1960 is an important year for those working in the domain of history of economic thought. This is the year Piero Sraffa published his slim but analytically powerful book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which revived the surplus approach to economics as found in the work of William Petty, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. 1960 is an important year for historians of Indian economic thought because it is the year that Krishna Bharadwaj, who would later review Sraffa’s book for Economic Weekly (now Economic and Political Weekly) and work in the tradition of the surplus approach to economics, submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Bombay. And it was in 1960 that Kanta Ranadive joined as a faculty member at the University of Bombay — the first woman to join the economics department¹. This essay is about her intellectual world — the people, the ideas.

There is very little in terms of biographical details that has been published on Ranadive (1925(?)-1996)². However, there are some details that she provides in her work, especially in her two books. We are also able to get a glimpse into her character on the basis of the published obituaries as well as personal recollections. 

Ranadive published articles in both Indian and foreign journals; the Indian journals include Artha Vijnana, Economic and Political Weekly and Indian Economic Journal; the foreign journals include Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics and World Development. In addition to journal articles, she also published two books: Income Distribution: The Unsolved Puzzle (Oxford University Press, 1978) and The Political Economy of Poverty (Orient Longman, 1990). 

Ranadive spent most of her teaching career at the Department of Economics, University of Bombay. During 1976 – 7, she was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. In 1987, Ranadive gave the Kale Memorial Lecture at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE), which was published the same year in Artha Vijnana under the title ​“Town and Country in Economy in Transition”. Ranadive was made an honorary fellow of the Asiatic Society of Bombay in 1991; she delivered a lecture there on 22 November 1993, which was published in the following year under the title ​“Market, Democracy and Unequal Relation” in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW).

The following recollection from C.T. Kurien, a contemporary of Ranadive, shows her as someone invested in the teaching of economics (and attests to her friendship with Joan Robinson). 

My first contact with Kanta was some time in 1970 – 71 after I had a piece with the title ​“What is Growth?” published in the EPW. She was one of the few who responded to it. After that we corresponded directly for some time. After  the Madras University selected some colleges, including Madras Christian College for autonomy, my colleagues in the Econ Dept and I produced an alternate undergraduate course for economics and I published a paper about it in the EPW. Kanta found it refreshing and at my request came over to MCC and spent a couple of days with us along with Krishna Bharadwaj interacting with the faculty. After I moved to MIDS also Kanta and I kept in touch for a while. I know from both Kanta and Joan Robinson that they used to correspond. Joan probably visited her during her frequent trips to India.³

She took ​“early retirement” from her teaching career in the Department of Economics, University of Bombay to work on ​“problems of economic development and income distribution”⁴. As Romar Correa, a former student of Ranadive, recalls: ​“Late in the day she was taken up by the dialectic and believed that an understanding of Hegel was indispensable to an understanding of Marx. She also held that theory must be immersed in history. Hence, not just Capital but Capitalism.”⁵  

After her death on 15 April 1996, Ashok Mitra and Prabhat Patnaik wrote obituaries in the Economic and Political Weekly, and Meghnad Desai in the Times of India. According to Mitra, “[h]er empirical findings led her to one or two important theorems on the nature of social exploitation and income inequalities which were close to standard Marxist formulations. She, in other words, reached her Marxism along her private route.” But Mitra does not tell us anything more about her ​“one or two important theorems.” Mitra informs us that Ranadive ​“was a fiercely private person.” Patnaik’s obituary is in the form of a letter to the editor, which is in turn based on the resolution passed by the condolence meeting by the teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University on April 22. ​“She”, Patnaik writes, ​“will be remembered for her pioneering research work on theoretical and empirical issues relating to income distribution.” Sadly, no such intellectual remembrance has been visible.

In his obituary, Desai, who belonged to the first batch of economics PhD students who were mentored by Ranadive, writes: ​“Not only was she a super teacher. But she was also a pioneering woman economist in the Indian context where even today in India as abroad very few women occupy the top echelon. It would not have been easy to survive in the male atmosphere of the department. She not only survived; she made her mark.” 

The major intellectual influence on Kanta Ranadive, as visible from her writings, is from Marx. The following vivid recollection by Romar Correa, a former student of Ranadive, also attests to this: ​“Only the volumes of Capital adorned her table and she followed the texts assiduously. The only occasion she said something nice about anybody was this quote from Brahmananda she approved of: ​‘Kanta Ranadive is a Marxist but a Marxist of a different kind’.”⁶

Ranadive’s 1978 book Income Distribution has its origins in the six lectures she gave on ​“Theories of Distribution” at M.S. University, Baroda in 1968. It ​“is a survey of the economics of distribution.” As she writes in the preface, “[t]he size distribution of income involves, on the one hand, technical problems of concepts and measurement and, on the other, philosophical issues like justice and equity.” She acknowledges Maurice Dobb, the Marxist economist, for his comments on the chapter on ​“The Ricardo Problem.”

In the book, she critically engages with theories of personal and functional income distribution, reviews the economic ideas of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, presents the empirical behaviour of income shares, criticises the marginalist production function and the elasticity of substitution, discusses market structure and degree of monopoly in relation to Kalecki’s theory of income distribution, and ends with a discussion on the investment-output ratio and savings propensities.

