Krishnan Srinivasan, born in Madras, India, in 1937. M.A. from Oxford University. Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Senior Research Fellow at the School for Advanced Studies, London. Former Deputy Secretary-General of the Commonwealth and former Indian Diplomat and Ambassador to the Netherlands.
Distinguished Visiting Scholar (1 September 2003 – 30 June 2004)
THE IMPACT OF THE COMMONWEALTH ON BRITAIN’S POST-COLONIAL ADJUSTMENT
My project was on the largest of the European Empires and its aftermath: the Commonwealth of Nations from circa 1945 and its effect on post-colonial British government and society. I did not debate the question whether post-colonial adjustment had taken place. I hold this to be self-evident and that it had largely taken place as early as 1965. There has been a great deal of work done on the rise and fall of the British Empire, and very little so far on its aftermath. During my attachment to London and Cambridge Universities before coming to NIAS in September 2003, I had almost completed my reading on this subject, but not one word had been written. By June 2004, I had completed a draft manuscript of 225 pages and 59,000 words. NIAS has made an inestimable contribution to my objectives. The facilities provided were ideal to the completion of a project which would have taken me four or five times longer elsewhere. Furthermore, I was able to have my manuscript read by a colleague-Fellow in NIAS who is a modern historian, and therefore benefited from a ‘peer-review’. I have an offer of publication in India from a new publishing house anxious to develop a non-fiction line. In the UK it is possible that the material will find a wider audience if published as a series of articles – this remains to be seen. It is probable that there will be seminars on my manuscript in the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at London University and at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge in the year 2004/05.
In addition, I published three articles in the UK and completed the text of a novel entitled “Guesswork” during my time at NIAS.