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K S Krishnaswamy: A Tribute
K S Krishnaswamy was closely associated with policymaking in the Reserve Bank of India and the Planning Commission from the 1950s to the early 1980s, retiring as deputy governor of the RBI. Over six decades, he was also a writer, well-wisher and supporter of the Economic Weekly and then the Economic & Political Weekly. He was also chairman of the Sameeksha Trust (1998-2006), publishers of EPW. A tribute by a close friend.
When Sachin Chaudhuri decided in the late 1940s to launch his cottage enterprise, the Economic Weekly, he had gushing encouragement and good wishes from elders and friends in the academia, such as from D P Mukherji in Lucknow, A K Dasgupta in Benaras, and D Ghosh in Bombay. That was not enough. He could still dare because he could lean on a few voluntary artisans. They were young researchers from either the Bombay School of Economics and Sociology or the fledgling Research Department of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). K S Krishnaswamy was one amongst them. With his death on 10 June the last witness present at the genesis of the Economic Weekly, which transmuted into the Economic & Political Weekly in 1966, is gone.
Krishnaswamy – Krishna to his friends – was the first London correspondent of the weekly, for on the day the journal was formally published, he was completing his doctoral dissertation with the London School of Economics (LSE). He returned home next year, and remained the flesh of the weekly till the end, sharing its excitements as well as its worries, excitement over the impact it was making both on academia and within the political arena, worries over how to gather bright, readable, penetrating “copies” as well as on the precarious state of the periodical’s finances.
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