Dr. Kamla Chowdhry

 Dr. Kamla Chowdhry was a pioneering management educationist and institution builder and the first faculty member of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA). On her birth centenary (December 17, 2020), there was a short documentary paying tribute to her remarkable life.

I was taken to the book by Abdul Kalam, on his inspiration being Vikram Sarabhai, and how he was instrumental in having the IIM Ahmedabad set up, but then never knew there was someone called Kamla behind this. 

As I hear : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE96oUU4aeY and read Chinmay Tumbe  a faculty member at IIM Ahmedabad and author of India Moving: A History of Migration and The Age of Pandemics in https://fiftytwo.in/story/kamla/?fbclid=IwAR0wvGLoS0Ex1b9_vU7Q3N_Bp3CI0CV9ZyRbsKmpMRyNiSWo3dgmoXyvejM

Today, on her birth centenary, it’s worth reflecting on her long and accomplished life, free of the shadows that others have cast on it for so long.

Kamla Chowdhry  was born in Lahore in 1920 to a Punjabi Khatri family where she was exposed to liberal ideals from an early age. Her father, Ganesh Das Kapur, was a leading surgeon in Lahore; her mother, Lilavati Khanna, came from a family of engineers involved in the building of the Sukkur barrage on the Indus river in Sindh. Kamla had gone to Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan, where she pursued music and learnt to play the sitar. After matriculating from Punjab University with a first-class degree in 1936, she earned a BA in mathematics and philosophy from Calcutta University in 1940: an unusual degree for women at the time.

She married a civil services officer, Khem Chowdhry, but the union proved short-lived. Khem, shockingly, was murdered by a person who had most likely been at the receiving end of his official strictures. He was killed as the couple slept: Kamla woke up to find him lying dead beside her. The murderer, a tribesman from the North West Frontier Provinces, confessed to his crime when he was apprehended in an unrelated case. The defence counsel for the murderer was a young Khushwant Singh, who told this story when he wrote Chowdhry’s obituary in 2006.

It would have been difficult, at that point, to imagine how her career would blossom. But inspired by Tagore and the ideals of Mohandas Gandhi, her life took a new turn. She dug her heels in and got an MA in Philosophy from Punjab University in 1943, where she stood first in her class. She went on to the United States to study further––by one account, a way to distance herself from the depression consuming her life. At Michigan University, she studied with Theodore Newcomb, who would come to be recognised as one of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century, and received an MA, and then a PhD, both in social psychology.

By 1949, she had become Dr Kamla Chowdhry, and was ready to come back to India. Her return took her to Ahmedabad, and to a job with Vikram Sarabhai. She arrived in Ahmedabad in 1949 at the age of 28.Cambridge-educated nuclear physicist, future icon of India’s space programme, Sarabhai was still in his twenties in December 1947, when he set up the Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association in his family’s hometown. ATIRA was one of the first in a list of trailblazing institutions Sarabhai went on to build. It was a business-oriented one. Until this time, management in India was a fiefdom of family-run agencies. Sarabhai, scion of a family of textile industrialists, intended for ATIRA to apply scientific techniques in the research of industrial problems.

IMA was founded in December 1961 as a public-private partnership between the government of India, the state government of Gujarat, local industrialists and the Ford Foundation. Several people played an important role in its conception and founding. One of these was Douglas Ensminger, Ford Foundation representative in India in the 1950s and 1960s, who pushed for the creation of a business school outside the traditional Indian university system, itself a British legacy. Another was Vikram Sarabhai. He pushed for an IIM to be set up in Ahmedabad along with Kasturbhai Lalbhai, and Jivraj Mehta, the other “founding fathers.”In 1962, the year IIMA's administrative office started functioning, its institutional partner Harvard Business School didn’t even admit women into its MBA programme.

 Between 1962 and 1965, Dr. Kamla Chowdhry was designated ‘Coordinator of Programs.’ But as colleagues of hers later reminisced, she was the de-facto director of IIMA. Sarabhai, the Honorary Director, rarely attended to day-to-day matters, and Chowdhry’s range of responsibilities was staggering. She recruited the first faculty members; convened faculty meetings; liaised with HBS and the Ford Foundation; and travelled across India to market the Institute. She even selected furniture. “She was looking after the whole thing,” the late Dwijendra Tripathi, a business historian who worked at IIMA from 1964 to 1990, remembered. 

Chowdhry’s major and lasting contribution during her time at IIMA was in designing the institute’s first educational offering. The Programme for Management Development, aimed at executives, was launched in 1964 and later came to be known as the Three-Tiered Programme for Management Development or the 3TP: it’s still offered today. 

Companies were asked to send executives across the three tiers of the organizational hierarchy: middle management, senior management and top management. The Institute customised programmes for each level, spread out over five to ten weeks. The first edition in Jaipur in 1964 was a roaring success—it attracted 40 companies and 120 participants. At least two executives from that cohort went on to become icons in the Indian business landscape: HT Parekh of ICICI and then HDFC; and Dr. Verghese Kurien of Amul. It formed part of the groundwork needed for the launch of the full-time MBA programme.

After 1965, Chowdhry’s focus shifted from administration to teaching and research. We know that former students have fond memories of her classes. Her case studies included research on firms such as Unilever and Sarabhai Chemicals, and Chowdhry maintained strong links with industry as a consultant.

In 1971, Vikram Sarabhai died unexpectedly in a hotel room in Kerala. Chowdhry left IIMA the following year, and moved to Delhi. The capital became the site of  further reinventions. In the 1970s, she worked with the India office of the Ford Foundation. In decades to follow, she moved away from management and took up environment and sanitation-related causes. 

She did not lose touch with the Institute she had helped build. In 1976, she donated the bronze bust of Sarabhai for a library that is named after him. In 1988, she was conferred an honorary doctorate by IIMA after JRD Tata and Prakash Tandon had received them in 1982 and 1984 respectively. 

For those who knew Chowdhry well, several traits stood out. Her mentorship abilities were as renowned as the flask of gin she never failed to carry on her trips. To women such as her niece, Nina Singh, she was a paradoxical figure who admired beautiful things like carpets and paintings, but spent too little time on her own appearance. In her later years, Chowdhry lived close to Delhi’s serene Lodhi Gardens. When not attending some board meeting or the other, she could be seen swimming powerfully in the pool maintained by the Ford Foundation.

After her death at the age of 85 in 2006, her well-wishers published a book of tributes. It captured some elements of her journey, mostly after the time she was at IIMA. Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) would write that she “was first and foremost an institution-builder and an institution-keeper.” Today, Kamla lives on in Ahmedabad in certain ways. Dormitory 1, mainly for women, at the Institute has been renamed in her honour. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), one of several organizations on which she left her mark, runs a restaurant named Kamala Café, where her photograph occupies a prominent space.

Yet there may never be anything like an adequate memorialization of the woman who once wrote: “Most changes that have altered the course of history have begun by individuals who by their examples and actions did what many thought was impossible. Underlying each one was a moral conviction, a fearlessness, that refused to be subdued.”