Krishan Kumar

Krishan Kumar interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 14th June 2019

Born in Trinidad in the West Indies in 1942; I don't know a lot about my very distant ancestry but I do know my family were all from Lahore before Partition; my mother and father both grew up in Lahore and met through mutual friends; it was an arranged marriage sometime in the 1920s; my father's mother really wanted him to be brought up in England; I think his father was a banker who died relatively young and his mother brought him to London; she and my father lived together in a boarding house in Kensington; he went to St Clement Dane's school and then to Imperial College where he took a degree in civil engineering; that English experience was quite important because I think my father always wanted us to be educated in England like him, but in the end he didn't actually join us in England; my father when he graduated from Imperial wanted to join the Indian Civil Service, but he graduated at the incredibly early age of seventeen - he was actually rather brilliant - and it was too early to take the Indian Civil Service exams because you had to be twenty-one; he didn't want to wait so he decided to take the Indian Police exam; they sent him back to the North-West Frontier, not that far from the region where he had grown up, so he was a Superintendent of Police in the Punjab in the early 1930s; the problem he found was that as an Indian there was a glass ceiling; he was a Superintendent but he might not have been able to get much further; so he decided to leave the police and practice as a civil engineer; however there weren't any jobs going in the area for him but he was told about this place, Trinidad, which he didn't know very much about, but there was an Indian community in Trinidad and they needed people to service that community to some extent, so there were opportunities there for Indians, it was part of the British Empire and he could travel around; one of the things I am saying is that I am very much a child of empire; my father was able to more around which he did easily because he was within the British Empire - from India to England, back to India and India to Trinidad; so he decided to try his luck and chucked the police force and went to Trinidad without my mother; they had just married and it was pretty certain that it was an arranged marriage but I never heard the details; certainly the families knew each other and were both of Hindu background, Brahmins, and at the time of Partition they had to get out; she stayed in Lahore and he went to Port of Spain, Trinidad; while he was waiting for a job he opened the first cinema in Port of Spain, showing Indian films; this was a huge success because the Indians there had had no opportunity to see Indian films; they were people who had gone there as indentured labourers in the nineteenth century whose descendants were living there, the Naipaul story that it told in 'The House of Mr Biswas'; they flocked to the cinema so he was incredibly popular; he then got a job as the Assistant Engineer for the Port of Spain City Council; he became famous because he was the first person who was able to drain a notorious harbourside road called Wrightson Road; he built the first dual-carriageway in Trinidad and it was the first road that did not flood; as a result people said to him, "Ranjit Kumar, you should go into politics"; my mother always thinks that was a disastrous decision on his part; he was persuaded to give up his job and become a politician which he was then for the rest of his life in Trinidad; it was disastrous as Caribbean politics are a pretty rough and tumble thing; I think my father was probably brought up as a tee-totaler, but you can't be so in Trinidadian politics; you have got to join them in the rum shops, you have really got to drink, and I think the drink began to take a toll on him fairly early; that is my mother's view; he had to join in with the other politicians and become popular and mix in with the ordinary people, and you had to drink rum; I think he managed to keep it under control for quite some time, but that is how he got into politics; we were all born there; I am one of six children, nicely spaced out between one year and nine months each, so she had six children in the space of about ten years; she joined him in Trinidad after about a year or so and when he went into politics she played quite an important role because she would go round talking to the women, particularly in the interior where they were working on the plantations, and tell them about Indian culture, music and stories, and they loved hearing about that; so actually she was quite important in promoting him; he was making speeches on the hustings and she was talking to the women in the villages; he did get elected and was a popular figure; he led the opposition in Trinidad because later on, the Peoples National Party under Eric Williams took over and it became in effect a single-party state once Trinidad became independent in 1960 everybody else was in opposition; so my father spent most of his life in opposition and not in government; the story takes a turn that after the Second World War; we were born during it but didn't see much action because Trinidad was an American base, there was a big naval base in Port of Spain, so we used to see American soldiers wandering around, and often came to the house rather drunkenly demanding rum; my father had a revolver to wave them away; they came because there was a kind of brothel next door and they had got the wrong house; after the war my mother had been desperate to see her own family back in India, and of course Partition had occurred and her family had to abandon everything in Lahore, a really nice big house which they just got out of in time, and ended up in New Delhi; her father was a doctor, he had converted to homeopathy, he had trained in England, I think got his degree at Edinburgh, then he had conversion to homeopathy and began to practice as a homeopathic doctor in Delhi and established a very influential, big practise, which his son has continued; the President of India was one on his patients; he had re-established the family in New Delhi and my mum wanted to see them after all the horrors that had taken place; as far as I know, none of the family was killed in the Partition riots but I have never really established what particularly happened; certainly her father and his immediate family were able to get to Delhi, so she said we must go; my father couldn't come with us because he was very much involved at that time in the Independence movement in Trinidad which was gaining steam in the late forties; he suggested she took the children and spend a couple of years there and then come back to join him; this was quite common for Indian families who used to separate but it didn't necessarily mean they were breaking up

