The Chosen One:Krishna Bharadwaj (1935-1992)

It is evident that Krishna Bharadwaj was not the first Indian economist to engage with classical political economy (henceforth CPE) in general or Piero Sraffa’s work in particular. She was, in her own time, the youngest of them and most consequential at that, having made CPE the centre-piece of virtually all her work. The present account of Bharadwaj’s work and persona highlights four features that seem to set her apart from other scholars. The first one is that she was completely home-grown as an economist. All her training, including doctoral study, was in India. This was by choice (see below) and unlike the case of her seniors like Arun Bose and Gautam Mathur, and contemporaries such as Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen. When she published her well-known review of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Sraffa 1960; henceforth PCMC) in the Indian journal Economic Weekly (see Bharadwaj 1963), she was teaching at Bombay University and had no direct exposure to Cambridge, UK.