Ethnicity Tamil Known for Social history Alma mater Cambridge | Name Dharma Kumar Occupation Historian | |
Notable credit(s) Author of Land and Caste in South India Died October 19, 2001, New Delhi Books Land and caste in South India, Colonialism, Property, and the State | ||
Dharma Kumar (1928 – October 19, 2001) was an Indian economic historian, noted for her work on the agrarian history of India. Her Ph.D at Cambridge on the agrarian history of South India was awarded the Ellen MacArthur Prize, and was published as Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge University Press, 1965).
She is noted for the position that many of the social structures of agrarian India, particularly the large class of landless labourers pre-dated the British era. This challenged the earlier view that the class of agricultural labourers had been formed as a result of British exploitation in the nineteenth century
Life
Born in a progressive Tamil Brahmin family, her father K. Venkataraman was one of India's leading chemists, and was the director of the National Chemical Laboratory. After a childhood in Lahore where her father was professor, Dharma Kumar did her bachelor's in Economics from Elphinstone College, Mumbai. She then went to Cambridge (Newnham College) for her Master's in Economics.
Shortly after Indian independence, Dharma, returned from Cambridge in 1948, and joined the Reserve Bank of India. In 1951, she married Lovraj Kumar, India's first Rhodes scholar. Lovraj was a graduate of chemistry from Oxford and was then working for Burmah-Shell in Mumbai. He would subsequently become a senior bureaucrat, serving as secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum for many years. They had one daughter, Radha Kumar.
After returning to India, she worked briefly at the Indian Council for World Affairs and University of Delhi's Institute for Economic Growth. In 1966, she joined the Delhi School of Economics. She was also one of the founding members of an academic journal, Indian Economic and Social History Review, which she edited for more than thirty years. The journal brought out a memorial volume in her honour in 2002, edited by Sanjay Subrahmanyam.
She was also active in the arts and the literary life of Delhi, and might have been portrayed in Vikram Seth's A suitable boy as the character Professor Ila Chattopadhya. She was also associated with the magazine called Civil Lines.
Dharma retired from the DSE in 1993. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1998, and underwent an unsuccessful operation, and died in late 2001.