0:11:36 I was about five or six when we went to Delhi; we took one of those ships from Trinidad to London; we then lived with my father's mother who had lived in England throughout; she never went back to India as she didn't really like it much; there are a number of Indians who think India is a disorganised, disorderly place, and love England because it is so orderly; my grandmother was very much of the view that the English knew how live and the Indians really ought to learn from them; we arrived in London, my grandmother had a house in Camden Town, and we lived with her for about four months while we were waiting for the next ship to take us to Bombay; then we sailed and I still remember that trip, going through the Suez Canal and coming out into the Indian Ocean, a wonderful experience, three weeks on ship; I wasn't very good at being on the sea and was sick quite often, but I still have an incredibly strong memory of that journey, particularly the last part, sailing into Bombay; we arrived in Delhi and lived for about two and a half years with my grandfather which were among the happiest years of my life; I still remember how wonderful it was; we had a big compound with cousins, aunts, lots of servants of course, and as children we could do anything we liked; I went to an English public school in Delhi called St Columba's which was probably run by Jesuits, but it was an incredibly good school; of course, it was English language but we learnt Hindi, which was compulsory in all schools after Independence; so I did learn Hindi well enough to make friends and talk in Hindi, all of which vanished very quickly after I left India; I think I also got a better education there than I would have done in England at that age because the standards were very high; when we eventually did arrive in England I found myself quite a bit ahead of many of my peers in school; after two and a half years my mother thought it was time to go back; my grandfather interestingly said that she shouldn't go back; I think he was already aware that things were not working out terribly well between my mother and father; we had very little sense of what might be happening at the parental level, but my grandfather asked why should we go back, we were all here and my father could come and join us when he liked, or when he had finished with his politicking in Trinidad; stay here, we have a big house, the children are at school, why go back; but my mother had this very strong sense that it was her husband's duty to bring us up, not her father's; he had a duty and we should go back and join him; on our way back we stopped off at London; I don't know what the actual story was at that point but I do know what the upshot was; my father said we should not go back to Trinidad as he wanted the children to go to school in England anyway, so what's the point of bringing them back; she should wait in London and he would come and join us as soon at Trinidad and achieved independence

0:15:58 The reason became clearer many years later, at least to the children, is that they were slowly separating and that my father had begun to have another relationship in Trinidad while we were away; whether my mother knew about that, has never been clear and she never talked to me about that, but she certainly heard after a number of years that there was another woman involved, and that he had already had another child by her; so at that point the did accept the argument that it was silly to go back to Trinidad it we were going to be sent to school in England; so we moved back in with my paternal grandmother who had now bought a house in Kentish Town, one of these nice, narrow, Victorian houses; we lived with her for about a year or so, went to the local primary school; I think what is amazing to me now is that there was my mother, still in her thirties, with six young children, and she was bringing us up single-handed; she did actually for the rest of her life; my father never actually rejoined us, he never came; she realized after a number of years that he was not coming; what was so interesting was that he kept up the kind of sense of the marriage, they never divorced or anything; I think under Trinidadian law you were legitimately allowed to live with another woman and the children had all the rights of legitimacy, so it didn't affect their lives in Trinidad; my mother may have been legally separated but there was no formal divorce and she never remarried or seemed to have any intention or desire to do so; so she devoted herself entirely to bringing up these six young children; the wonder is that we didn't all become juvenile delinquents, but I think both our Trinidadian and Indian education and background really helped us; the schools in Port of Spain were very good, although I was only there for a year or two, and above all the schools in India; both my sisters and boys went to very good schools in Delhi and we had a really good foundation in English language and mathematics, so when we arrived in London, when I was nearly nine years old, I went to the local primary school and found I could do the subjects pretty well; when it came to the 11+ exam, which I sat on a day when I had a temperature of 101o, I passed, and did well enough to go to the local Grammar school, William Ellis, in north London, and so did all my brothers; so I think we were lucky that our Indian education had prepared us quite well for English schools, because of course it was the English education system that we had been through in India as well

0:19:44 I think it was a bit of a shock for my mother to be left on her own because she had grown up in a very protective family; they were well-to-do, well-established, servants everywhere; she was brought up learning to read and play music; she went to Lady Irving's College in Lahore, a well-known liberal arts college for women, and she graduated with a B.A. in English, some time in the '30s; but she wasn't expected to run things on her own and it must have been a new challenge for her in a strange country, all by herself; she and my father's mother did not get on very well; my grandmother was rather strict and felt that my mother was not sufficiently firm with us, so there was a bit of tension between them; so after a year or maybe two, we moved out of my grandmother's house and moved to a flat in Swiss Cottage, and that is where I lived for most of my time in London; William Ellis School was just on the other side of Hampstead Heath on the edge of Parliament Hill Fields, so there was a very easy connection between Swiss Cottage and Parliament Hill by train

0:21:41 Before going to Grammar school I was passionate about reading; we were very lucky that there was a public library in Kentish Town with the most wonderful librarians; all of us had started reading rather voraciously with the encouragement both of my father and mother; they were great readers and believed strongly in education; so when we arrived in London, immediately we all went to the public library; I remember the mornings we spent reading there, we got to know the librarians and they got to know us, and were so kind and helpful; there were all kinds of activities around the public library, so it really became a home from home for us; I read everything and anything, not necessarily the great classics that all children should read - Enid Blyton, Malcolm Saville, 'Wind in the Willows' - all those kind of classics, but anything; oddly enough I loved stories about girls' Public schools; my sisters used to read these stories and I would devour their stories about boarding schools, which I was fascinated about as I had never been in one, and what kids got up to there and the fact that they were away from home; I thought it must be wonderful to live in a boarding school; reading was just the greatest pleasure, to go away into a corner and read; the other thing that I got interested in was chess and that probably started in India too; I do remember playing chess there and became quite good at it; when I went to Grammar school which had a very good chess team I became a regular player for the school, right from the start at the age of eleven; I was obviously quite good and got into the first team quite quickly; perhaps I might say that I became the Middlesex under-14 chess champion; I then entered various other competitions including the London Open under-18, I think, and