How John Matthai became a leading light of economic policy in independent India

Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy’s biography of John Matthai, Honest John, is an object study of how an author has to perform an intricate balancing act between the different elements of a subject’s life: unspooling the various milestones, his professional progression, the contexts (economic, social and political) defining his professional choices and, finally, how the interplay between the subject’s personal events, or emotional growth, determine some life choices or professional achievements. John Matthai is, admittedly, an interesting choice—independent India’s first railways minister and its second finance minister—though charting his life holds myriad challenges and Dadabhoy’s courageous enterprise manages to score on some counts but comes up empty on many others.

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Matthai’s life became manifestly fascinating by first moving from the private sector to the government, and then becoming a core member of the policy circle that watched over the transition of India from a colony to an independent republic. Matthai had till then shifted from academia to policymaking before settling down at the Tata Group. As a professor of economics at Madras Presidency College, he was nominated to the Madras legislative council in November 1922, affording him first-hand experience in bridging the distance between theory and practice.

This brought him to the notice of the Tata Group which pursued him and convinced him to join. Matthai’s work on the Bombay Plan—drafted under the imprimatur of J.R.D. Tata and G.D. Birla, among others—had caught the attention of both Congress party leaders as well as the colonial administration. Matthai’s graduation into national-level policymaking happened when he was invited to join the interim government in August 1946.

It is here that Matthai bumped up against national politics, preparing him for long debates, contentious arguments and partisan broadsides against his policy choices. Initially approached for the finance portfolio, the political exigency of having to accommodate Muslim League’s Liaquat Ali Khan forced Matthai to console himself with the industries and supply portfolio. From here to railway minister during independence, which literally had to transport the horrors of Partition across borders, and finance minister thereafter, Dadabhoy’s biography is like a luxury train, affording readers a fleeting view of modern India’s economic history as it passes by.

Dadabhoy diligently excavates official memoranda, policy briefs, letters, Parliament records and debates to provide a glimpse of how a newly-formed republic, recovering from decades of surplus extraction while grappling with widespread poverty and the after-effects of a devastating communal carnage, was trying to craft a sustainable and equitable policy architecture. Statements from leaders with contesting views provide an interesting dynamic, showcasing some of the moral and ethical dilemmas in constructing a democratic, empathetic and secular republic from scratch.

Matthai’s biography as a vehicle provides an excellent vantage view. But herein lies the nub. There is a lot going on outside that is covered meticulously and, yet, the tumult and turmoil occurring inside the vehicle goes completely undocumented. This is a large, noticeable gap; Dadabhoy has fastidiously mounted flesh and bones to a skeletal framework but forgotten to add a soul to the end-product. It is this conspicuous omission that robs the biography of meaning.

Writing about the art of writing biographies, specifically Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria, author Virginia Woolf had commented: “Could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and yet keep the peculiar virtue that belongs to fact—its suggestive reality, its own proper creativeness?" This “suggestive reality" is perhaps the secret sauce that could have helped Honest John become a compelling narrative, instead of just an interesting read.

For example, close to 100 pages are dedicated to tracing the debates, question-and-answers, budgetary allocations after Matthai joins the interim government and later assumes office as railways minister. It is an informative interlude, providing readers a view of India’s modern economic history in the making. But, then, readers come away not any wiser about the dramatis personae, specifically John Matthai, scripting this important chapter in India’s history.

In the preface to American Prometheus, a biography of scientist Robert Oppenheimer, authors Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin confess that, “It is a deeply personal biography researched and written in the belief that a person’s public behaviour and his policy decisions (and in Oppenheimer’s case perhaps even his science) are guided by the private experiences of a lifetime." There are multiple instances in Honest John which cry out for some understanding of Matthai’s “private experiences".

The first, and most obvious, missing link in the book is the influence of Achamma Matthai. Apart from a perfunctory mention in the book as John Matthai’s wife, Achamma deserved some more exposure. She was one of the early female graduates in India, having graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from St John’s Diocesan College, Kolkata, in 1920. The relationship between Achamma and John needed to be explored in more granular detail and not the boilerplate statement, “It proved to be a happy marriage". Achamma’s influence on John Matthai’s career trajectory, his professional choices and his moral journey looms over the book like some nebulous spirit, palpable yet undefined.

This becomes evident in March 1944, when both John and Achamma are distraught after their daughter Valsa dies under mysterious circumstances in the US. This is soon after the Bombay Plan is announced and two years before Matthai resigns from the Tatas to join the interim government. The interim period is intensely important but Dadabhoy provides little for us to understand Matthai’s state of mind, how he manages to tackle the demons or how the tragedy shaped his personality thereafter.

In the foreword to the book, Matthai’s daughter-in-law Syloo (married to Ravi Matthai) describes the man: “Daddy was seen as being a formidable person, a man with a serious demeanour and an eminence which many thought precluded intimacy or even small liberties. But, at home, he was an entirely different person." In other words, Matthai, like everybody else, was human with the usual flaws and frailties.

Dadabhoy provides a brief glimpse of the man’s faultlines by recounting the episode where Matthai seeks Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s intervention after Matthai’s son reportedly runs over and kills a pedestrian in Allahabad. This is the only instance when readers catch sight of the great man’s feet of clay; Dadabhoy’s hands may have been forced here by an earlier book which first recounted the incident. But barring this single incident, there is scarce little to sketch out the man’s personality.

This shortcoming is perhaps born out of necessity. While Parliamentary records and inter-ministerial archives have become much more accessible, we do not know if Dadabhoy had similar luck with John Matthai’s personal documents and letters. Also, to be fair to Dadabhoy, many of the people who knew Matthai personally have all passed on, adding another layer of insurmountable constraints. This biography, therefore, apart from being a valuable document for understanding how some of India’s policy contours unfolded in the first decade after independence, adds little to the mystique of John Matthai as one of India’s leading post-independent policy architects.

The author is a senior journalist and author of Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of India’s Financial Sector Reforms. He posts @rajrishisinghal

‘Honest John: A Life of John Matthai’: By Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy, Penguin Random House India, 396 pages, ₹999

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