Not surprisingly, Ranadive favoured Kalecki’s theory and not the marginal productivity theory of income distribution because the former recognised structural power. As she concludes her critical discussion of Kalecki’s theory, “[t]hrough explicit recognition of the role of market imperfections, oligopoly agreements and relative bargaining strength of trade unions and employers in determining wages and profit margins, Kalecki’s model makes distribution a function of class conflict” (p. 265).

Her two R.C. Dutt lectures, given in 1987, were published as The Political Economy of Poverty in 1990. The first lecture/​chapter titled ​“The Challenge of Poverty” examines the ​“concept of poverty”, ​“poverty line,” ​“poverty and inequality,” ​“relevant conceptual structure” and the ​“historical dimension.” The second lecture/​chapter titled ​“Poverty and Social Formation” discusses ​“Classical economists and Marx,” ​“Marx on poverty,” ​“From poverty to inequality,” ​“Capitalist society and poverty” and ​“Economies in transition.” 

In the first lecture, Ranadive calls for a holistic approach to understand poverty. As she writes, “[t]he only way to understand the modality of both continuity and change is therefore to have the whole network of closely interrelated concepts, because social phenomena are inherently dynamic in the sense that they are parts of an overall social structure which needs reproduction for its continued existence” (p. 27). After all, as she argues, “[a] realistic appraisal of ​‘necessaries’ cannot be made without taking into account the fact that spending habits are socially determined” (p. 9). 

The second lecture ​“Poverty and Social Formation” is an application of, in Ranadive’s own words, the ​“Marxian paradigm.” She employs the Marxian categories of property, production conditions, materialism, labour, among others to situate poverty as a structural characteristic of capitalist societies. In all this, she highlights the need to recognise the nature of power relations. Her references demonstrate engagement with a wide range of ideas; for instance, she cites the work of Fernand Braudel, Robert Brenner, Eric Hobsbawm, Michał Kalecki, Simon Kuznets, Wassily Leontief, Karl Polanyi, and Richard Titmuss. In the chapter, she critically reviews the economic ideas of the classical economists, especially Smith and Ricardo, and arrives at the conclusion that history ​“has no role even in classical economics as a closer scrutiny would indicate” (p. 33). Though I think that there is enough primary textual evidence to contest her claim, it does not seem appropriate for this introductory essay on Ranadive’s life and work.

Ranadive viewed economics as consisting of contending schools of thought. In her seminar paper published in the 1979 volume Framework for a National Credit Plan edited by S.L. Shetty, she discusses ​“two alternative approaches” — the ​“formalist” approach of marginalist economics and the ​“interventionist” approach of Keynesian economics (p. 5). While she was highly critical of the former, she was also critical of the latter. Ranadive also refers to the former as ​“orthodox neo-classical theory” (p. 6) and ​“equilibrium economics” (p. 7). 

Besides her criticisms of marginalism in her monographs and articles, she was also a signatory to a ​“letter to the editor” published in the popular Economic and Political Weekly. While the historical moment was the awarding of the Nobel prize in economics to George Stigler, it may be viewed as a general criticism of the prize itself.  I provide an excerpt from the letter below.

By deliberately ignoring distinguished scholars like Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, and by repeatedly awarding the Economics prize to those with much less creative contribution, the award committees have betrayed unworthy prejudicies [sic] and thus devalued the Economics prize almost to the level of the much disgraced Nobel Peace Prize. The Economics prize can retain its stature only if it is kept free from petty doctrinal sectarianism (p. 2076).

The list of signatories is long; it also included K.N. Raj and V.K.R.V. Rao⁷.

Ranadive considered theory to be important. As she tellingly writes, “[t]hose who are impatient to get things done and as such have a distaste for theory may do well to remember that even ​‘practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually,’ as Keynes put it, ​‘the slaves of some defunct economist’” (p. 1). In this 1979 essay, she constructively employs the following concepts from the surplus approach to provide an analysis and framework for India’s development planning: basics and non-basics (from Sraffa) and expanded reproduction and primitive accumulation (from Marx). And in her 1990 book, Ranadive makes an insightful observation regarding theory: ​“any conceptualization is more than a matter of formal structure because it has intellectual aims and policy implications” (p. 21).

In the surplus approach of Marx and Sraffa, also employed by Smith and Ricardo, the role of power is central. The unequal nature of power is a constant in Ranadive’s writings. And she rightly notices the ​“irrelevance of the role of power in economic activity” in mainstream economics (p. 8). This is one of the reasons she believes that the developments in economic ideas over time ​“have not always implied unqualified progress and in many respects there has been positive retrogression” (p. 8). Like many Marxists, Ranadive was critical of Smith and Ricardo for not possessing ​“a materialist concept of history;” that is, as Ranadive writes in her 1990 book The Political Economy of Poverty, they ​“failed to distinguish capitalist economy from ​‘an exchange economy in general’” (p. 35). 

About the author

Alex M Thomas is Associate Professor in Economics at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He has authored the textbook Macroeconomics: An Introduction, and is a founding-member of the Indian Society for the History of Economic Thought. [Full profile]