the best I ever did there was to come 3rd; my book prize for the Middlesex under-14 was 'Botvinnik the Invincible' - Botvinnik was one of the Russian Grand Masters, and it was a book of his games; chess was important and we all played, my brothers and I, not particularly the girls, but my brothers were all good chess players, and the school encouraged us; one of the nice things that I remember about William Ellis was that during the school breaks you were supposed to go out into the playground, but often it was cold and wet; if you were a chess player you were allowed to stay in the nice warm school, and that encouraged a lot of people to play, and was part of the secret of the school's success as a chess playing school; our chess club was immensely popular with people playing in the lunch hour and things like that; our great rivals was St Paul's School and we often met them in the finals of the London Schools Chess Championship and we would alternate between who would be number one; Haberdashers was another one that was good, but William Ellis had a really good chess team; another thing, I did always love cricket; again that was both the West Indies and India which were both great cricketing countries so even in Trinidad I was aware of these enormously popular West Indian cricketers; then in India, even more so, I followed the cricket passionately, listening to the radio commentaries, going to some of the games I think, so when I came back to England I was very keen to continue that interest; I played at school although I wasn't terribly good, but I enjoyed it enormously, and certainly followed the games, first on radio and then increasingly on television; we lived quite near Lord's cricket ground so a great thing to do was to take a little time off school during the week and go and watch the test matches when played at Lord's; I did not continue playing as I didn't want to do something that I was not really good at; I think I made the first team at William Ellis, but later on I became much more attached to tennis which I loved playing; again, I was not great but enjoyed it enormously, and that I continued playing up until quite recently when we went to America; tennis took over but when I moved eventually to Canterbury, Kent had wonderful cricketing side, and Canterbury has one of the most famous ground - St Lawrence's Cricket Ground is a beautiful place - so I often went to watch Kent play; I still find cricket immensely aesthetically attractive; I wish they hadn't given up on the kind of dress code that they had; now they turn up looking like motor bikers or something and I think it a great shame because of the gracefulness of the flannels that they used to wear was part of the charm of cricket, and I think now that many don't do that, they wear goggles or helmets for protection, but it takes away some of the charm as far as I am concerned; having moved to America of course I have had to give up on cricket

0:29:11 Although my mother and father were brought up as Hindus I don't think my father took it terribly seriously, partly because he had lived most of his life in England and out of India; I don't think his mother particularly instilled religious principles in him; and my mother certainly didn't; she took the view, especially once we had arrived in England, that any religion was better than none, and since we were in England and England was Anglican, we should be Anglicans; so we were never brought up in the Hindu religion and I know very little about it; she kept her faith so most mornings she would say her prayers, but she never imposed it on us or expected us to follow it; she was very keen that we should go to church or at least attend ceremonies; the school had assemblies in the morning and if you wanted to you could be dispensed from it if your parents said you were not a practising Christian, preferably to another religion like Judaism or Islam; we had quite a few Jews in William Ellis and they could exempt themselves; but my mother never wanted us not to attend, so I went and I loved it; I loved singing the hymns; I then joined the Boy Scouts and my mother thought that was good, a good kind of discipline; maybe she was conscious of the fact that there was this large family and just her; she wanted assistance from the institutions around and the Scouts she thought would be good; both my brother and I joined the Scouts attached to the local church in St John's Wood, and I loved it; we would go out camping and doing all kinds of things, and of course there were services attached which I liked; on my own initiative I began to go to Sunday School; I'm not sure that my mother said I should but she certainly encouraged it; again that was a really quite important experience because I really enjoyed those Sunday School sessions, reading the Bible; I turned out to be a good reader and was asked to read at the Evensong service at the church, which was rather flattering at the age of twelve; I did do it a few times, and I suppose it was a kind of confidence booster, the fact that I was selected; I suppose I did feel religiously quite strongly at that point; I certainly remember a kind of surge of religious emotion; but that I supposed evaporated somewhere around the age of 14-16, and probably had a lot to do with the kind of people I was mixing with at the school; the school was immersed in a kind of left-wing atmosphere of Hampstead and Highgate; a lot of Labour MPs sent their sons there because they didn't want to send their sons to Public schools as ideologically unsound; there was Highgate School just at the top of the hill; they were our great rivals; they were the Public school and we were the Grammar school, and we came pretty close to them for Oxbridge entry; the kind of left-wing intelligentsia, George Weidenfeld the publisher up the road, and a lot of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia had settled there; most of them were Communists or former Communists or Socialists; half the LSE seemed to be living up in Hampstead, the Laskis were up there, so there was this great left-wing culture that formed; I got to know the Abramsky family, headed by a wonderful figure called Chimen Abramsky who was a scholar both of Marxism and Judaism; he later on became Professor of Jewish History at University College, London; he never had a degree because he got caught during the Second World War between finishing his degree at Jerusalem University and being in London visiting some friends, couldn't get back to Jerusalem to finish his B.A.; he ran a Jewish bookshop in the East End of London, a quite well-known rare book shop and that is how he kept himself; but because he was so well-known as a scholar of Judaism in the end he was given the Chair without a first degree; they then awarded him an honorary Ph.D. or something, and then he went back to Jerusalem and was similarly awarded; I got to know the family incredibly well; the son, Jack Abramsky is my oldest friend whom I met in the first form at William Ellis and we've been friends ever since, and I see him every time I come back to London; one of the other really influential figures there was Jack's cousin who was Raphael Samuel; he was a charismatic figure whom I remember so well in the house, 5 Hill Way, Highgate; Chimen's wife Miriam, again a wonderful woman, held a kind of Salon at the house; I would go there after school for tea, then be asked to stay for supper, and there would always be visitors of all kinds; people like Eric Hobsbawm who was a friend of the family, Isaiah Berlin I once remember meeting there, various scholars from Israel who were coming through because