On a warm morning in February, I visited a windowless beige room in Delhi’s Apeejay School of Management, to see India’s largest collection of writings by the author Ayn Rand. On metal bookcases lining all four walls, antique editions signed by Rand stood alongside cheap pirated copies, once peddled on street corners. Audio and video cassettes also sat on the shelves, though more of them rested in a ceiling-high pile of boxes in a corner. I was welcomed by Barun Mitra, a 56-year-old policy analyst and the proud custodian of the collection. “I’m very lucky,” he told me, spectacles dangling from a cord around his neck. “Ayn Rand changed my life.” As a fan wobbled overhead, Mitra’s research assistant scurried about the room to fetch collectibles for my inspection.
Rand, a Russian-born American writer, is best remembered for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Through many fiction and non-fiction works, she created Objectivism: a philosophy that posits rational self-interest as the moral purpose of life, and capitalism as the best system to govern society.
Many Indians have found solace in Rand’s philosophy, despite the fact that India’s political tradition is a far cry from the Objectivist ideal. In fact, Mitra’s collection emerged from a 50-year attempt to create an official Objectivist movement in India. But the movement, like the collection, has been largely abandoned by its followers. Over conversations with Mitra and many others who helped lead the movement, I learnt about this ill-fated endeavour.
The story begins in 1960s Bombay, with two Rand enthusiasts: Govind and Tara Malkani. They met at a bus stop, Mitra told me, when one of them noticed the other reading The Fountainhead, and soon after became a couple. Tara Malkani worked in the offices of Air India, and her employee privileges allowed her one complimentary flight a year; using it, she almost always went to Boston to hear Rand speak at an annual lecture forum. After the couple married in the mid 1960s, Govind, an accountant, would accompany her on these trips, during which they bought books, tapes and videos related to Objectivism, gradually amassing a collection. In the late 1960s, they started a society called the Rand Club of Bombay, which met weekly at their flat in Grant Road, a bustling locality in the south of the city.
Many people curious about Objectivism flocked to the Malkani home. “Anyone who was interested could drop by on a Saturday,” Mitra said. A standard meeting in the 1980s, when he started going, would see about 12 attendees. Like many others, Mitra found the Rand Club when he wrote to the United States-based Ayn Rand Institute, which told him to contact the couple. Mitra said that by the late 1980s, largely inspired by the Malkanis, about a dozen other Objectivist groups had cropped up in India.
The couple put their collection to use, circulating books and tapes among these new clubs. To include those who lacked tape-playing equipment, Tara personally typed and bound hundreds of pages’ worth of Rand’s lectures. Mitra showed me reams of these manuscripts. “This is a lifetime of dedication,” he said with reverence, leafing through yellowing pages.
Krishna Rao Jaisim was one beneficiary of the Malkanis’ collection. He met Tara in the early 1960s, after he had embraced Objectivism, and she sent him books and tapes. When he read The Fountainhead, he told me, “the novel became the Bible, the Koran and the Gita” to him. Jaisim studied architecture—like the protagonist of The Fountainhead—and went on to open a firm in Bengaluru named “Jaisim-Fountainhead.” Today, he gives each student who trains with him a copy of the book.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Objectivist events were organised semi-regularly in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune and Bengaluru. According to Mitra, the meetings were especially useful because Rand’s philosophy provided an “intellectual basis for India’s economic transition,” especially during economic liberalisation in the 1990s. In Delhi, a club called “Atlas Meet” convened each month, where people often discussed how to propagate Objectivism. Notes for the August 2009 meeting, still available online, included an agenda item titled “Spread and Sustain.” In attendance at that meeting was Sharad Joshi, who was then a member of the Rajya Sabha. Four years earlier, he had tabled a demand to remove the word “socialism” from the Indian constitution. Rand herself had a very low opinion of socialism, modelling the villain of The Fountainhead on Harold Laski, a political theorist who shaped the socialist tenets of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Still, the movement’s leaders were often disappointed with these meetings. “Finding 50 interested people would be difficult,” Vikram Bajaj, an entrepreneur and former host of Atlas Meet, told me. “People would be enthusiastic on the surface, but they were liabilities for a movement,” because they lacked commitment. Mitra was often frustrated by the tendency of certain attendees—“literalists,” he called them—to treat Objectivism as a cult of personality, discussing “whether one should have cats as pets, or smoke, because Rand did that.” Jerry Johnson, who works in marketing, and who frequented the Malkani household in the early 2000s, agreed. “The philosophy gets tainted,” he said, by people “looking for gurus.”
In 1996, Mitra founded the Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in Delhi that espouses free-market ideals. By the time the Malkanis died—Tara in 2000, and Govind in 2009—Mitra had established himself as the heir to the movement. After Govind’s death, he and several other Objectivists helped sort through the Malkanis’ possessions. Then, Mitra shipped the bulk of their Rand collection to Delhi.
Nowadays, however, its items do not see much circulation. By 2010, the turnout at meetings had become increasingly meagre, and the movement dwindled. What is left of it has drifted to online blogs. But despite the demise of Rand Clubs, most Objectivists I spoke with insisted that the movement has a future. “We need Rand now more than ever,” Johnson said, because India is “flirting with fascism to get economic growth.” In March, he wrote a piece for the web platform DailyO.in, arguing that both the left- and right-wing players involved in the controversy at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University “need to rediscover Ayn Rand.”
Objectivism is still widely known in the country, though its official movement may have winnowed. In 2012, The Economist reported that in India, Rand outsells Karl Marx sixteen-fold. The story also reported that India ranks behind only the United States and Canada in the number of Rand-related Google searches.
Mitra still runs the Liberty Institute, although he has scaled it down and now primarily uses it to advocate for stricter protections of private-property rights. Over coffee, he told me he plans to digitise the Malkanis’ collection. Objectivism will play a large role in India’s future, he said, and the Malkanis’ movement “could not be suppressed.”