Birkbeck College in the mid-1970s, recalls: “Robin Marris was at Birkbeck for a while and I remember a slightly tense lift journey with Robin and Ajit on one of Ajit’s visits to Birkbeck. As you say Robin had hoped that Ajit would provide evidence for his theory, not undermine it. Robin was also fairly right-wing so that may also have been a factor” (personal communication, email dated 30 January 2018).

In 1971, Robin Marris and Adrian Wood (1971) jointly edited a volume on aspects of the corporate economy; included in the contributions are papers by Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow and Oliver Williamson, as well as five papers between Marris and Wood as authors, but strikingly Ajit Singh is not in the list of contributors. Perhaps there was no invitation; perhaps there was and it was declined for some reason; it was suggested by some who knew both that Robin was possibly too right-wing from where Ajit stood; in his obituary for Robin Marris, Adrian Wood (2013) quotes him as saying that from the mid-1970s he had become “hostile to socialism”, and turned away from, if not against, Labour and the trade unions.

This was completed in 1970 and published as Take-overs: Their relevance to the stock market and the theory of the firm (1971).

Christopher Bigsby, Arthur Miller’s biographer, notes: “On his return from the BlED Congress, Miller drafted a letter to President Johnson. He explained that as the new President of International PEN he had had discussions with a large number of writers and scholars from a range of countries, and that he had found almost total agreement that the Vietnam War could only strengthen what were called ‘Stalinist forces’ throughout the East. … there is no evidence that he sent the letter and no record of a reply, but it does underline the extent to which he was already committing himself to the anti-war cause” … “Whatever options Miller might have had, silence wasn’t one of them. While [various] magazines were preoccupied with the emergence of a new anarchic Left in the form of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, he was acknowledging the primacy of Vietnam” (Bigsby 2011). Miller was President of PEN International for the 1966–1969 term; Ajit was then in Cambridge. So the encounter, in all likelihood, would have to have been in Berkeley or at some other site of anti-war protest in the USA, before 1965. Jo Bradley, Ajit’s partner and then his first wife, says that the poster statement was one of Ajit’s prized possessions—alas buried somewhere in his mountain of personal papers.