Chimen had lots of contacts there; a lot of historians; Chimen was a historian so had a lot of good friends, so I suppose that is how I developed my interest in history, the idea that it was history that I should be doing, particularly through Raphael; Raphael did something very interesting; when I got to sixth form - I think I had already been accepted at St John's College, Cambridge, on the basis of my 'A' level and scholarship results; you had to go up and do the scholarship exam at Christmas at the college you were to be at just to see if you could get a scholarship or exhibition; Raphael said I should take the exam but I should leave school as it was a waste of time; he had gone to one of these very progressive schools in Highgate, King Alfred's; he left school at sixteen and got himself to Balliol College, Oxford, at a very young age; got a first in history, and was one of Christopher Hill's favourite sons, then rather annoyed him by refusing to take an academic position; the only position he would take was at Ruskin College because that was the only place in Oxford he wanted to be, so he was kind of against the conventional academic career; it was very typical that Raphael said I should leave school and he would tutor me; he was probably about nine or ten years older than me; at that time he was working in London at the Institute for Community Studies in the East End where Michael Young was; Raphael had the idea that after doing history at Oxford maybe it was sociology that he wanted to do; this is also very important in my own career as that is what happened; Raphael spent a year doing sociology and then decided that it was a complete waste of time and that history was really where it was at, so had gone back to being a social historian, managing by teaching at Ruskin a couple of days a week, more or less living like a bohemian; he bought himself a house in Spitalfields and was living there; I used to go along to the house and have tutorials with Raphael; I would write him an essay, I remember he put me on to Tawney 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism' and that was my first engagement with Max Weber; it was not reading Weber, who I would probably not understood as I had never heard of until that time, but Tawney's response to Weber, a wonderful book and still one of my favourites; Raphael was opening up all kinds of dimensions of history, partly because he said that for the scholarship exam you can't just rely on your 'A' level syllabus; you need to show your ability to handle bigger historical problems; I didn't get a scholarship nor an exhibition at St John's but I had my place there and wasn't worried; actually I would rather have gone to Oxford, again partly because of Raphael, I wanted to go to Balliol, that was the history college; but unfortunately Oxford had admissions much later; you weren't told until the Spring whereas the Cambridge colleges were very cleverly making offers before Christmas; so I had my offer from St John's in November, with the attachment that you must come up and sit the scholarship exams in December; you would go up and spend a couple of days in a dark Cambridge though of course it was very exciting to be there; I had been to my Headmaster and told him I had got a place at St John's but really wanted to go to Balliol; the amazing thing at that time was what they would do for you; my Headmaster wrote to somebody in Balliol who said they would be delighted for me to apply but I wouldn't know until the Spring, and I think I was so afraid of losing my place at Cambridge so decided then to let Oxford go; whether my life would have been very different if I had gone to Oxford, I have no idea, but St John's turned out to be an extremely good place; so the influence of Raphael was so important, he made history exciting as a subject to do so I had no doubt, though there was a moment when I thought I should perhaps try the science route because my mother was very keen; at William Ellis school we all did French and Latin but in the 3rd form you had the strange choice of either German or classical Greek: I liked Latin very much and was good at it, and I was quite inclined to do Greek because if you did Latin you really ought to do Greek; my mother gave what turned out to be rather bad advice; she thought I would probably be a scientist like my father and I think she hoped I would do something scientific; she said that German would be a much better language than classical Greek, as German was felt to be the language of science at that time; so I allowed myself to be persuaded to opt for German rather than Greek and I have regretted it for the whole of my life; you don't teach yourself ancient Greek in your spare time whereas you can pick up a modern language any time; I did three years of German to 'O' level, got the basis of the grammar and vocabulary and am glad to have it, but I so much wish I had done ancient Greek because so much of the concepts I deal in now in the social sciences are Greek-based, use Greek terminology, and if you don't know the etymology of some of these words you don't really understand what the concepts mean; so I find myself struggling; I go to
the dictionaries, and at least I have mastered the Greek alphabet so I can actually read the thing even if I don't know what it means, but I just wish I had done classical Greek to complement my Latin; I got to the sixth form and actually started doing a science sixth, I thought I should be a scientist and opted to do physics, chemistry, pure and applied maths; thank goodness, after a couple of months I realized it was not for me, partly because my mathematics wasn't really good enough to be a scientist; I chose instead to do Latin, history and English for my 'A' level subjects and I was so glad; I have always felt what a great decision, thinking back I wonder if I spent days agonizing over this or just change in a moment from science to arts; all I know is that I just did it; maybe I talked to my mother about it but she was very good about not pressurizing any of us; we were all allowed to follow our own bent, but the one thing that she was keen on was that we should continue in education, nobody questioned that we should all go to university so she always supported us and didn't try and push us in any direction; my father was still writing letters saying he would love one of us to be a civil engineer but none of us did; he kept up correspondence with my mother all the rest of their lives although they never met again; there was a monthly letter and a certain amount as an allowance, but my mother was unsure about it so she got herself a job at the Indian High Commission; again this was a family thing; her father in Delhi was very well-known and through various contacts they offered her a position and she worked there until she retired at the age of sixty

