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<b>T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan:</b> Of economists and novelists

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T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan
Last Updated : May 16 2016 | 10:39 PM IST
Some years ago, while browsing at one of the bookshops at the Delhi airport, I found a book on globalisation by a former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor on top of the fiction shelf. I took a picture and sent it to the author. He was highly amused and later told me that much of economics was indeed fiction.

But some economists have also written genuine novels and plays. I don't have a comprehensive list or anything approaching one. It could be that some 19th century economists had written novels or plays or poems.

But the 20th century ones have tended to be prosaic fellows, competing far too aggressively for academic advancement to indulge in frivolities like the fine arts. The faculty rat race has deadened their senses.

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The pioneer, at least in the last half-century, was John Kenneth Galbraith - of whom Paul Krugman quite stupidly said that he was not an economist at all because he wrote for the public and not academic economists. By that token, Adam Smith was also not an economist, nor John Maynard Keynes.

Galbraith wrote two satirical novels, one of which I have read. It was called The Triumph and was about politics. It was published in 1968.

His other novel was published much later in 1990. It was called A Tenured Professor. If it is anything like first one, it will be very good.

As for plays, the only economist I know of who has written one is Kaushik Basu who, as it happens, also paints.

Mr Basu tweeted recently that it was staged in Delhi. It is called Crossings at Benaras Junction.

Horses for courses?

Galbraith and Mr Basu have left me wondering if academics can write good novels and if their approach is not altogether either too severe or too complex because they are worried about what their university peers might think.

There was, for instance, Iris Murdoch who was a professor of philosophy at Oxford and wrote over 30 mystery novels and plays. It takes a special effort to read her books. I could never finish one.

Another professor to write a lot of novels was the now all but forgotten C P Snow. Again, unless you liked that sort of writing immensely, he was hard to plough through, possibly because they were so inward looking in the way only the English can be.

Then there was Tom Sharpe who wrote some very amusing satirical novels that may have been loosely modelled on Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. They were lacking the bite that characterised Amis. But even Amis was not easy to get through.

School teachers are not regarded as "academics" so a writer like Colin Dexter who created Inspector Morse gets somewhat left out. Compared to the university types, he was a terrific writer whose template has been copied by many.

An RBI surprise

But guess what? Now a former RBI official, and a monetary economist of some repute in central banking circles, has written not one but two novels. He was the last person one would have expected to write, of all things, novels.

Asuri Vasudevan, from the little I know of him, had a reputation as a taskmaster who did not suffer shoddiness gladly. He retired as an executive director in 2000. After retirement he went off to Africa as an IMF consultant and returned only towards the end of the 2012. Since then he has produced two highly evocative novels called The Cloudburst and The Banana and the Peepal Leaf.

Evocative because these books bring to life an India of which few English-only types have any idea. They vividly illustrate idioms, life-styles and value systems, in this case in and of Andhra.

But while the stories are told well enough a life spent in writing drab reports and treatises in monetary economics - that too for the RBI - has left the books bereft of style. There are no asides, no little codas and cadences. That is a flaw that marred Galbraith's book also. There are no flourishes at all. Mr Vasudevan himself thinks in a very austere manner, but it also looks as if the books have been edited down to the bare bones.

In fact, it is as if the author is narrating a story orally. There is a lot of dialogue. With a less adult storyline, you could be forgiven for thinking it is a grandfather narrating a story to a grandchild in which there are lots of incidents but very few events.

Therein lies their charm. They are well worth reading.

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Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

First Published: May 16 2016 | 9:43 PM IST

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