{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac","title":"Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780374601096","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac","id":"bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac","uuid":"bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac","title":"Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the","normalized_title":"capitalismanditscriticsahistoryfromthe","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780374601096","isbns":["9780374601096"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":681,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bd6aae02-10ad-4c93-8cfd-ed3ca405bfac/search"},"page":{"printed_page":19,"pdf_page":353,"physical_index":353,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c05b1a73a675f2fabce578cecc0874373b3173d86e6086b2c138838e2dff49a9"},"chapter":"CAPITALISM AND ITS CRITICS","content":"“Nature … faithful and submissive to those who respect her”\n\nJ. C. Kumarappa and the Economics of Permanence\n\nOn May 9, 1929, J. C. Kumarappa, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant and economist who lived in Mumbai (which was then called Bombay), traveled to Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, to meet Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the proindependence Indian National Congress. Kumarappa had recently returned to India from New York, where he had obtained a master’s degree in public finance at Columbia University. When he arrived at Gandhi’s ashram, which was located on the banks of the Sabermati River, he saw a diminutive old man clad in a simple dhoti (loincloth) sitting under a tree spinning cotton.1 Gandhi, who to hundreds of millions of Indians was a spiritual leader as well as a political one, invited Kumarappa to sit beside him. At the age of fifty-nine, the mahatma was then at the height of his influence. During the previous decade, his strategy of leading peaceful protests against British rule—satyagraha—had turned him into an iconic figure at home and abroad.\n\nThe following year, Gandhi would undertake his famous Salt March in the coastal town of Dandi, where he and his followers openly flouted the colonial laws by gathering salt on the salt flats. (Since the Salt Act of 1882, Britain had monopolized production of the mineral and imposed a sales tax on it that hurt the poor.) When Gandhi met Kumarappa, however, his mind was on economics rather than politics. Indian nationalists had long claimed that British colonial policies, particularly the tax system it had imposed, impoverished the majority of the native population. Gandhi was looking for someone to conduct a detailed survey of Matar Taluka, a poor rural area in the Kheda District of Gujarat. His goal, he later explained, was to build an “Indian economics” from the “bottom by the a posteriori method of securing rock bottom facts and drawing therefrom, by the most rigid process of reasoning, conclusions which no amount of jugglery could controvert.”2 In some ways, Gandhi and Kumarappa were very different: Gandhi was a Hindu ascetic from Gujarat; Kumarappa, a Christian businessman from Tamil Nadu, in the south of India. But they hit it off, and Gandhi offered Kumarappa the job of leading the survey.\n\n19","previous_page":18,"next_page":20}