0:46:10 I found Cambridge a wonderful place to be; I matriculated in 1961 and there were a number of us from William Ellis who went up together and so I had friends; I think that is quite important as Cambridge can be very intimidating, particularly for those who have come from State schools; for Public school students there is much more continuity, I feel, with Oxbridge, but for Grammar school and other students it is much more of a challenge; it helps to have friends from the same background and I had four or five close friends, including Jack Abramsky who went to Trinity as a physicist; so for the first term we were meeting regularly to share our experiences, but then we drifted apart, and I got to know people in John's very well; I did something - I'm not sure how public one ought to make this - but I got very interested in the theory of anarchism; there was a schoolteacher at William Ellis whom I got to know extremely well, a man called George Webb; I read all kinds of things under George's influence, and those led me in a libertarian direction; so I began to read Kropotkin and Bakunin and those kinds of people; when I arrived at St John's I grandly announced that I was going to found the Cambridge Anarchist Society which caused a certain consternation in the College, but how tolerant they are, especially in those days; in the sixties it was still a very elitist thing to go to somewhere like Cambridge, you were one of 5% or even less, so you felt privileged and felt the confidence of privilege; so I thought nothing about announcing that I was starting this Society; you had to have a Senior Member, and my Tutor at St John's was the historian Ronald Robinson, historian of Empire, a lovely man, "Robbie" as we called him, who always liked drinking with the undergraduates at the JCR bar; I went to him and said that I wanted to start this thing, and he puffed on his pipe, said he didn't believe in anarchism, but if I wanted to do so that was OK; so "Robbie" was my Senior Tutor, so formally the figurehead; so I launched the Cambridge Anarchist group and the Dean of College was obviously rather alarmed, turned up at our inaugural meeting in one of the rooms in St John's - I had quite a large audience; I launched into my spiel on why anarchism was important, making it very clear we were not thinking of bombing King's College Chapel or assassinating the Queen or anything of that kind; it was going to be a purely intellectual society, we were going to discuss anarchist ideas; I noticed there were some people there who wanted a bit more activist and we fairly soon discouraged those people from being part of the group because it was meant to be a discussion of ideas; the Dean turned up to listen to what I had to say and then invited me to tea; I still remember going to the Dean's rooms in St John's, he sat me down, gave me a cup of tea and a slice of cake, said he hadn't known what to expect but was rather concerned to think that the College was harbouring an anarchist society, but saying that he was very reassured by what I had to say; it was a kind of legalistic argument about the State, and I had wrapped it all up in ways that was not I think alarming to the Dean, and he was perfectly happy from then on to let the Society flourish for the three years that I was at Cambridge, and the Cambridge Anarchist group still exists according to undergraduates I speak to; I met some really interesting people through that group who were not politically active, and hated the political parties and didn't want to join either the Labour or Conservative Party, but were intrigued by the anarchists; one of my closest friends at St John's was the art historian T.J. Clark; he got the best double-starred First that anyone has ever got since the sixteenth century, an extraordinary student; he did history, then went to the Courthauld and did his Ph.D. there; then he became the Professor of Art History, first at Harvard then at Berkeley; he taught also in England before he went to America - at Leeds, he was Professor of Art History there; he writes a lot in the London Review of Books with his wife Anne Wagner; they are both back in London now as he is retired; so Tim became a member of the anarchist group, and another called Donald Nicholson-Smith who translates a lot of French works joined us; so kinds of odd-balls emerged from different parts of Cambridge and we all met through the Anarchist Society; there were some right-wing people who were very upset that Cambridge had an Anarchist Society; a year before that there was a student at King's College, Brian Pollitt son of Harry Pollitt, and there had been a notorious incident where there had been some thugs who had come up from London who had attacked Brian in his rooms at King's, actually broke his arm; it was just before he was due to take his finals and just as he was standing for the Presidency of the Cambridge Union; they somehow thought that by beating him up, or perhaps they had more in mind, they would somehow squash his ambitions; of course it worked exactly the opposite; he got the Presidency on a sympathy vote; he couldn't write, but he dictated his answers and got his first in economics; that was the background to what happened to me; there was clearly a group of people who were in touch with some rather unsavoury people, probably in London, against what they saw as the rise of the Left in universities like Oxford and Cambridge, so the foundation of the Anarchist Society, which made it to the Sunday Times; what happened was that I was invited by a group of students from Magdalene College to meet them for a drink before the inaugural meeting of the Society; they met me in a pub up the Trumpington Road; they were very friendly saying they were really interested in anarchism and looking forward to this; as we left the pub and were walking into the back courtyard which was rather dark, I was then leapt on, bundled into the back of a Land Rover, blindfolded, and driven out into the Cambridge countryside; I was kidnapped; apparently what they had done was to put a note under the door where we were going to have our first meeting saying that Kumar was doing the whole thing for a joke, he'd had a bet that if he could get more than ten people to the first meeting he'd get £10, the whole thing is not serious; they were hoping to destroy the society at birth; some people did leave but a hard-core did not; they thought this was a trick and they were being deceived and stayed in the room until midnight; I was being driven out into the countryside, and they said don't worry and they weren't going to hurt me, but they didn't explain what they were doing it for; they took me out of the Land Rover, took off the blindfold, untied my hands, and told me I was only mile away from Cambridge and then left me there; I knocked on a farmhouse nearby and explained what had happened and asked if they could give me a lift back; they agreed but it was some fifteen miles away; when we got to Cambridge I went to my meeting and the amazing things was that there were still people sitting there and I explained to them what had happened; the next day 'Varsity' came out - front page, 'Prominent anarchist kidnapped', and they had a picture of me being lifted up at the back of the pub with the faces of the people lifting me blacked out, but clearly there was a 'Varsity' photographer there taking the picture; and it turned out that the whole thing had been cooked up in the offices of 'Varsity' by a notorious Right-wing person whom I actually knew; he was a fellow historian called Andrew Medlicott, and Andrew was the Editor of 'Varsity'; his father was a Conservative M.P., and Andrew, whom I knew and liked and we got on very well, thought that they should teach these Left-wingers a lesson; anyway, I think they needed copy that week so here was a wonderful thing, kidnap an anarchist and they had their front page; of course, what that meant was that we had a huge amount of publicity; I then had to face the accusation that I had staged the whole thing in order to get people to join the Anarchist Society, which of course they did as they were now curious as to what this thing was; so we had and enormous amount of not necessarily welcome publicity, but it was publicity; I think most people did not believe it was done by me but I am sure some people did; anyway the Proctors were able to track them down pretty quickly; I said who the people from Magdalen were and they went to see them - this very Cambridge thing, it was kept out of the hands of the police who were not involved at all, entirely a University affair; the guys who had kidnapped me were told to go and say sorry; they came to my rooms, apologised, and we shook hands; they were then rusticated for a term and that was their punishment

