In 1967, I went to Harvard University as a graduate student to study Economics. Economic History was one of the required subjects. It was taught by Alexander Gersckron who was a Jew with Russian origin. He left Russia and first went to France, and from there he migrated to the United States. Eventually, he landed at Harvard, where he worked his way to become the Professor of Economic History.

In 1967, when I became one of his students, he was identified as the dean of Economic History. He had earned that distinction because of his work on Russia in which he concluded that the rates of economic growth suggested by the Russian government were based on wrong assumptions. He came up with a different formula that suggested a much lower rate in the period after the assumption of power by the Communist Party in what was then known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, the USSR.

In a one-on-one meeting with me, he told me that he knew very little about the South Asian sub-continent and would look to me to get him acquainted with that part of the world. Every year, he chose a group of half a dozen students who met at his house for dinner and discussed their special interests. Mine, I said, was the movement of people since the country to which I belonged – Pakistan – was inundated by millions of migrants who had left India for Pakistan in the summer of 1947, the time when the British colonial hold over their South Asian colony ended. Their arrival in Pakistan was to profoundly influence the history of the new country.........

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