The Thorners' works of economic history such as Investment in Empire , The Agrarian Prospect In India and two volumes of collected articles are still crucial reference material for any student of modern India. Alice, 78, now works on Indian urban history. Two books edited by her and Sujata Patel, Bombay—Metaphor for Modern India and Bombay Mosaic of Modern Culture, were recently released.
After a lifetime of painstaking study of India, Alice Thorner's latest books are a tribute to Bombay, a city in which she and her husband and four children lived for almost a decade. It is a study of a megapolis in change. There are articles as diverse as migration patterns in the 19th century as well as Gujarati cultural revivalism. There is even a tone of lament, because now, as Alice Thorner writes, "old chants often lose out to film music".
Indeed, the Thorners have seen the passing of old India and the birth of the new. Daniel wrote his dissertation as far back as the late '40s on the birth of the Indian railways. Although trained in psychology, Alice read so widely on India that after her marriage in 1939 she was asked by the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service to interpret broadcasts about Subhas Chandra Bose, emanating from Tokyo. As the independent Indian nation-state began its tortuous journey into sovereignty, the Thorners stood as witnesses to the midnight tryst with destiny.
"The late '40s and '50s were times of hope, and although the word has been devalued now, a time of idealism," says this doyenne of Indian economic history. "People had made sacrifices for Independence and they were elated that it had come. Of course, there may have been some corruption, but it was on a small scale. There was even a lively critique of Jawaharlal Nehru and the policies of those days. But there was not the sort of despondency and cynicism as I see now."
At the University of Pennsylvania, they learnt Sanskrit from Norman Brown and art history from Stella Kramrsich. After Daniel Thorner's book, Investment in Empire, was published in the '50s, they went on to study Indian land reforms, the cooperative movement and the urban and rural workforce. Daniel even edited an agrarian and ecological atlas of South Asia between the two wars which is slated for publication very soon.
Daniel Thorner made several statements that are still regarded as controversial. The current revolution, he said, is not green or red but steel grey. His work sparked off the still unresolved debate on the mode of production of Indian agriculture. "Daniel was an optimist," says Alice, "never ready to sell India short. And inspite of arguments about impoverishment, never believed that things were getting worse. He was impressed by people's initiative, by the working of capitalist agriculture. Athough he recognised that independent India was by no means an egalitarian country, he doubted whether it had ever been."
THEY met when they were both graduate students at Columbia University in the US—"a perfectly standard story"—married and went to London for a year where "we were first introduced to modern India". P.N. Haksar, Krishna Menon, Feroze Gandhi, Kumaramangalam, "the whole gang", was in London at the time and the freedom struggle was uppermost in their minds. "There was much talk of Nehru then, of Subhas Bose, Gandhi. I remember Indian students sitting at the feet of Krishna Menon and hearing his analysis of the day's news." Today Alice Thorner's contemporaries are grandparents, they have faded from the scene in which they once played an active part. Yet she retains her endless curiosity about India and is still excited at the way in which the policies of the past are being reinterpreted. "So much that was held to be true in those days is now being re-examined. That fertilisers would multiply crop output, that canals would solve the problems of dry regions. Now all of these facts are seen to have serious ecological consequences."
Her own work on working class women in Bombay—she has edited a report with sociologist Neera Desai—took her deep into the heart of the city. How did the people react to her? "Once when I did not go to the slum, the women asked one of my researchers, where is the headmistress today? They had found a place to fit me in! A foreign-looking woman, asking them questions, what else could I be?" she smiles.
What brought and kept them here, this scholarly American couple plodding through the heat and dust for over 40 years? In the high noon of McCarthyism, Daniel Thorner was blacklisted as a possible communist. Hounded out of their home in the US, they remained in India from 1952 to 1960 in a flat on Warden Road, Bombay. "It was in a Sindhi colony and they treated us so well. We were never made to feel strange.
" For the last 30 years, Alice Thorner has lived in Paris where she is associated with the Centre for the Study of India and South Asia. "While Indian Studies in the US and in the UK has subsided a little, in France it has exploded," she says. "Of course, that's because the beginnings were very small."
She brings an old world, no-nonsense pragmatism to her observations on India, no airy fairy post-modernism for this level-headed chronicler. "I must say I find the notion that history doesn't matter a little difficult to accept." She says she doesn't quite understand the workings of the globalised Indian economy either—"It's far too technical for me." And she would like India to have control over her own economy and society "although, who am I to say?" From her base in Paris, Alice Thorner visits India regularly, keeping alive her husband's dream of intellectual exchange. In an age of high-flying punditry, she is a shy prophet of modern India.
