MacroScan (Printable Version) - On Tapas Majumdar

Tapas Majumdar who passed away on the 15th of October was an outstanding economist and teacher. A person of extraordinary dignity and integrity, he was never one to thrust himself into the limelight, but he had a profound influence on several generations of students, first at Presidency College, Calcutta (where he taught, among others, Amartya Sen, Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amiya Bagchi) and later at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he founded the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, becoming Emeritus Professor after retirement.

After early education in Calcutta, Tapas Majumdar went to the London School of Economics where he completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Lionel Robbins on ''The Measurement of Utility''. This was subsequently published as a book and went on to become a classic. With impeccable clarity and logical precision, it negotiated what was then a new and complex field, utility theory, with such mastery, that for numerous students it remained, for years to come, the best exposition on the subject. I certainly remember that for me it was The Measurement of Utility, on which I had to do a tutorial at the Delhi School of Economics, that first brought some clarity on the subject with its distinctions between Introspective Cardinalism, Introspective Ordinalism, Behavioral Cardinalism and Behavioral Ordinalism.

He returned from LSE to teach at Presidency College, Calcutta, where, after the retirement of Professor Bhabatosh Datta, he became the Head of the Department. As Head he presided over a galaxy of remarkable economists, including Dipak Banerji, Mihir Rakshit, Amiya Bagchi and Nabendu Sen, who constituted at that time the Economics faculty of Presidency College. My first meeting with Professor Majumdar was in 1969, when he was sitting as the head of a table around which sat this illustrious group. I had just been selected for a faculty position at Cambridge and was visiting Calcutta and in particular Amiya Bagchi, my predecessor in that post at Cambridge. Professor Bagchi took me along to Presidency College to which he had returned. Professor Majumdar made some polite inquiries about me and gave me a cup of tea. The respectful affection with which he was regarded by his illustrious colleagues, was obvious to me even at this first meeting.

Of course I had seen Tapas Majumdar once before this. In the early sixties he was giving a lecture at the Delhi School of Economics. He was so famous at the time that just to get a glimpse of him, several of us undergraduate students had gone along to the lecture. The Lecture theatre was jam-packed, with scores of people standing in the aisles. We also stood without following a word of what he was saying. After he had spoken, somebody got up from the audience and, to everyone's irritation, asked him an extremely long-winded and ponderous question. Professor Majumdar, who had a mischievous sense of humour (about which his classmate from college days, Ashok Mitra, would tell me later) simply said: ''could you repeat that please?'' After the question which had begun with ''Do you think…'' was ponderously repeated, he just said: ''No''.

Professor Majumdar who had begun his career as a theorist in Calcutta (he had developed an alternative proof of Amartya Sen's ''A Possibility Theorem on Majority Decisions''), made a twofold switch at the beginning of the seventies. At the suggestion of his friend J. P. Naik he moved to Delhi to occupy a chair at JNU and devoted himself to Education Studies, in which he had developed an interest earlier. The Zakir Husain Centre was the product of this double switch.

When the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning was started by Krishna Bharadwaj at JNU, he was already in the university and helped greatly in the setting up of the new Centre. Until the Centre acquired adequate faculty strength he regularly taught a compulsory course in the M.A. programme. He was an awe-inspiring but avuncular figure for younger faculty members like myself (he was in fact the uncle of my colleague, the eminent economic theorist, Anjan Mukherji). It was people like Professor Majumdar who built JNU into the unique institution it has become.

Professor Majumdar had an honest and progressive liberalism which has become rare these days. His days in Presidency College had coincided with the Naxalite movement of the late sixties and early seventies which had drawn many students. Despite his political views being completely different from the Naxalite students', Professor Majumdar was one of the extremely few teachers (Professor Sibatosh Mukherji, also later of JNU, was another) who defended the students and came to their personal assistance, even while making no secret of his political differences with them.

At JNU in the early seventies there was a strike called by the Students Union, then headed by Prakash Karat, on the demand that the students should have the right to get their examination scripts re-evaluated if they so wished. In response to the strike the authorities closed down the university and shut the Hostel Mess. As the situation deteriorated, the Students Union informally agreed to call off the strike, provided a group of about 30 teachers appealed to them to do so, and it was left to younger teachers like me to see if this was feasible. The general mood among teachers was hostile to students, since the demand on which the strike had been called appeared to them to question their integrity. So, we were in a quandary. Taking courage in both hands we approached Professor Majumdar, who took one look at the appeal and signed it without a word. With such a senior Professor being the first signatory, it was easy to get signatures from other teachers, and the crisis was averted. All his life Professor Majumdar lived up to the courage of his liberal convictions.

This is also evident in the excellent report that the Committee on Education headed by him produced in January 1999, for which the country will remember him with gratitude. The report stated unambiguously that as a consequence of the Unnikrishnan judgement of the Supreme Court, universalization of elementary education had become a ''justiciable entitlement'' of every Indian child. Hence, the ''State has to make the necessary reallocation of resources, by superseding other important claims if necessary, in a manner that the justiciable entitlement becomes a reality.'' At a time when neo-liberalism had become dominant in official circles, with the government looking for ways to wriggle out of its Constitutional commitment to universalize elementary education, and keen instead on privatizing education, Professor Majumdar's report was a sharp and uncompromising document. His integrity did not bow to power.

Honest to the core, an inspiring figure for generations of students and colleagues, Professor Majumdar was a role model. It is people like him who constitute the moral core of a society.