0:58:17 At Cambridge I had two teachers who influenced me, one was my Directory of Studies, F.A. Hinsley; he took me through all my courses including Medieval history, which he claimed he didn't know much about but had ideas about, which he certainly did though he was a Modern historian; Hinsley was wonderful as a Tutor; it is remarkable to think that in those days you had these one to one tutorials, you'd read your essay out and they would comment, and Hinsley was extremely good; he had the effect without meaning to of directing me away from history as a strict discipline towards thinking of the history of ideas, and thinking more broadly about historical themes, so I think in a way he was almost preparing me for my departure from history to another discipline; the other person who had quite an influence on me was Peter Laslett at Trinity; Laslett was incredibly good; he was himself a Johnian so had a particular affection for Johnian undergraduates, so he invited me first and then my friend, Tim Clark, to the Saturday morning seminars at Laslett's rooms in Trinity which he held as a little invited group of people whom he thought would be interested; that was where I got my first encounter with sociology and social science, because there were people like Garry Runciman around at that time and he would invite people like Runciman to come and give talks; generally his was building up the unit for the study of population and social structure with people like Wrigley; Laslett was really my introduction to sociology, again I don't think he wanted to drive me away from history, but it was something I'd never even heard about but I realized that it was an interesting area; another person I remember very well even though I never got to know him was Michael Postan, a Medieval historian, who was marvellous, a wonderful lecturer, he made Medieval history so interesting; he made a remark that I have never forgotten that the best historians are not Marxists or non-Marxists but ex-Marxists, which is clearly what he was; he said that Marxism forces you to ask the right questions even though they give terribly wrong answers; he used that method in understanding the evolution of Medieval society, and that had a real impact, I really loved those lectures by Postan; finally and very importantly, Duncan Forbes at Clare; I did the special subject on the Scottish Enlightenment when we read Hume and Ferguson, Millar and Smith, and that was a wonderful opportunity because we went to Cambridge University Library, reading originals, because at that point nobody had produced modern editions, that was really exciting; that was a terrific opening because the Scottish enlightenment was sociology; I loved that in Ferguson in particular, he was my favourite; but Forbes also lectured on Hegel, brilliant lectures, and there was a paper in the Cambridge Tripos on Theories of the Modern State; Forbes lectured on that and so did Laslett, and I think that was my sense of an alternative to professional history; it was intellectual history, history of social theory, Marx, we didn't do Weber but we did Hegel, Rousseau, and through Forbes and Laslett that was beginning to change my mind about what my future direction should be; but of course everything would depend on what sort of degree I got; I did terribly badly in Part I and only got a 2:2; it was a terrible shock as I had always been either the top of the class or number 2 at William Ellis; to suddenly find yourself with a 2:2 was such a traumatic experience; so I really worked hard for Part II and I got a first, and luckily what you do in the Cambridge system that seems to define your degree; that allowed me to get a scholarship to go to the L.S.E. and then switched from history to sociology

1:03:46 I decided that sociology was a subject that would allow me to do history by other means; I really did think that; I thought having read what I thought was sociology among the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and in people like Hegel and Marx, I thought that was what sociology would be; I was crushingly disappointed to discover that sociology was not that; it was dominated by the Americans, particularly by Talcott Parsons and people like that; I couldn't believe how it was presented, so un-historical, so vacuous in so many ways that I was thoroughly disappointed; it reminded me of what Raphael Samuel said to me; I consulted him before I went to the L.S.E. and he said that he had tried switching to sociology and didn't like it; I remember the first day I went to the L.S.E. I bumped into him on the tube, and as he left he said "See you back in history"; he had said you could do any sociology you want under the guise of history, and he was quite right about that; people like Eric Hobsbawm showed that you can be a historical sociologist, but I'd made the choice and the L.S.E. was obviously the place to do sociology; I was very interested in working with Ernest Gellner; I think I'd read his book 'Thought and Change' which I had found very exciting, and I had got a bee in my bonnet about Darwinism, I wanted to do a Ph.D. on Darwinism and its influence in the social sciences in the nineteenth century; Gellner was very reluctant to take that on; he said that sociology had been through this, Karl Popper had written the book rejecting evolutionism; I said I was not interested in evolutionism, Darwinism is not evolutionism; he sort of agreed but was very resistant to supervising that; in that system you shop around for a supervisor and don't allow yourself to be dictated to, again there was that kind of confidence that I could do what I liked; Gellner suggested Robin Fox in the anthropology department was interested in Darwinism; I went to Robin and he was delighted to have a student who was interested in Darwinism; formally I was in sociology and if I'd stayed with Robin I would have had a Ph.D. in anthropology for technical reasons, even though the work I was doing was not anthropological; anyway, he took me on and I spent two rather miserable years; I read a lot of nineteenth century evolutionism and Darwinism which I am glad of, but in the meantime a little book had come out by John Burrow 'Evolution and Society'; Burrow did exactly what I had been trying to do which was to show that Darwinism and evolutionism were completely different things, and he proved it so well that it seemed impossible to repeat that; it rather threw me and I decided not to continue along that vein; my three-year studentship ran out and I needed a job, and luckily you could get a job at that time without having a Ph.D. as long as you were doing one and promised to finish it; I managed to get a job at the University of Kent, at Canterbury, which was run by an extremely broad-minded figure, Paul Stirling

