Paul Kurien

Paul Kurien I FIRST heard of Paul Kurien from a teacher of mine in Calcutta. In the early 1970s they had been students together at the JawahartaJ Nehru University in New Delhi. Those were the halcyon days of the JNU, newly set up, with its teachers and students fiercely committed to scholarship and ideological debate, or rather, to the inter penetration of one with the other. Among the precociously gifted talents at the university were my teacher and paul. One was a Maoist, the other a Trotskyism both had an acute intelligence and a formidable knowledge of the scriptures. Evidently they had had some rare battles in hostel room and coffee house. My teacher invariably referred to Paul as 'Paul Marx', at once a tribute to his erudition and an indictment of his refusal to see another point of view.