Surendra J. Patel Six years back, an economist called Surendra J. Patel passed away. He seems to have been both prolific and respected in his day—the Hindu ’s obituary of him, from which a bit is reproduced below, suggests so. Perhaps his major works are still sometimes read by economists and historians in a library or two. At Permanent Black, however, there would have been no reason for his writing to be remembered had a section in one of his essays not struck an editor here as unusually felicitous—in fact, as prose much more expressive than any that editors in scholarly publishing, weather-beaten and teeth-gritten by academese, expect to see in an essay on the economics of agriculture. To be fair to the late Dr Patel, this compliment cannot be laid as a charge upon his entire essay, the bulk of it being what Dr Patel meant it to be, namely, sound agricultural economics. Orwell and Woolf don’t lurk between its lines. The whole isn’t remotely a stab in the direction o...