1:08:21 To backtrack. Robin Fox was really very nice to me; he included me in that little group he was developing, including Lionel Tiger, and their first article 'Some Zoological Perspectives in the Social Sciences' by Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger, you couldn't image people with those names and that overlap; so I used to attend conferences on ethology at the London Zoological Society with people comparing apes and men and things like that; I quite enjoyed that and read some physical anthropology, but he clearly wanted me to join the bandwagon of sociobiology and I kept resisting that; I was caught between Gellner's reluctance to even consider this and the extreme biological Darwinism that the Foxites and other were trying to promote; I was unhappy with all that; Robin was perfectly happy to let me follow my own head and he wrote for my job applications, but then he left to go to Rutgers before I had even got to the point of leaving the L.S.E. because my money had run out; he offered to supervise me from a distance but it would probably be better to have someone at the L.S.E., and David Martin, a very nice person in the sociology department offered to take me on so formally I did have a supervisor in sociology in my last year; I kept up with David Martin, but I lost touch with Robin and only met him once again at some conference in America later on, and we talked about what had happened in the past

1:10:40 Kent had a joint sociology and anthropology department and Paul Stirling believed deeply in keeping the two together; like so many people I was excited by the new universities and I never thought of applying to anywhere else; I applied to Sussex, to Essex and Kent, and Kent came up trumps, and I liked Canterbury when I went down there, and I liked that fact that Kent had a college system; it was a collegiate university, kind of Oxbridge via Durham; Durham was very important in the setting-up of Kent and the Vice-Chancellor of Durham was the Chair of the Foundation Committee, and he brought the Durham college system to Kent; so Kent looked a nice place, the department was flourishing; Paul Stirling was such a humane, open-minded person; he actually appointed me to teach what he called intermediate civilizations, because the anthropologists dealt with the kind of primitive stuff and sociologists with modern; he wanted someone teaching the ancient world and medieval, and I said I would love to do that; in the end it never worked out, and I just taught the usual sociological courses; a very good group of people were brought together there, many of them formerly Oxford of Cambridge - John Davis, of course, and Nevill Colclough, both Oxford historians; later on the ecological anthropologist, Roy Ellen, joined us; it was a good anthropologist group, they specialised in the Mediterranean, Greece and southern Italy then there was Frank Parkin who was an extremely lively figure, then he went to Oxford on a one year thing and subsequently went to Magdalen as a Fellow; Frank Furedi was there, Ray Pahl, a very good urban sociologist; it was a great place to be and I really enjoyed Kent, and I stayed there for twenty years; I lived in Canterbury from 1967 when I was appointed, which was only three years after the university had come into being, until 1996; I think I never expected to stay so long, I thought I would go there for a couple of years and then go back to London which was where life was; but London was only an hour and a half away on the train anyway, so I wasn't losing touch with my London friends or my family; so Canterbury was a lovely spot, halfway between London and the Continent; we could get onto the hovercraft and have lunch in Boulogne, or from Dover to pop over to Paris, Canterbury was in a beautiful position to escape to the Continent if you wanted to, so I had no reason to move; I had various offers; I got to know Bernard Crick very well at the L.S.E., he was one of my teachers that I particularly liked; we kept in touch the whole of his life and he even came down to Virginia a couple of times when I was there; I remember writing an essay on Revolution which I wrote for Ralph Milliband who was this kind of Marxist, and Ralph obviously didn't like it because I took a very anti-Marxist view as I was very influenced by Hannah Arendt at that point; he didn't exactly mark it down but he made it seem that he was very unhappy with it; I gave it to Bernhard as I was upset by what Milliband thought of it; he read it and said he really loved it; my first publication was a review essay of Hannah Arendt's book 'On Revolution' for the journal 'Government and Opposition' which Bernard Crick was one of the founders of; he then commissioned my first book which was a book on revolution, a series of documents, a mixture of history and theory and an introduction by me, for Weidenfeld and Nicolson for whom Bernard Crick was editing; I started that at the L.S.E. and finished it just after I got to Kent - my first book, 1971, 'Revolution: The Theory and Practice of a European Idea'

1:15:33 I think that my first full-scale book which was also the thing I submitted to the University of Kent for my Ph.D. because by that time I couldn't submit it to London as I had left the L.S.E. and would have to formally re-register which was ridiculous; as a lecturer I was able to submit a manuscript to the university; I wrote a book called 'Prophecy and Progress' and this was a study of the idea of post-industrial society, and I published that with Allen Lane at the Penguin Press, and then it went in to a Penguin which was wonderful to have this nice cheap thing; it sells much better when it is in that format and it did do very well; I am very proud of that because it is a mixture of history and theory which is what I like doing; I like putting history against general ideas, and there was this theory that we were moving into a new form of society called the post-industrial society, associated particularly with an American sociologist, Daniel Bell; I thought he had got it all wrong partly because he'd got wrong what industrial society was; he thought it was all over and that we were moving into a new phase; I went back to the nineteenth century to look at the history of industrialism, partly through the eyes of some of the thinkers like Marx and St Simon and Comte, to show what Bell was arguing didn't really happen until the twentieth century; most societies remained agrarian until the First World War, in France I think the majority of the population were living in the countryside as late as 1945; so there was a kind of abbreviation of the history of industrialism which is what I argue; he got the history wrong and as a result the idea that we could quickly move into a new phase made no sense; we were perhaps at the climax of industrialism but were certainly not beyond it, and there were vast sectors of the world that had barely got in on the act, and capitalism was a system that was global; so the book argued, I hope courteously, against Bell's argument, using nineteenth century history as the foil mainly, and mixing this with the commentary of Marx and Tocqueville and others on the emerging industrial society; I am very satisfied with that mixture of history and theory because I think that is where my strength lies; this is what allowed me, in a sense, to do history by other means; I am now a sociologist because you are defined by your final degree and can't be anything else; no history department would appoint me, but I love history and so was able to continue to do history via a certain form of social theory, and the first book 'Prophecy and Progress' shows that; the next book that I think I enjoyed came out of that because the last part of that book was talking about future societies and what might be, and I actually wrote a little bit about utopias in the very last chapter suggesting that there was a lot to be got from utopian writers; I think it was my friend Ray Pahl's saying why didn't I write a book about utopias; so in the 1980s I spent eight or nine years reading up as much as I could on the history of utopian thought, and wrote my book 