Listen to this article:

When he enlisted in the United States Army at Fort Devens in 1944, the young German Jew, whose family had escaped Hitler’s Germany to settle in rural America, did not expect to be posted to a base in Calcutta. Much less would he have imagined that one day his obituary would appear in The Financial Times of London.

‘Bye Bye Mr Sugar’ the FT obit said in 2011, bidding farewell to a well-heeled gentleman who had made his reputation and money as one of the foremost authorities on the global sugar economy. He had spent his last years in a well-appointed home not far from Highgate Cemetery, the resting place of Karl Marx. It’s a home where I spent an evening with him, talking about sugar and revolution, while being taught how to mix Angostura bitters in Barbadian rum. That was in September 1990.

His is a story I have been waiting to tell. It begins with my spotting a thin book with a yellow cover tucked between grey and brown coloured tomes in my father’s bookshelf. It was the 1970s. The book shelf had all manner of books from Aldous Huxley to Ramana Maharishi, John Updike to Mahatma Gandhi. Churchill’s history of the Second World War to the poetry of W.B. Yeats. On one of my usual rummaging raids I pulled that thin yellow book out.

The title, printed in red, read ‘American Shadow Over India’. The author, L. Natarajan. Published in 1952 by the Communist Party of India’s People’s Publishing House in Bombay. The book had a Foreword by J.C. Kumarappa, a nationalist economist of repute, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi and a member of the National Planning Committee of the Indian National Congress.

Natarajan’s book was an expose. It documented the rising influence of the United States in a newly independent India. It examined in detail the trade and investment links between the US and India before, during and after the war. It analysed the immediate post-independence relations between the governments of India and the US. It had chapters on US intelligence operations in India, on US aid to India, on the activities of American Christian missionaries, on American influence in research institutions and universities across India. It documented US thinking on India’s relations with her immediate neighbours, especially China and Pakistan. On every topic it offered a well-documented analysis.

I read the book with great interest. I quoted from it in my essays and classroom lectures during the 1980s, when I was teaching development economics at a university. There wasn’t a page in it that I had not read with great attention. So I was taken aback........

© The Wire