Teaching Career
He joined as a lecturer in St. Paul's Cathedral Mission College, an affiliate of the University of Calcutta in 1930 and continued till 1936. There he worked out plans for rural service programme in the college in cooperation with the Visva-Bharati University associates at Sriniketan and Santiniketan.
He married Helen Paranjothi.
After obtaining his doctorate, in 1940, he joined Madras Christian College, Chennai, when he was only thirty years of age, as its first professor and head of the department of economics. He remained there till 1946. Prof. K. N. Raj, founder of Centre for Developmental Studies, Tiruvananthapuram, and G. Jagathpathy, former Chief Secretary of the government of Madhya Pradesh were his students in the 1941-44 batch of BA Honours course. Raj has recalled about
| “ | the emphasis he placed on (a) learning economic theory directly from the original contributions of recognized thinkers (rather than from the processed and often over-simplified versions available textbooks on the subject), and (b) independently judging its applicability to the conditions in India through empirical investigations and observations based upon them. … He kept the formal lectures to the minimum given for the course (no more than about twelve a week in the first year, nine or so in the second year and as low as five in the final year), leaving us adequate time for reading widely and reflecting over it.2 | ” |
At that time the economics cirriculum of Madras University was focused on Marshallian economics. Adiseshiah introduced the study of imperfect - monopolistic competitions and pioneered teaching Keynesian economics to South Indian students.
Adiseshiah exhorted his students to visit the neighboring villages to Tambaram, where the college was situated, to study and collect data about the living conditions of the inhabitants including their education, health, size of the family and other particulars. He started a Rural Service League in the college, and led the members taking with them first aid kits containing medicines for common ailments such as ointments, eyedrops and laxatives. K.N. Raj has asserted:
| “ | This unique approach proved, in no time, to be an ‘Open Sesame’. In fact, long after I left MCC (Madras Christian College) and out of curiosity, went back to a village, I got a warm welcome, though it was now their turn - the villagers – to badger me with innumerable questions. Developing such emotional links was clearly two-way-street – which those who now exhort us to integrate with the rural people forget all too often.4 | ” |
His belief in the necessity for integration between theory and practice of economics remained with him till the end. The last popular lecture which Adiseshiah delivered at Stella Maris College on Sep. 8, 1994, published in the December issue of MIDS Bulletin, exhorted the teachers and students to test their theories and all their learning at the practical field level. He told them that the economics student should identify the people below poverty line in the village and help them to rise above it through various forms of self-employment. He considered that this was part of the learning process for both the teacher and the taught.
He has recorded that his own views were shaped
| “ | in the villages of Bengal and South India with their rural service centres where we worked out the economics of hand pound rice, hand-made paper, hand-loomed textiles, crop rotation and rural credit, rural medicine and sanitation, adult literacy and curriculum reform. It was there that I found the testing ground for the many ideas and plans that I carried with me to UNESCO in Paris and from there to the four corners of the earth.5 | ” |
His publications in 1940s included books on banking, rural development and agricultural transformation. He was engaged, with his fellow economists in the Madras University, in work on planning the future industrialization of India and Madras State.
Helen Paranjothi bore him a son and a daughter. In 1946 his marriage fell apart. Adiseshiah fell in love with Elizabeth Pothen, who was then professor of history at the Madras Women’s Christian College. The separation between Adiseshiah and Helen Paranjothi was bitter and prolonged. He turned a renegade. The annulment of the marriage came only in 1956. Meanwhile Adiseshiah married Elizabeth Pothen.
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