'Utopias in Anti-Utopian Modern Times'; that is the second book I would like to have on this desert island as I really enjoyed the work and I think I had something to say utopias and utopianism, again mainly as a history of ideas, starting with the Greeks and working through to the present; it was a very enjoyable thing; I think the third book would probably be 'The making of English National Identity'; I suppose this was my coming to terms with England, and my sense of what Englishness was or is; I have always been interested in the idea of Englishness, it goes back a long way to my initial encounters with England, what is it to be English, and my own relations to England, how do I see myself; my only culture is English, only language is English, but I'm not born or bred in England; so I always had a kind of curious relationship, where do I stand in relation to England; English culture was always fascinating to me so this book traces the idea of Englishness from early times, mostly debates with people who seem to want to talk about English nationalism at an incredibly early period; I think it was Patrick Wormald who wanted to decide what happened with King Alfred, and there were people who defined the C14 with the birth of English nationalism with Chaucer, or with the Elizabethans or the C18; I said this was anachronistic as there was no English nationalism at this time; the earliest is the late C19, and if anything it is only coming into it's own now with Brexit; this book came out in 2003 so it is before Brexit, but I was anticipating it I think, already there were the signs of a developing English nationalism in the early 2000s which I was able to talk about; but the book is mainly historical, mostly an engagement with ideas about Englishness from the medieval period up the the present; I'm very happy with that and I think the book has had quite an impact, I have seen many references to it in the current literature about English national identity; I flattered by the extent that people refer to that book; if I am allowed to I would love to include my Empires book because I'm following on again as my argument about England was that Englishness was so related to Empire; the English had been an imperial people since the middle ages; they conquered the Welsh, then the Irish and then nearly conquered the Scots; part of my argument is that nationalism is too small for the English, their vision is much larger, they rule the world in effect; having done that with the English I just at that point met my wife Katya Makarova ... from Russia, and we began talking about the similar experience of the Russians and the English as imperial people; she said we feel exactly the same thing; we have this Empire, first a Czarist Empire then a Soviet Empire; we have lost that and we have no idea who we are; Russia is not a nation, it has never thought of itself as such, and I felt so much that Englishness was similar; these were countries that had had great Empires and had lost them, and were looking for a new role, trying the European Union, but that didn't work, the Commonwealth seemed to be a bit grubby and that wasn't working out too well; there was a real uncertainty about English national identity; I decided to look at other empires to see if it was true of the imperial peoples of the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire; so I took five empires - the British, French, Hapsburg, Ottoman and the Russian, to compare them from the point of view of the ruling people; I wasn't interested very much in what was going on at the bottom level; what did the people who ran the empires think they were doing, what was their idea of their mission in the world, and what was their way of justifying to themselves; one of the commonalities is the suppression of their own national identity which was part of how you manage a diverse entity like an empire; you cannot bang the national drum because that's counter-productive, and the English knew that very well, I think the Russians did, I think the French tried hardest, but even there it wasn't imposing a kind of French nationalism on the rest of the world; my favourite are the Habsburgs, there is something really loveable about them; so I wrote about the Spanish Habsburgs as well as the Austrian Habsburgs, and I think that they are the most imperial people in the sense that they understood that you do not - they hated German nationalism, loathed it and put it down wherever they could, which of course they paid the price for; but I think that's the way that Empires work; so my last book 'Visions of Empire: How five imperial Regimes shaped the world' is the thing I am still very much involved with; I am doing another little book on empires, and now trying to expand it to non-Western empires - the Chinese, the Moguls, the Arabian empires - it's important to extend that; I am interested in the concept of Eurasianism and empire, this is what brought me in Chris Hann's research group at the moment, looking at Eurasia and the extent of interconnection between empires; so that would be my fourth of my favourite books

1:26:07 I don't think I suffered any racism, certainly not consciously, I was not aware of it; I suppose as I grew up in relatively protective environments - the Hampstead-Highgate milieu and somewhere like Cambridge; I am sure there must have been reactions to me as an Indian, particularly at that time in the fifties and sixties although there weren't so many Indians around at that time, most of them were students or something of that kind, there wasn't the kind of mass phenomenon that developed later on, and maybe that made it easier too; I was not aware at any time of discrimination on the grounds of my race; I just wonder whether I was protecting myself, deceiving myself in not seeing it when it was there; friends of mine might have quite different responses to that question but I was not conscious of it, and I think partly because I didn't want to be, I felt so much part of England, and wanted to be part of England; I actually wrote an essay 'Growing out of English Culture'; I was invited by Bhikhu Parekh to write an essay where we were all expressing our views about our relations with England, and I talked about this unconscious acceptance of Englishness until I began to realize that my first truly Indian friend was at Cambridge; I didn't know any Indians; we grew up in an environment where all my friends were English so I had not reason to think of myself as Indian; at Cambridge for the first time I met Indians who had all come St Stephen's School and those elite Public schools in India; I still have friends from that time; one of them is a politician, Mani Shankar Aiyar, a good friend from Cambridge; so that was the first time I became aware of Indians, and I began to think of myself as someone who was both inside and outside English culture; I suppose the fudge is to say that you are British but not English, but I think it is a bit of a fudge; I don't feel British particularly, and I do feel English culture is the only culture I have, but I do also feel a certain distance and I suppose moving to America made that even stronger; I don't have to worry any longer whether I am accepted as English and I don't live in England; in American I am kind of Asian-American or some peculiar ethnic designation that they have; I don't worry about that thing any more, but perhaps growing up in England I was more concerned to be accepted, and perhaps as a result shut my eyes to some of the things that were going on and some of the responses to me; but I have to say that I was never conscious of a sense of discrimination