Themes > Features	18.10.2010


On Tapas Majumdar

Prabhat Patnaik

Tapas Majumdar who passed away on the 15th of October was an outstanding economist and teacher. A person of extraordinary dignity and integrity, he was never one to thrust himself into the limelight, but he had a profound influence on several generations of students, first at Presidency College, Calcutta (where he taught, among others, Amartya Sen, Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amiya Bagchi) and later at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he founded the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, becoming Emeritus Professor after retirement. After early education in Calcutta, Tapas Majumdar went to the London School of Economics where he completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Lionel Robbins on ''The Measurement of Utility''. This was subsequently published as a book and went on to become a classic. With impeccable clarity and logical precision, it negotiated what was then a new and complex field, utility theory, with such mastery, that for numerous students it remained, for years to come, the best exposition on the subject. I certainly remember that for me it was The Measurement of Utility, on which I had to do a tutorial at the Delhi School of Economics, that first brought some clarity on the subject with its distinctions between Introspective Cardinalism, Introspective Ordinalism, Behavioral Cardinalism and Behavioral Ordinalism. He returned from LSE to teach at Presidency College, Calcutta, where, after the retirement of Professor Bhabatosh Datta, he became the Head of the Department. As Head he presided over a galaxy of remarkable economists, including Dipak Banerji, Mihir Rakshit, Amiya Bagchi and Nabendu Sen, who constituted at that time the Economics faculty of Presidency College. My first meeting with Professor Majumdar was in 1969, when he was sitting as the head of a table around which sat this illustrious group. I had just been selected for a faculty position at Cambridge and was visiting Calcutta and in particular Amiya Bagchi, my predecessor in that post at Cambridge. Professor Bagchi took me along to Presidency College to which he had returned. Professor Majumdar made some polite inquiries about me and gave me a cup of tea. The respectful affection with which he was regarded by his illustrious colleagues, was obvious to me even at this first meeting. Of course I had seen Tapas Majumdar once before this. In the early sixties he was giving a lecture at the Delhi School of Economics. He was so famous at the time that just to get a glimpse of him, several of us undergraduate students had gone along to the lecture. The Lecture theatre was jam-packed, with scores of people standing in the aisles. We also stood without following a word of what he was saying. After he had spoken, somebody got up from the audience and, to everyone's irritation, asked him an extremely long-winded and ponderous question. Professor Majumdar, who had a mischievous sense of humour (about which his classmate from college days, Ashok Mitra, would tell me later) simply said: ''could you repeat that please?'' After the question which had begun with ''Do you think…'' was ponderously repeated, he just said: ''No''. Professor Majumdar who had begun his career as a theorist in Calcutta (he had developed an alternative proof of Amartya Sen's ''A Possibility Theorem on Majority Decisions''), made a twofold switch at the beginning of the seventies. At the suggestion of his friend J. P. Naik he moved to Delhi to occupy a chair at JNU and devoted himself to Education Studies, in which he had developed an interest earlier. The Zakir Husain Centre was the product of this double switch. When the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning was started by Krishna Bharadwaj at JNU, he was already in the university and helped greatly in the setting up of the new Centre. Until the Centre acquired adequate faculty strength he regularly taught a compulsory course in the M.A. programme. He was an awe-inspiring but avuncular figure for younger faculty members like myself (he was in fact the uncle of my colleague, the eminent economic theorist, Anjan Mukherji). It was people like Professor Majumdar who built JNU into the unique institution it has become. Professor Majumdar had an honest and progressive liberalism which has become rare these days. His days in Presidency College had coincided with the Naxalite movement of the late sixties and early seventies which had drawn many students. Despite his political views being completely different from the Naxalite students', Professor Majumdar was one of the extremely few teachers (Professor Sibatosh Mukherji, also later of JNU, was another) who defended the students and came to their personal assistance, even while making no secret of his political differences with them. At JNU in the early seventies there was a strike called by the Students Union, then headed by Prakash Karat, on the demand that the students should have the right to get their examination scripts re-evaluated if they so wished. In response to the strike the authorities closed down the university and shut the Hostel Mess. As the situation deteriorated, the Students Union informally agreed to call off the strike, provided a group of about 30 teachers appealed to them to do so, and it was left to younger teachers like me to see if this was feasible. The general mood among teachers was hostile to students, since the demand on which the strike had been called appeared to them to question their integrity. So, we were in a quandary. Taking courage in both hands we approached Professor Majumdar, who took one look at the appeal and signed it without a word. With such a senior Professor being the first signatory, it was easy to get signatures from other teachers, and the crisis was averted. All his life Professor Majumdar lived up to the courage of his liberal convictions. This is also evident in the excellent report that the Committee on Education headed by him produced in January 1999, for which the country will remember him with gratitude. The report stated unambiguously that as a consequence of the Unnikrishnan judgement of the Supreme Court, universalization of elementary education had become a ''justiciable entitlement'' of every Indian child. Hence, the ''State has to make the necessary reallocation of resources, by superseding other important claims if necessary, in a manner that the justiciable entitlement becomes a reality.'' At a time when neo-liberalism had become dominant in official circles, with the government looking for ways to wriggle out of its Constitutional commitment to universalize elementary education, and keen instead on privatizing education, Professor Majumdar's report was a sharp and uncompromising document. His integrity did not bow to power. Honest to the core, an inspiring figure for generations of students and colleagues, Professor Majumdar was a role model. It is people like him who constitute the moral core of a society.



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