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David Engerman, who is not an economist but teaches history and global affairs at Yale University in the US, has written this very fat book about six development economists from South Asia: Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Jagdish Bhagwati, Rehman Sobhan (Bangladesh), Mahbub ul Haq (Pakistan) and Lal Jayawardene (Sri Lanka). The introduction is titled ‘Development as History and Biography’. That should make libraries buy three copies, one for each subject.
It is a matter of conjecture if Sen and Bhagwati see themselves as ‘development’ economists. Also, the title, with the word apostle in it, is intriguing because for 205 years Cambridge Apostles was the name of an intellectual club that permitted only 12 members at a time. Their names are secret.
The six men Engerman has chosen were all educated in the 1950s at Cambridge, UK, where economics was taught with a softly leftist orientation, and descriptively, rather than with the mathematical rigour of the US. In the prevailing Cambridge view of the time the state was assigned a leading role in fostering economic growth.
Left leaning
But growth, while seen as being necessary, is not regarded as being sufficient. For achieving this completeness, the soft Left introduced a new objective: development. Basically, it meant higher state investment in health, education, female emancipation and a few other things. The focus was to be people instead of the usual things that economics studied. And the allocation of resources was to be guided by governments rather than markets.
Five of Engerman’s ‘apostles’ were all for it. One, Jagdish Bhagwati, while agreeing that people must form the focus of policy, wasn’t at all sure about assigning such a role to the state. While Sen and Bhagwati were contributing hugely to academic economics, the other four waded into economic administration and advocacy. They often used economics to justify the government’s policies and tried to change it whenever possible. Amongst the Indian economists, Manmohan Singh was the only one to stay on in India.
We know a lot about Sen, Bhagwati and Singh. So for an Indian reader the real value of this book lies in what it says about Sobhan, Haq and Jayawardena. They played as great a role in their countries as did the Indians did in India.
But Haq didn’t have as much success as Sobhan and Jayawardena did. Like Singh in India in 1991 they helped completely transform the economies of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The recent problems these countries are facing are largely because they have abandoned the paths shown by them.
Early on in the book, Engerman tells us how these six economists were quite often at odds with each other. They had all kept in touch and saw things very differently at times. The goal was known but they could not agree fully on the paths to that goal.
One reason for this could simply be that barring Sen and Bhagwati, the others were keenly aware of what their national politics required of them, at least in their public utterances. What was remarkable was the ease with which each of them made economics fit into political boots. They served their governments well.
Nowhere did this become more clear than in an interview that Singh, as RBI governor, gave to TN Ninan of India Today in 1983. He was candid and said the Indian economy needed to free itself of bureaucratic controls. But later when he was heading the Planning Commission later he toed the political line completely.
This book isn’t written as a set of biographical essays. Instead it tells a highly readable story of the professional lives of these economists. It’s replete with anecdotes and insights that are extensively referenced and footnoted. Engerman says he has interviewed around 100 people.
Taken together the narrative adds up to a wonderful portrait of them as students and top-notch professionals. The only problem is its sheer size: you need a desk to keep it on while reading. But pleasure is always accompanied by pain.
The reviewer was a student of Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh at the Delhi School of Economics and is an alumni of Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK
Title: Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made
Author: David C Engerman
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Price: ₹1,300
Published on June 15, 2025
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